Trivia: Bearing the kind of sensitive-man good looks that have led many to think he would be perfect for a career as a tortured, latte-chugging intellectual, Ethan Hawke instead emerged in the 1990s as both a talented actor and a thinking girls' poster boy. In addition to acting, Hawke penned two novels -- The Hottest State, which is rumored to be based on a former relationship he had with singer/songwriter Lisa Loeb, and the best-selling Ash Wednesday. Born November 6, 1970, in Austin, TX, to teenage parents who separated when he was a toddler, Hawke was raised by his mother. The two led an itinerant existence until she married again, and the family settled in Princeton Junction, NJ. There Hawke began to study acting at Princeton's McCarter Theatre, and at the age of 14, he made his film debut in Explorers (1985). A sci-fi fantasy flick that starred the actor alongside River Phoenix, it didn't make much of an impact upon its theatrical release, but thanks to the presence of both Hawke and Phoenix, it went on to a second life on cable.Following his debut, Hawke stopped acting professionally to attend Carnegie Mellon University. His college career didn't last long, however; while still a student, Hawke was chosen to play one of the young protagonists of Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society. The 1989 film, which marked the beginning of Robin Williams' turn toward more dramatic roles, was a success, and Hawke, in his role as the shy, cringing Todd Anderson, made prep school angst look so photogenic that he soon had something of a teenage following. After starring as Ted Danson's son in Dad the same year, Hawke went on to make a string of movies that allowed him to demonstrate his talent but never quite propelled him further into the realm of stardom. White Fang (1991) provided him with a go at adventure by casting him as a young gold miner who forms a bond with the titular canine, while Waterland (1992) had Hawke plumbing the depths of mild delinquency as the troublesome student of an emotionally estranged Jeremy Irons. Unfortunately, almost nobody saw Waterland, and the same could be said of Hawke's other film that year, the WWII drama A Midnight Clear. Lack of an audience obscured the actor's strong performances in both films, and it was not until 1994 that he began to gain recognition for something besides Dead Poets Society. In that year, Hawke created something of a reputation for himself, both on- and offscreen. Offscreen, he became tabloid fodder when he was caught dancing with a then-married Julia Roberts and thus gained a certain -- if fleeting -- kind of notoriety. On screen, the actor starred in Ben Stiller's Reality Bites, portraying the kind of goateed, ennui-mired, more-sensitive-than-thou slacker that helped get him labeled as such in real life. Matters weren't helped when, that same year, the actor published The Hottest State, a meditation on love from the point-of-view of an angst-ridden twentysomething that was scorned by many critics as pretentious posturing.After starring as another sensitive student of life in Richard Linklater's romantic talkathon Before Sunrise (1995), Hawke went back to his sci-fi roots with Gattaca (1997), a near-future parable about the dangers of genetic engineering. Although the film was a relative disappointment, it did present Hawke with an introduction to co-star Uma Thurman, whom he married in 1998 and had a daughter with later that same year. Also in 1998, the actor starred opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in an adaptation of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations; despite mixed reviews, the film heightened Hawke's profile while further establishing him as one of the leading interpreters of sensitive-boy artistic angst. After a starring turn as one of the titular Newton Boys alongside Matthew McConaughey, Skeet Ulrich, and Vincent D'Onofrio in Richard Linklater's neglected 1998 Western, Hawke took on an entirely different role in 1999. Starring in Scott Hicks' Snow Falling on Cedars, he portrayed a journalist investigating the murder of a Japanese-American man in post-WWII Washington State. The same year, he appeared in Joe the King, the directorial debut of his friend and Midnight Clear co-star Frank Whaley.In addition to his film work, Hawke has remained active in the theater. He was the artistic director of the now-defunct Malaparte, a New York theater company that he co-founded with a group of actors including Robert Sean Leonard, Frank Whaley, and Josh Hamilton. He has also worked behind the camera, directing the music video for Lisa Loeb's "Stay" in 1994.Hawke subsequently earned some of the best reviews of his career to date as the title character of Michael Almereyda's 2000 adaptation of Hamlet. Set in modern-day New York, the film allowed Hawke to give the famously tortured prince a slackerish spin that more than one critic noted seemed to come naturally to the actor. The following year, he could be seen in an altogether different feature, portraying a rookie cop opposite Denzel Washington in Training Day, Antoine Fuqua's gritty cop drama. He also collaborated again with director Linklater, first for Tape, a drama co-starring Robert Sean Leonard and wife Thurman, and then for Waking Life, a groundbreaking animated feature in which the actor reprised the role of Before Sunrise's Jesse. 2001 also marked Hawke's first significant foray behind the camera as the director of Chelsea Walls, a multi-character drama about various artists living in New York's famed Chelsea Hotel.In 2002, Hawke played alongside Frank Whaley in The Jimmy Show and made an appearance on the hit television drama Alias the next year. The year 2003 was not a banner one for the actor -- after rumors of an affair between Hawke and a young model began circulating among various television and print tabloids, Uma Thurman announced their official separation after five years of marriage. In 2004, Hawke starred with Angelina Jolie in director D.J. Caruso's Taking Lives and reprised his Before Sunrise role opposite Julie Delpy in Linklater's sequel Before Sunset, a film which also provided the long-time actor with his first screenwriting credit.Hawke appeared in several moderately successful films throughout 2005 and 2006 (Assault on Precinct 13, The Hottest State, Fast Food Nation), but found himself back in the limelight for 2007's crime thriller Before the Devil Know You're Dead, in which the actor played one of two brothers involved in a plan to rob their parents' jewelry store. The film would win the Best Picture from the American Film Institute. He found success yet again for his role in the 2008 crime drama What Doesn't Kill You. The film, which also stars Mark Ruffalo and Donnie Wahlberg, features Hawke as a street-hardened young adult struggling to rise above the dog-eat-dog lifestyle to which he has become accustomed. In 2009 Hawke starred in Daybreaker, in which he played a vampire sympathetic to the human plight, and worked with Don Cheadle, Wesley Snipes, and Richard Gere for his role as a narcotics officer in the crime thriller Brooklyn's Finest.In 2013 Hawke scored a minor hit as the star of the horror film The Purge. In that same year he returned with Julie Delpy and Richard Linklater with Before Midnight, their sequel to Before Sunset, which garnered Hawke a second Oscar nomination in the Best Adapted Screenplay category. He returned to Oscar contention in 2014, this time in the Best Supporting Actor category for playing the father in Linklater's Boyhood.

Trivia: Born February 18, 1954, in Englewood, John Travolta was the youngest of six children in a family of entertainers; all but one of his siblings pursued showbusiness careers as well. By the age of 12 Travolta himself had already joined an area actors' group, and soon began appearing in local musicals and dinner-theater performances. By age 16, he dropped out of high school to take up acting full-time, relocating to Manhattan to make his off-Broadway debut in 1972 in Rain, and a minor role in the touring company of the hit musical Grease followed.In 1975, Travolta was cast in an ABC sitcom entitled Welcome Back, Kotter. As Vinnie Barbarino, a dim-witted high school Lothario, he shot to overnight superstardom, and his face instantly adorned T-shirts and lunch boxes. Before the first episode of the series even aired, he also won a small role in Brian De Palma's 1976 horror picture Carrie, and at the early peak of his Kotter success he even recorded a series of pop music LPs -- Can't Let Go, John Travolta, and Travolta Fever -- scoring a major hit with the single "Let Her In." Approached with a role in Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, he was forced to reject the project in the face of a busy Kotter schedule, but in 1976 he was able to shoot a TV feature, director Randal Kleiser's The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, which won considerable critical acclaim. Diana Hyland, the actress who played Travolta's mother in the picture, also became his offscreen lover until her death from cancer in 1977.In the wake of Hyland's death, Travolta's first major feature film, John Badham's Saturday Night Fever (1977), emerged in the fall of that year. A latter-day Rebel Without a Cause set against the backdrop of the New York City disco nightlife, it positioned Travolta as the most talked-about young star in Hollywood. In addition to earning his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, he also became an icon of the era, his white-suited visage and cocky, rhythmic strut enduring as defining images of late-'70s American culture. In 1978, he starred in Kleiser's film adaptation of Grease, this time essaying the lead role of 1950s greaser Danny Zuko. Its box-office success was even greater than Saturday Night Fever's, becoming a perennial fan favorite and, like its predecessor, spawning a massively popular soundtrack LP. In the light of his back-to-back successes, as well as the continued popularity of Welcome Back, Kotter -- on which he still occasionally appeared -- it seemed Travolta could do no wrong - but things wouldn't always be so rosy for the performer.Travolta's first misstep was 1978's Moment By Moment, a laughable May-December romance with Lily Tomlin. He then reprised the role of Tony Manero in the Saturday Night Fever sequel Staying Alive. Directed by Sylvester Stallone as a kind of Rocky retread, the film was released in 1983 to embarrassing returns and horrendous reviews. It would prove to be just one in a string of '80s stinkers for the actor, followed by disappointments like Two of a Kind, Perfect, and The Experts. He made a minor comeback with 1989's Look Who's Talking, which fared well at the box office, but the movie did little for Travolta's reputation, and the performer was all but completely washed up by the beginning of the '90s.Then, in 1994, Travolta made one of the most stunning comebacks in entertainment history by starring in Pulp Fiction, a lavishly acclaimed crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, a longtime Travolta fan who wrote the role of Vincent Vega specifically with the actor in mind; Travolta reportedly waived his salary to play the role. A critical as well as commercial smash, Pulp Fiction introduced Travolta to a new generation of moviegoers, and suddenly he was again a major star who could command a massive salary, with a second Academy Award nomination to prove it.In the wake of Pulp Fiction, the resurrected Travolta became one of the hardest-working actors in Hollywood, and on Tarantino's advice he accepted the starring role in director Barry Sonnenfeld's 1995 Elmore Leonard adaptation Get Shorty. Acclaimed by many critics as his finest performance to date, it was another major hit, and he followed it by appearing in the 1996 John Woo action tale Broken Arrow. Phenomenon was another smash that same summer, and by Christmas Travolta was back in theaters as a disreputable angel in Michael. The following year he reunited with Woo in the highly successful thriller Face/Off, which he trailed with a supporting turn in Nick Cassavetes' She's So Lovely. After 1997's Mad City, Travolta began work on Primary Colors, Mike Nichols' political satire, portraying a charismatic, Bill Clinton-like U.S. President. An adaptation of the acclaimed book A Civil Action followed, as did the 1999 thriller The General's Daughter, in which Travolta co-starred with Madeline Stowe. Travolta did suffer an embarrassment in 2000, when he produced and starred in the sci-fi thriller Battlefield Earth, based on the novel by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard (whose teachings Travolta publicly admired and advocated). The film was universally panned as so bad it was funny, but Travolta bounced back, shedding some pounds to play the baddie in 2001 action thriller Swordfish. A complex tale of mixed loyalties, computer hacking, and espionage, Swordfish teamed Travolta with X-Men star Hugh Jackman in hopes of dominating the summer box office. This put Travolta in good shape to weather another disappointment, when his dramatic Oscar contender A Love Song for Bobby Long, was not well received by audiences or critics. While he received more praise for his performance in Ladder 49, a film about the lives of firefighters, his career took another hit in 2004 when he reprised the role of Chili Palmer in Be Cool, a sequel to Get Shorty that proved to have none of the magic that made its predecessor so successful. Unfazed, Travolta signed on to star in the 2007 Baby Boomer comedy Wild Hogs, alongside a dream cast of Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence and William H. Macy, who played four listless suburbanites who decide to "live on the edge" by grabbing their sawed-off choppers and hitting the open road as would-be Hell's Angels. Later that year, Travolta took another comedic turn in Hairspray, Adam Shankman's screen adaptation of the stage musical (which, in turn, is an adaptation of John Waters's 1988 feature), which put Travolta in drag to play the heavy set, bouffant hair-do'd mother once played by drag queen Divine. He would follow this up with some middling action fare, with The Taking of Pelham 13 and From Paris with Love, as well as a sequel to Wild Hogs, 2009's Old Dogs.

Trivia: The youngest of seven children born to Ukrainian immigrants; her actress sister Vera (the second oldest) is 21 years older. Made acting debut in Vera's directorial debut, the drama Higher Ground, which premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Made TV debut in American Horror Story.

Trivia: Played bass in metal band Early Man. Starred as Ziggy Sobotka in the second season of The Wire. Won the 2009 OFTA Television Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture or Miniseries, for his role in Generation Kill. Won the 2012 Robert Altman Award for Best Ensemble Cast as part of the ensemble for Starlet. As of 2018, stars as Nick Fletcher on The First.

Trivia: Can play the piano. Got her start in youth theater productions. Attended Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts, whose alumni include Doctor Who actors William Hartnell and Bonnie Langford and Doctor Who director Graeme Harper. Played several characters on the sketch-comedy series The Kevin Bishop Show. Portrayed a soothsayer in the 2008 Doctor Who episode "The Fires of Pompeii" before landing the role of the Doctor's companion, Amy Pond.

Trivia: Producer, director, and occasional character actor Larry Fessenden personifies low-budget independent filmmaking at its edgiest and riskiest. Like the better-known Abel Ferrara, with whom he is often favorably compared, Fessenden established himself by making gritty, supernaturally tinged studies of paranoia, often set in an urban landscape, with sudden, shocking bursts of violence atop cerebral undercurrents -- "philosophical horror," he terms it. The extent to which Fessenden gleaned enthusiastic reviews for these outings, including many from mainstream critics, serves as a reflection on the extent of his long-honed skills and his ability to function outside of the system. Fessenden grew up in a wealthy family on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and attended the Andover preparatory school. Feeling dissatisfied, he dropped out, obtained his GED, and high-tailed it to New York University, where he enrolled in filmmaking and acting courses and set up his own independent production banner, Glass Eye Pix, in 1985. After a series of short projects in the mid- to late '80s, Fessenden emerged with his first feature: 1991's No Telling. This decidedly offbeat outing deftly blends the Frankenstein mythos with ecological and animal rights themes. The director followed it up with the 1996 Habit, also an unusual and inventive take on a longtime horror staple -- this time, the vampire genre -- about an alcoholic bartender (Fessenden) who becomes hopelessly enmeshed in a physiological and psychological addiction to a seductive woman with a penchant for bloodletting. These first two films both gleaned enthusiastic reviews and a devoted cult following; they actually constituted the premier and sophomore installments in what came to be known as the director's "Urban Paranoia" trilogy. The third opus, Wendigo (2001), tells of a stressed and burnt-out couple who take a detour from life on a rural retreat with their young son, only to run headfirst into a malevolent creature. The Last Winter (2006) culled the most glowing reviews to date for Fessenden; it dramatizes the plight of a group of Arctic oil workers confronted by a supernatural entity. Beginning in 2000, Fessenden also branched off into two directions simultaneously, alongside his directorial efforts; he established himself as a character actor (no stretch, thanks to a distinguished look that earned frequent comparisons to a more extreme Jack Nicholson) in such outings as Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America (2004), Broken Flowers (2005), The Brave One (2007), and Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (2008), while also producing the work of other directors through Glass Eye Pix. That production banner specialized in work similar in genre and theme to Fessenden's own directorial efforts; titles included The Roost (2004), Zombie Honeymoon (2004), Automatons (2006), and Sisters (2007, a remake of the Brian De Palma shocker of the same name).

Trivia: With an astonishing resumé that incorporates everything from Seinfeld to Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, character actor Toby Huss qualifies as a staple of American pop culture. Born December 12, 1966 in Marshalltown, IA (the birthplace of many an actor or actress), Huss grew up in the American heartland, then briefly attended the University of Iowa after high school before dropping out and heading to Tinseltown. The elusiveness of Huss' name recognition is tied inextricably to his versatility -- most viewers will remember such inimitable creations as Cotton Hill (on Mike Judge's King of the Hill); Artie -- The Strongest Man in the World (on The Adventures of Pete & Pete); and The Wiz ("Nobody beats me, cause I'm the Wiz!"), a nutty appliance salesman who dates Elaine, on Seinfeld -- but only the most incisive of viewers could tie them to the same person. Huss also portrayed Felix "Stumpy" Dreifuss on the HBO period drama Carnivàle (2003-2005) and Big Mike on the irreverent Comedy Central series Reno 911! (2003-2007). In addition to his television work, Huss has graced nearly 40 feature films with his presence, and nearly all are laugh-fests that take full advantage of the actor's comic flair. These include: Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996), Harold Ramis' Bedazzled (2000), and The Country Bears (2002). As Beavis and Bears demonstrate, Huss is particularly adept at voice work.

Trivia: Born in Los Angeles, California, where his father was a professor of linguistics at UCLA, the family moved back to their native London when he was 7. Went by the name BB Burn when he competed as a beatboxer. His big television breakthrough came in BBC's Bleak House, an adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel, in the role of William Guppy. Appeared in the 2009 West End revival of Oliver! as Bill Sikes, opposite Rowan Atkinson; he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in a Musical in the Whatsonstage Theatre Awards for the role. He and his wife had a third child, a daughter, Rosa in 2014. The couple split up in 2017.