Trivia: Lead actor, onscreen from the '80s.

Trivia: Despite the phenomenon of many young actors struggling for years to break into Hollywood -- driving taxicabs and waiting tables until determination, persistence, and raw ability reel in a breakthrough -- a select few stumble into acting and celebrity by sheer happenstance. Malik Yoba epitomizes this idea. While working in a field with virtually no connection to the entertainment industry, Yoba decided, simply for fun, to attend a casting call session for a forthcoming Disney comedy called Cool Runnings. When his phone rang one month later, that single call changed Yoba's life forever.Born September 17, 1967, in New York City, Yoba came of age in the crime-ridden ghettoes of the Bronx and Harlem -- so crime-ridden and dangerous, in fact, that he found it impossible to escape the reach of violence. He fell into the path of a bullet at age 15, which hit him in the neck but (fortunately) did not inflict permanent injury or disability. A self-described "misunderstood child," Yoba empathized deeply, as a young man, with troubled inner-city youth, and regarded many as the victims of widely held racial and social misperceptions. Yoba thus opted to devote himself to volunteering, and later (in his early twenties) to full-time counseling, with endless exhaustive hours spent in NYC youth organizations. His specialties and passions in this role included teaching music and acting to school-age children and adolescents, and he would often organize teenagers around a specific cause, to pass on the flame of activism -- encouraging them to mount their own grass-roots social activism. These years found Yoba paying fervent and frequent visits to such institutions as secondary schools, homeless shelters, and penitentiaries.The open casting call for Cool Runnings arrived in late 1991, and Yoba reportedly only sought it out on a lighthearted note, at a friend's request. By all accounts, he auditioned and then promptly forgot about it, only to be astonished one month later by the studio's callback and invitation to co-star in the picture alongside John Candy, Leon, and Doug E. Doug. Released in October 1993, the comedy stars Candy as the out-of-shape Olympic gold medalist Irv Blitzer, recruited by a bunch of happy-go-lucky Jamaicans to coach their bobsledding team in the 1988 Olympic Games; Yoba played irascible and cantankerous team member Yul Brenner. Critics responded coolly to the film (many attacking it as yet another in a seemingly endless string of formula sports pictures), but audiences disagreed, and Cool Runnings shot up to break the 68-million-dollar mark at the domestic box office.Yoba then landed one of the two highly coveted lead roles in the first season of the Fox series drama New York Undercover. Something of an ethnic update of ABC's controversial smash hit NYPD Blue (which had premiered exactly one year earlier), the gritty program co-starred Yoba and Michael de Lorenzo as, respectively, J.C. Williams and his partner, the Puerto Rican detective Eddie Torres, assigned to the Harlem beat and juggling personal difficulties (including extramarital parenthood, the ups and downs of "playing the field," and family members with substance-abuse problems) with routine drug busts and criminal pursuits. Critics heavily lauded the series for its intense, take-no-prisoners realism, high-voltage street slang, and careful reliance on hip contemporary music (via a slew of pop and R&B guest stars who turned up, one per week, for a live musical performance at the end of each episode).New York Undercover lasted four seasons and wrapped in late June 1998; in the meantime, a brief supporting role as cigar-store patron named The Skunk in Wayne Wang and Paul Auster's beautifully wrought and understated slice-of-life drama Smoke (released stateside in the late summer of 1995) reunited Yoba with occasional Undercover co-star Giancarlo Esposito. A turn in Wang's improvisational follow-up (and semi-sequel), Blue in the Face, ensued that fall.At around the same time, Yoba returned to activism with full force, helming a series of interactive lectures for troubled urban youth called "Why Are You on This Planet?" The program combined exercises in reading, writing, art, music, and visualization to teach children self-empowerment and the wisdom of solid decision-making. "Why Are You on This Planet?" qualified as an instant, triumphant success and continued seemingly without end; in the meantime, Yoba perpetuated his dramatic efforts as well, with contributions to innumerable motion pictures. He essayed a pair of small, impressive performances in two very different 1997 indie dramas -- first as Detective Carson in James Mangold's all-star New Jersey policier CopLand (1997), then as a studio engineer in George Tillman Jr.'s ensemble comedy drama Soul Food, alongside Vivica A. Fox and Vanessa L. Williams.These options suggested that Yoba had an inherent strategy of signing for parts in small, finely wrought low-budget pictures outside of the Hollywood mainstream. Nevertheless, several of Yoba's project choices during the late '90s and early 2000s (though in keeping with this trend) brought the him decidedly mixed success and thus challenged the "foolproof wisdom" of this strategy. The films Oh Happy Day (2004), Kids in America (2005), and They're Just My Friends (2006), for instance, scarcely made a splash with critics or the public, and thus did little to advance Yoba's career. On the small screen, the stock-market series drama Bull (2000), co-starring Yoba and Donald Moffat, appeared and disappeared almost instantly. Yoba fared far better with his second billing in an acclaimed 2006 crime series, Thief; he plays Elmo, a member of master thief Andre Braugher's safecracking team. Thief premiered on the FX network in March 2006 to excellent ratings. In 2007 he appeared in the TV Series Raines, and also starred in Tyler Perry's Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married? He appeared in that film's sequel three years later and also tried his hand at small-screen success again in the show's Defying Gravity and Alphas.

Trivia: Actress Alicia Coppola made her first strong impression on U.S. television around the beginning of the 1990s, when the performer -- then in her early twenties -- landed guest appearances on such series programs as Star Trek: Voyager, NYPD Blue and Touched by an Angel. Coppola essayed roles in a series of projects over the ensuing decade, which included everything from direct-to-video melodramas (the 1997 Velocity Trap) to well-received telemovies (the 1999 Blood Money); through it all, she remained active and prolific. After taking on a recurring role on the TV period drama American Dreams as Nancy (2003-2004) and a bevy of guest roles on other series, Coppola earned a regular part on the cult show Jericho as Mimi Clark (2006-2007). Coppola's film career ascended to a new level in 2007, when she signed on for a supporting role alongside Nicolas Cage and Harvey Keitel in the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced adventure saga National Treasure: Book of Secrets.

Trivia: The daughter of an attorney father and writer mother, German-born Elisabeth Röhm spent the majority of her childhood and adolescence coming of age in New York. Röhm discovered an innate love of acting during her collegiate years (in the early '90s) and thereafter landed a regular role on the daytime drama One Life to Live. She graduated to fame, however, by virtue of two prime-time roles: Detective Kate Lockley on the supernatural drama series Angel (1999) and Assistant District Attorney Serena Southerlyn on NBC's Law & Order. Big-screen roles include supporting turns in Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous (2005) and Aftermath (2008).

Trivia: Like many another contemporary movie and TV favorite, Stanley Tucci is a graduate of the drama department at SUNY-Purchase. Tucci made his film bow in 1985's Prizzi's Honor, after which he specialized in playing lowlifes and scuzzbags, despite his offscreen credentials as a loyal friend and loving family man. Some of his more memorable appearances were as Rick Pinzolo in TV's Wiseguy (1987-1989), a minor-league thug named Vernon in Beethoven (1992), and a Middle-Eastern assassin in The Pelican Brief (1993). Tucci acquired a fan following of sorts for his slimy year-long role of Richard Cross on the weekly TV series Murder One (1995).In 1996, Tucci broke loose from his established screen persona by playing an ambitious Italian-American restaurateur in Big Night, the most delightfully "gastronomic" film since Like Water for Chocolate. The art-house favorite was a sheer labor of love for Tucci, who served as its producer, co-wrote its script with his cousin Joe Tropiano, and shared directorial duties with his friend Campbell Scott. Tucci again directed two years later with The Impostors, a farcical comedy that cast him and longtime friend Oliver Platt as two stowaways on an ocean liner. Unlike Big Night, however, the film did not do well with audiences or critics. After starring in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1998) as Puck and In Too Deep (1999) as a police supervisor, Tucci again stepped behind the camera, this time to direct Joe Gould's Secret (2000). A historical drama about an eccentric man (Ian Holm) living on the streets of Greenwich Village, it received a very enthusiastic reception at the 2000 Sundance Festival, where it premiered. The early 2000s seemed to be a winning period for the versatile actor, with Tucci also taking home the Best Supporting Actor in a television movie award for his role in Conspiracy (2001). That same year he appeared in America's Sweethearts as an intense movie mogul. He continued doing solid work even when the finished films were sometimes lacking. He played in the Jennifer Lopez hit Maid in Manhattan, Sam Mendes' Road to Perdition, the American remake of Shall We Dance?, and landed his largest role in a major Hollywood production when Steven Spielberg cast him as the ambitious, officious manager of The Terminal. Tucci lent his voice to the animated film Robots in 2005, and the next year earned solid notices for his work as a fashion magazine editor loyal to the diva editor in chief Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada.The highly-respected character actor continued to work steadily in a variety of projects, but a pair of high-profile supporting roles in 2009 earned him strong reviews and awards consideration. As the husband to Julia Child in Julie & Julia, Tucci got to work opposite Meryl Streep yet again in another box-office hit, but it was his creepy turn as a child killer in the big screen adaptation of The Lovely Bones that earned him Screen Actors Guild, Golden Globe, and Academy Award nominations.In 2010 he appeared opposite Cher in Burlesque, and was a loving father in the sleeper hit Easy A. In 2012, Tucci was cast as the announcer and emcee Caesar Flickman in the hit adaptation of the smash novel The Hunger Games. Tucci continued to be a work horse, appearing in seven films in 2014, including Transformers: Age of Extinction and a cameo in Muppets Most Wanted.

Trivia: RADA alumnus Donald Moffat made his London stage debut in 1954, playing the First Murderer in MacBeth. On stage, the wiry, angular Moffat excelled in the plays of Ibsen and Moliere; on screen, he has since carved his niche in eccentric, unpredictable roles. He has also sparkled in authoritative characterizations, both bombastic (a tantrum-tossing LBJ in 1981's The Right Stuff, a fascistic Colonel Ruppert in the 1991 TV movie Babe Ruth) and cool-headed (the fictional U.S. president in 1993's A Clear and Present Danger, Kennedy in-law Hugh Auchincloss in the 1982 video presentation Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy). In addition, Moffat has brightened many a Robert Altman production, most prominently as the ubiquitous bike-riding tax collector in Popeye (1980). Donald Moffat's TV-series resumé includes such roles as an immigrant Scandinavian minister in The New Land (1974), a lovable android in Logan's Run (1977), and all-knowing Dr. Marcus Polk on the ABC daytimer One Life to Live.