Trivia: An actress with a knack for light comedy, Amy Adams was born in Italy and raised in Castle Rock, Colorado. After high school, she studied dance and worked in regional dinner theater until age 20, when she moved to Minnesota with her family after being spotted by a visiting Minneapolis producer and recruited to work in his dinner theater there. She landed her first film role in the satiric 1999 comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous, which was, appropriately enough, set in Minnesota. After appearing in the independent comedy Psycho Beach Party, Adams made guest appearances on a number of television series, including That 70s Show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The West Wing; she was also cast as a regular in Manchester Prep, a TV spin-off of the hit film Cruel Intentions. Manchester Prep, however, was never aired when its network decided that the show's sexual content was too strong for television, although several episodes were eventually re-edited into a direct-to-video feature entitled Cruel Intentions 2. 2002 proved to be a very busy year for Adams, who appeared in no fewer than four features, including the eagerly anticipated Catch Me if You Can, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks.Adams took a 2 year break following Catch Me If You Can, reemerging in 2004 to appear with Fred Savage in the low-key comedy/drama The Last Run. The next year she took a substantial role in the romantic comedy The Wedding Date, but the part that proved to be a career-shaping one was the very innocent, very pregnant Ashley in Phil Morrison's independent film Junebug. Adams was adored by audiences and praised by critics for her quirky, sensitive performance, and she netted a Best Supporting Actress nomination in the process.The young actress rounded out 2005 with a brief series of regular appearances on the wildly popular TV comedy The Office. In 2006 Amy co-starred in the NASCAR comedy Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, alongside Will Ferrell and Sacha Baron Cohen. 2007 provided a big boost to her lead-actress stock in the form of Disney's Enchanted, a Splash-like confection in which Adams played a fairytale princess inadvertently plopped into the alternate universe of modern-day New York City. The family-friendly Thanksgiving release racked up considerable praise and millions of box-office dollars. Adams picked up her second Academy Award nomination in 2008 for her work in John Patrick Shanley's adaptation of his award winning play Doubt. In addition to that honor, she scored nods from the Screen Actors Guild, and the Hollywood Foreign Press. The following year, Adams teamed with Doubt star Meryl Streep again, to play a young amateur chef who attempts to cook every recipe in a massive cookbook by Julia Child (Streep) in the Nora Ephron-directed Julie and Julia.The following year, Adams played the romantic interest of Mark Wahlberg in the Oscar contender The Fighter, earning tremendous critical acclaim both for her tough performance and spot-on Boston accent. Then in 2011, Adams teamed up with funnyman Jason Segel for a much anticipated relaunching of Jim Henson's beloved Muppets franchise. In 2012 she played the controlling wife of a cult leader in Paul Thomas Anderson's drama The Master, and captured her fourth Best Supporting Actress nomination in just eight years for her work in that film. In 2013 she took on the legendary part of Lois Lane in the Superman reboot Man of Steel.

Trivia: Austrian-born actor Christoph Waltz began his career on the stage, making a name for himself at prestigious venues like Zurich's Schauspielhaus Zürich and Vienna's Burgtheater. He would eventually study at the Lee Strausberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York, and branch out into on-camera acting, appearing in Austrian TV productions. His film career blasted into the stratosphere in 2009, however, when he was cast as Colonel Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. His role as the feared "Jew Hunter" earned him the best supporting actor award from just about every critics group in the country, as well as from the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.Flush with this worldwide success, he played bad guys in The Green Hornet and The Three Musketeers, and played the heavy in Water for Elephants, but he earned his best reviews as part of the foursome in Roman Polanski's adaptation of the award-winning play Carnage. In 2012 he reteamed with Tarantino, playing a bounty hunter in Django Unchained, again earning superb revierws as well as a second Best Supporting Actor Oscar at that year's Academy Awards ceremony.

Trivia: Intimidation often looms large for a legendary director's son who wishes to follow in the footsteps of his famous parent; perhaps for this reason, more than a few opt to establish themselves in another field. For Danny Huston, however -- the scion of mythically revered, Academy Award-winning filmmaker John Huston -- it wasn't at all a question of intimidation, merely one of circumstance. After pursuing directorial work fervently and dauntlessly, but encountering mixed success and frustration about his own inability to get studio backing for projects, Danny Huston found himself being drawn, one assignment at a time, into bit roles before the camera. In the process, Huston inadvertently launched himself as one of the most respected character actors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.Born May 14, 1962, in Rome, as the illegitimate child of John Huston and European actress Zoe Sallis (during the former's separation from his then-wife, the late Ricki Soma), Daniel Huston came of age in Ireland and London. He studied art and cinema as a young adult, often spending a considerable amount of time on his father's movie sets, and honed his skills in his early twenties not in the arena of directing (as might be expected), but in that of painting.Danny Huston's directorial assignments began inconspicuously, at the age of 24, with the 1987 made-for-television comic fantasies Bigfoot and Mr. Corbett's Ghost (the second of which featured John Huston in the cast). The elder Huston -- then riding on the tails of his mid-'80s comeback with Under the Volcano and Prizzi's Honor -- engineered Danny's premier A-list feature. For it, Danny signed to helm a cinematization of Thornton Wilder's picaresque fantasy novel Theophilus North, co-adapted by John Huston, Prizzi's Honor scribe Janet Roach, and James Costigan. The Hustons assembled a dream cast: Anthony Edwards, Lauren Bacall, Harry Dean Stanton, Mary Stuart Masterson, Anjelica Huston (Danny's half-sister), David Warner, and Virginia Madsen, who dated and then married Danny in the fall of 1989. Robert Mitchum replaced John Huston in a key role when he died during production. Mr. North stars Edwards as the title character, a Yale graduate who wheedles his way into the upper crust of Newport, RI, in 1926, thanks to an inherent surge of electricity in his body that enables him to relieve the ailments of locals and thus charm them irrepressibly.Unfortunately, Mr. North -- which took its stateside bows in early August 1988 -- received tepid and lackluster reviews. Perhaps for this reason, Huston found it difficult to lock down a follow-up. Within a decade, the assignments were few and far between, and he occasionally found himself directing embarrassing fare like the 1995 direct-to-video horror exploitationer The Maddening (where psychotic marrieds Burt Reynolds and Angie Dickinson trap a poor woman and her daughter in their home and torture them systematically), and waiting, ever so patiently, for additional projects to take shape. Huston's personal life also decrescendoed during the early '90s, given his separation and divorce from Madsen. With no other immediate options visible to him, Huston started accepting Hollywood friends' invitations to play on-camera bit roles -- and scored tremendous success in this arena to rival anything prior in his career. He debuted as a bartender in Mike Figgis' late-1995 critical smash Leaving Las Vegas, then followed it up with turns in such cause célèbres as Timecode (2000), 21 Grams (2003), Silver City (2004), and The Aviator (2004). Huston was particularly memorable as British agent Sandy Woodrow in Fernando Mereilles' The Constant Gardener (2005), and as sociopath Arthur Burns in John Hillcoat's ultraviolent Western The Proposition (2005). He would go on to appear in films like Robin Hood, Stolen, and on the series Magic City.

Trivia: With a statuesque presence and a look that very much recalled the screen sirens of classic Hollywood, raven-haired Krysten Ritter entered the limelight on the fateful day when her path crisscrossed with a group of Elite Modeling scouts at a shopping mall in her Pennsylvania hometown. Witnessing the young woman's innate glamour, that agency, and later Wilhelmina Models, signed her -- propelling her to an international modeling career. She subsequently set her sights on film acting, began training under the tutelage of famed acting coach Marjorie Ballentine, and started accepting film roles in the early 2000s, meanwhile juggling careers as a businesswoman, writer, and recording artist/frontwoman for the band Ex Vivian. Throughout, Ritter exhibited a unique personal style that she later referred to as "rock-&-roll-'90s-ballerina...grungy yet feminine." Her filmed assignments began with a small turn as a 1950s art history student in the Julia Roberts vehicle Mona Lisa Smile (2003). Ritter then landed a multi-episode roles on Gilmore Girls (as Lucy), Veronica Mars (as Gia Goodman), and 'Til Death (as Allison Stark). She gradually ascended to higher billing in features, with supporting turns in a series of romantic comedies that included What Happens in Vegas (2008), Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009), and She's Out of My League. She had a major part in the 2010 comedy Killing Bono, and the next year she wrote and starred in L!fe Happens. In 2012 she landed the part of Chloe on the sitcom Don't Trust the B in Apartment 23.

Trivia: Relatives of famous people rarely have the chops to overcome nepotism cries, but Jason Schwartzman, nephew of Francis Ford Coppola, is one actor who does.Schwartzman was born June 26, 1980, to producer Jack Schwartzman and actress Talia Shire, the latter best known as Rocky Balboa's love interest Adrian. He graduated from the Windwood School in 1999 and continued to live with his mom and two brothers at their home in the Los Angeles area.Chosen at the tail end of an exhausting casting search, Schwartzman burst into the film industry with his deft, hilarious portrayal of chronic overachiever Max Fischer in Wes Anderson's critically acclaimed Rushmore (1998). Since then, the young actor kept a low profile, opting to spend time with his band Phantom Planet, which recorded an album for Epic Records. Keeping with his geek-chic nature, he also chose small, quirky roles in television, such as his guest appearance as a slimy fake-ID dealer on NBC's tragically short-lived series Freaks and Geeks or his work in spoofs for the 1999 MTV Movie Awards.He maintained his credibility in the independent scene during the next couple of years, appearing in Spun, and acting in his cousin Roman Coppola's CQ. After a role on the short-lived, though critically acclaimed, Fox sitcom Cracking Up in 2003, Schwartzman began kicking his film career into high gear. After a role in the quirky 2004 David O. Russell ensemble comedy I Heart Huckabees, the young actor appeared in 2005's big-screen version of Bewitched with Will Ferrell. He then played a lovable slacker in the intimate, critically acclaimed dramedy Shopgirl, appearing with Claire Danes and Steve Martin, who wrote the novella that the script was adapted from. In 2006, Schwartzman joined the cast of his cousin Sophia Coppola's biopic Marie Antoinette, playing French king Louis XVI opposite star Kirsten Dunst. Then in 2007, he re-teamed with Wes Anderson, starring in and co-writing The Darjeeling Limited, a film about three brothers taking a soul-searching train ride through India. The film got mixed reviews, but reception to it was positive overall, setting Schwartzman up nicely for his next film, The Marc Pease Experience, in which he played the title role of a former high-school musical star who's stuck living in the past.He voiced the role of Ash in Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2009 which turned out to be a busy year for him as he co-starred in Funny People, and became the star of the HBO comedy Bored to Death. He had a brief but memorable turn in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World in 2010, and two years later he teamed up with Anderson yet again in Moonrise Kingdom.

Trivia: Rough-hewn and soulful, Terence Stamp was one of the most recognizable faces of 1960s British cinema. During that decade, he became immortalized on the screen and off, his working-class charisma and battered good looks making him both a natural for leading man roles and a poster boy for the swinging Sixties lifestyle.Born in Stepney, London on July 22, 1939, Stamp made his film debut in 1962 as the martyred hero in Peter Ustinov's adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd. He turned in a star-making performance that earned him an Oscar nomination and established him as part of a new wave of talent in British cinema. Stamp next made his mark in William Wyler's The Collector (1965), winning a Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for his portrayal of a warped recluse who kidnaps an art student he has lusted after from afar. Stamp spent the rest of the decade earning recognition for both his work and real-life exploits. On the screen, he worked with the likes of John Schlesinger (Far From the Maddening Crowd), Joseph Losey (Modesty Blaise), Ken Loach (Poor Cow), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Teorema), and, for Tre Passi nel Delirio, Federico Fellini, Roger Vadim, and Louis Malle. Off the screen, Stamp was known for his friendships with the likes of Michael Caine and his relationships with such preeminent beauties as Julie Christie and model Jean Shrimpton. He and Christie were immortalized in Ray Davies's song "Waterloo Sunset" in the lines, "Terry and Julie cross over the river, where they feel safe and sound."Despite the promise of his early career, Stamp spent much of the next couple of decades in relative obscurity. He popped up in a number of fairly forgettable films and was cast as a villain in the first two Superman movies. He also appeared in such disparate projects as Legal Eagles (1986), Wall Street (1987), and Young Guns (1988). In 1994, Stamp truly re-entered the filmgoing consciousness, going delightfully against type to play a world-weary transsexual in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. The film was a surprise success, and Stamp's portrayal was singled out for particular notice. Once one of the cinema's most reliable hard men, Stamp revived his career with a poignent portrayal of a character who wore more make-up than most of the screen's actresses put together.Stamp followed this success with a turn as a mysterious tantric sex therapist in Bliss (1996). In 1999, he could be seen doing supporting work in Bowfinger, in which he had a hilarious turn as a L. Ron Hubbard-esque "guru;" and Star Wars: Episode I-The Phantom Menace. That same year, he starred in Steven Soderbergh's The Limey, back in top form as a grizzled ex-con bent on avenging his daughter's death. One of the film's highlights was the inclusion of footage from the 1968 Poor Cow, which allowed Stamp to appear as a younger version of himself. Building off the best buzz he'd had in quite some time, Stamp began the 21st century in Red Planet, and voiced Jor-El on the television series Smallville, before appearing in Get Smart, Valkyrie, Yes Man, The Adjustment Bureau, and Song for Marion.

Trivia: Typically cast as a criminal or a cop, beefy, bald, American character actor Jon Polito has appeared on stage, television, and in feature films, notably the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing (1990) and Barton Fink (1991). Polito can be recognized for his pencil-thin moustache. He launched his career on Broadway in 1977. In 1981, Polito debuted in the feature film The Killing Hour and then portrayed mobster Tommy Lucchese on the television series The Gangster Chronicles.

Trivia: Something of an old standby -- a stalwart -- whenever Hollywood needed to call on an Asian-American character actor during the '70s, '80s, '90s, and 2000s, James Saito made countless guest appearances on such blockbuster programs as M*A*S*H, The Fall Guy, and The A-Team, often without even so much as a character name. (The M*A*S*H appearances list him only as "South Korean" or "Korean Soldier.") From the early '80s onward, Saito's resumé started to incorporate a number of feature films; per the experiences of most character players, these pictures varied substantially in quality -- from the depths of Hot Dog... The Movie! (1983) to the heights of Buckaroo Banzai (1984) and Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995). In 2007, Saito landed one of his first regular series roles, as Dr. Chen on the spiritual drama Eli Stone.

Trivia: Began acting career at age 6 when she was cast as Oliver in stage production of Oliver Twist. Competed in National French Speech Competition in high school. Enjoyed playing the violin and performing gymnastics until her interests shifted to acting. At school she was an executive member of the Best Buddies club, an organization that helps people with disabilities. Graduated high school as valedictorian. Speaks French as her second language and is learning Spanish as her third language.

Trivia: American character actor Andrew Airlie began his career by appearing in bit parts and walk-ons in Hollywood A- and B-listers. Early roles include that of a mall patron in the Andrew Bergman comedy The Freshman (1990), a co-pilot in the sequel Look Who's Talking Now (1993), and a physician in the Alicia Silverstone/Cary Elwes thriller The Crush (1993). Though these constituted small assignments, they did establish Airlie's resumé and Hollywood presence. In time, Airlie rose to slightly higher billing. In 2000, he became one of the first American prime-time actors to play a groom at a gay wedding in the Donna Deitch-directed telemovie Common Ground. Shortly thereafter, Airlie took on a supporting role in Rose Troche's ensemble drama The Safety of Objects (2001) and played another physician in the summer 2005 box-office blockbuster Fantastic Four. Airlie also maintained a presense on the small screen, appearing in recurring roles on such series as the mid-'90s Outer Limits and The 4400, as well as a regular part on the fantasy-comedy-drama Reaper, playing the main character's father, Mr. Oliver, who sold his son's soul to the Devil before he was born.