Trivia: A master of improvisational comedy, tall, rangy, and rubber-faced, Ryan Stiles is best known for playing comic Drew Carey's best friend in the ABC sitcom The Drew Carey Show. Born in Seattle, Stiles entered the entertainment industry as a standup comedian in Vancouver, British Columbia. It was not the career his parents had hoped he would choose, but Stiles managed to make a living for a few years. In the mid-'80s, Stiles switched gears and joined the Second City comedy group in Toronto, renowned for its highly topical and fast-paced sketches. There, Stiles grew adept at improvising; in 1990, he transferred to the Los Angeles Second City troupe and, before long, the six-foot, five-inch redhead was working on television and in feature films. He made his film debut in Rainbow War (1986). Stiles' early television credits include guest-starring roles on Parker Lewis Can't Lose and Mad About You. Outside of The Drew Carey Show, he had his greatest success as a regular on the British improvisational series Whose Line Is It, Anyway?, which found an American audience on the Comedy Central cable network. During the show's run (1988-1993), it won four CableACE awards. The show was revised and updated, as a replacement series on ABC, in the summer of 1998. The show was hosted by Drew Carey.

Trivia: Best known for her spate of roles on American prime-time sitcoms, actress Christa Miller grew up in Manhattan. As the daughter of 1960s fashion model Bonnie Trompeter and aeronautical engineer Chuck Miller, and the niece of Love at First Bite star Susan Saint James, Miller overcame a significant physical debilitation as a young child -- the surgical removal of a potentially crippling leg tumor -- before establishing herself as a successful print model during her teens. The transition to acting was a fluid and easy one, and consisted, in the early years, of guest appearances on such programs as Kate & Allie (reportedly without James's involvement; the established actress later insisted that her niece got the job on her own behalf), Northern Exposure, and Seinfeld. Miller achieved full-fledged sitcom stardom in 1995, when comedian Drew Carey tapped her for regular cast billing as Kate O'Brien, his onscreen gal pal, on his blockbuster program The Drew Carey Show. Then, as Carey wound down at the end of the 2000-2001 TV season, Miller snagged another role: that of hospital board member Jordan Sullivan, with whom the main character (Zach Braff) enjoys a brief tryst, on the medically themed sitcom Scrubs (created by Miller's husband, Bill Lawrence). She remained with that program over the course of multiple seasons and struck a chord with audiences. In 2008 she was one of the leads in the remake of The Andromeda Strain, and the next year she was cast in the Courtney Cox series Cougar Town.

Trivia: Versatile character actress Kathy Kinney gained considerable popularity in the late '90s for playing Mimi Bobeck, the outrageously made-up, flamboyantly vulgar, and vindictive nemeses of Drew Carey on the ABC sitcom The Drew Carey Show, but she had been involved with television, feature films, and stage work for years. Fans of the long-running CBS comedy Newhart may remember Kinney for playing Miss Goddard, the town librarian. She started out as an improvisational comedienne, performing in various New York comedy clubs. It was her friend Bill Sherwood who provided her film debut, when he cast Kinney as an artist who throws a going away party for a homosexual friend who has just broken up with his longtime lover in Parting Glances (1986). Armed with this success, Kinney moved to Los Angeles the following year and became a hard-working character actress. Her other film credits include appearances in This Boy's Life (1993), Stanley and Iris (1990), and Three Fugitives (1989).

Trivia: Actor James Hong was working as a nightclub comic in San Francisco and Hawaii when he was tapped for his first regular TV role: "Number One Son" Barry Chan in the Anglo-American co-production The New Adventures of Charlie Chan (1957). Hong would later appear as Frank Chen in Jigsaw John (1976) and Wang in Switch (1977-78). In theatrical features, he played characters bearing such flavorful monikers as Chew, Lo Pan and Bing Wong. He was seen as Faye Dunaway's butler in Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), repeating the role (minus Faye) in the 1990 sequel The Two Jakes. One of his most sizeable screen roles was Lamont Cranston's brainy assistant Li Peng in The Shadow (1994). James Hong has also directed a brace of feature films, including 1979's The Girls Next Door and 1989's The Vineyard.