Trivia: A product of a blue-collar Chicago neighborhood, actor Michael Gross spent the first two years of high school as (by his own admission) a "greaser" and gang member. He straightened himself out in his last two years, graduating as senior class president and National Honor Society member. Gross played guitar with a folksinging group before gravitating to the theatre. He attended the Yale School of drama (one of his classmates was Meryl Streep), then worked in regional theatre before landing in New York. In 1982, Gross was cast as Steven Keaton, ex-radical patriarch of a clan that included Michael J. Fox and Justine Bateman, in the long-running sitcom Family Ties. Perhaps chafing a bit at the press attention given to his co-star Fox, Gross took every available opportunity to play an image-busting role, notably the scuzzy, cold-blooded killer in the 1985 TV movie In the Line of Duty: The FBI Wars. Michael Gross is the brother of comedienne and former Saturday Night Live regular Mary Gross. In the years to come, Gross would prove to be a truly prolific actor, appearing in films like El Sonoma, Broken Windows, and Stay Cool, as well as TV shows like Tremors, How I Met Your Mother, The Young and the Restless, and ER.

Trivia: Born June 9th, 1961, Michael J. Fox made his television debut in Vancouver at the age of 15. Three years later, he moved to the U.S., living in spartan conditions until he was able to get his green card. Things started breaking for Fox in 1980, when he made his simultaneous American TV and movie bow, winning a regular role on the weekly series Palmerstown, U.S.A. and a supporting part in the theatrical film Midnight Madness. Previously billed as Michael Fox, the actor was compelled by the Screen Actors Guild to add the "J" to his name to avoid confusion with an older character actor who went by the same name. At 5'4", the baby-faced Fox was able to play adolescents and teenagers well into his twenties; during the early stages of his career, however, his height lost him as many roles as he won. Fox had sold all his furniture and was subsisting on macaroni and cheese at the time he won his star-making role as junior conservative Alex P. Keaton on the long-running (1982-1989) sitcom Family Ties. Before the series ran its course, Fox had won three Emmys, one of them for an unforgettable "one-man show" in which his character soliloquized over the suicide of a close friend. Fox's movie career caught fire after he replaced Eric Stoltz in the role of time-traveling teen Marty McFly in Back to the Future (1985), an enormous hit which spawned two sequels. Not all of Fox's subsequent movie projects were so successful -- although several of them, notably The Secret of My Success (1987) and Casualties of War (1989), were commendable efforts that expanded Fox's range. In later years, the actor seemed to be have difficulty finding the vehicle that would put him back on top, although he continued to keep busy. In the fall of 1996, Fox returned to television in the ABC sitcom Spin City, in which he starred as Michael Flaherty, the Deputy Mayor of New York City. That same year, he could also be seen in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! and Peter Jackson's The Frighteners. In 1999, the diminutive actor lent his talents to another wee character, voicing the title role of Stuart Little for the film adaptation of E.B. White's beloved children's book about a walking, talking mouse. Married to actress Tracy Pollan since 1988 -- she played his long-time girl friend on Family Ties -- Fox credited her with helping him survive his battle with Parkinson's Disease, with which he was diagnosed in 1991. Fox voiced a variety of animated characters throughout the 2000s, and appeared on TV shows including CBS' The Good Wife and the FX drama Rescue Me,

Trivia: Actress Tracy Pollan had a few commercials and minor TV roles to her credit when, in 1985, she was cast as Ellen Reed on the long-running sitcom Family Ties. Her on-camera romance with series star Michael J. Fox blossomed into the real thing; Pollan and Fox were married in 1988. Outside of Family Ties, most of her film and TV roles have taken advantage of her athletic prowess, most notably the made-for-TV The Abduction of Kari Swenson (1989). While she has been less visible on screen and in public since the births of her children (partly due to threats on her life from an aggressive female stalker), Tracy Pollan has continued surfacing from time to time in such roles as Kathleen Kennedy in the 1990 TV movie The Kennedys of Massachusetts.

Trivia: An alumnus of Eastern New Mexico University, American actor Ronny Cox received one the best early film showcases an actor could ask for. In 1972, he was cast as one of the four unfortunate rafters in Deliverance; it was Cox who engaged in the celebrated "dueling banjos" sequence with enigmatic albino boy Hoyt J. Pollard. Two years later, Cox found himself in Apple's Way, a homey TV dramatic weekly described as a "modern Waltons". Most of his subsequent roles were in this benign, All-American vein--and then Cox shocked his followers by portraying Jerry Rubin in the 1975 PBS TV drama The Trial of the Chicago Seven. During this telecast, Cox became one of the first (if not the first) actors to mouth a now-familiar expletive of disgust on American television. As his physique thickened and his hairline thinned in the 1980s, Cox was much in demand in films as a corporate villain, notably in Paul Verhoeven's Robocop (1984) and Total Recall (1990). The flip side of this hard-nosed screen image was his portrayal of the apoplectic but scrupulously honest police chief in Eddie Murphy's Beverly Hills Cop films.