Trivia: Cloris Leachman seems capable of playing any kind of role, and she has consistently demonstrated her versatility in films and on TV since the 1950s. On the big screen, she can be seen in such films as Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Last Picture Show (1971), for which she won an Oscar; and Young Frankenstein (1974). On TV, she played the mother on Lassie from 1957-58, and Phyllis Lindstrom on both The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77) and her own series, Phyllis (1975-77). She was a staple on many of the dramatic shows of the '50s, and a regular on Charlie Wild, Private Detective (1950-52), and The Facts of Life. Leachman has won three Emmy Awards and continues to make TV, stage, and film appearances, including a turn as Granny in the film version of The Beverly Hillbillies (1993) and supplying her voice for the animated Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996) and The Iron Giant (1999). In 1999, she could be seen heading the supporting cast in Wes Craven's Music of the Heart.

Trivia: A former Mouseketeer, Lisa Whelchel is best remembered for playing spoiled, little rich girl Blair Warner on the long-running sitcom Facts of Life (1979-1988).

Trivia: An actress best known as Dorothy "Tootie" Ramsey, the lone African American student and consummate gossip at the exclusive Eastland Preparatory School for Women on NBC's sitcom The Facts of Life (1979-1988), Kim Fields actually appeared on several popular series in the 1970s-2000s. The Big Apple native grew up in a single-parent household and began acting in commercials well before she reached her teens, making her most widely seen appearance on an advertisement for Mrs. Butterworth's syrup. She made her foray into acting with scattered guest appearances on Good Times in 1978 and signed for the Facts of Life role one year later, at the age of 10, when Norman Lear (the producer of both Times and Facts) tapped her for that part. Fields remained with the program for its entire nine-year run, a run that witnessed numerous changes in the show's lineup and format, including the replacement of star Charlotte Rae with Cloris Leachman, and a change of venue in 1985. About five years after Facts folded in 1988, Fields scored her second major coup with a much different multiseason role as Regine Hunter, a loose, money-hungry employee of a clothing boutique on the urban-oriented Queen Latifah sitcom Living Single (1993-1998). Fields spent the following years appearing in scattered features, such as the 2000 telemovie Hidden Blessings and the 2001 telemovie Facts of Life Reunion (which reunited her with several of her ex-costars), and making guest appearances on programs including The Drew Carey Show and The Division; she also took time out to start a family.

Trivia: Of all the "break out" performers from the series The Facts of Life, Mindy Cohn was the most improbable. The others were all child actors with experience in performing, but Cohn never trained as an actress and knew little or nothing about the series when she first came to the attention of the producers. Born in Los Angeles, she was an ordinary high school student attending the Harvard-Westlake School when the makers of The Facts of Life, planning their first season, arrived there to observe and photograph an actual girls' school in operation. It was reportedly series star Charlotte Rae who first spotted Cohn, a student at the school, entertaining some friends, and brought her to the attention of the producers. All involved agreed that she was a "natural," one of those uncanny, untrained individuals who simply looked good and memorable and funny in front of the camera, in a manner comparable to the child performers they had already cast, and with that ability added something extra special in terms of verisimilitude -- and a good deal of wry humor -- to the cast they already had. And so Cohn was cast as Natalie Green and was one of the three original young first-season cast members to get spotlighted when the program moved to its second season, achieving stardom in the course of a seven-season run for the series. One very ironic moment came later in the run of the show when Cohn, who had always been on the heavy side and whose character had been conceived with that as an attribute, began to slim down. According to Cohn, in an interview for the DVD release of the first two seasons, the producers actually asked her to put the weight back on, if possible; when she refused, they came up with a compromise by having her character dress in clothes that made her look like she was still overweight. Since the series ended production, she has somewhat limited her acting work while earning a degree in cultural anthropology. Cohn has specifically taken parts that were devised to capitalize on her work from the series and has still found enough roles to keep her occupied. She has also been extremely busy as a voice artist, including portraying the role of Velma on Scooby-Doo.

Trivia: Fans of the long-running television sitcom Facts of Life (1979-1988) will remember Nancy McKeon as Jo, the tough-talking, golden-hearted girl from Brooklyn who struggled to fit in at a posh girls school, but she has been involved with television, and to some extent, feature films, since she was two years old and cast in a commercial for which her brother, Philip McKeon (he is 18 months older), was auditioning. After shooting the spot, McKeon became a model and even appeared in Sears catalogs. Her brother was also a successful child model. In 1978, nine-year-old McKeon and her father moved to Los Angeles -- her brother was already out there appearing on the popular sitcom Alice (1976-1985) -- but she would not have a successful audition until at age 12, she landed a part on Starsky and Hutch (1975-1979) and then a part in the television movie Return to Fantasy Island (1978). She joined the cast of Facts of Life in its second season and remained until the show's end. While on the show, McKeon frequently appeared in television movies such as Strange Voices (1987). In 1995, McKeon returned to series television with the short-lived sitcom Can't Hurry Love, which she also produced.

Trivia: The offspring of actress Patty Duke and actor/director/writer John Astin and brother of actor Sean Astin, Mackenzie Astin was perhaps destined to be a performer. Born and raised in L.A., Mackenzie began as a child and teen actor on TV in the early 1980s with roles in the TV movie Lois Gibbs and the Love Canal (1982), and the girls' prep-school sitcom The Facts of Life. Astin moved to feature films in the 1990s with a spate of roles in Hollywood studio films, including the lead in the Disney adventure Iron Will (1994). After substantial parts in two high-profile box-office disappointments, Terms of Endearment sequel The Evening Star (1996) and the Sandra Bullock-Chris O'Donnell historical romance In Love and War (1996), Astin focused on work in more idiosyncratic independent films. Astin's boyish good looks made him deceptively "perfect boyfriend" material in the romantic comedy Dream for an Insomniac (1998), and he played a hapless male in the mockumentary Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human (1999). Astin particularly enhanced his indie record with his performance as one of the young preppies negotiating The Last Days of Disco (1998), the final part of Whit Stillman's trilogy dissecting the mating habits of Manhattan's haute bourgeoisie. Astin returned to TV in the late 1990s as shooting victim Kevin McCarthy in the docudrama The Long Island Incident (1998), and in the civil-rights drama Selma Lord Selma (1999).

Trivia: The daughter of Mark Miller, an actor best known for his starring role on the mid-1960s TV sitcom Please Don't Eat the Daisies, actress Penelope Ann Miller was born in California and raised in Texas. After a year of attending Menlo College, Miller dropped out to train with acting coach Herbert Berghof. Her first role of note was as ditsy ingenue Daisy in the Neil Simon Broadway comedy Biloxi Blues, a role she would later recreate in the film version. For her role in Our Town she was nominated for a Tony award in 1989. In 1987, the blonde, saucer-eyed actress made her film debut in the wacked-out comedy Adventures in Babysitting, after which she costarred with popular leading men ranging from Pee-Wee Herman (Big Top Pee-Wee) to a GOlden Globe nominated performance alongside Al Pacino in Carlito's Way. Some of Miller's best known film roles have included that of Marlon Brando's enigmatic daughter in The Freshman (1990), a brief turn as silent film actress Edna Purviance in Chaplin (1992), and the svelte 1930s pulp heroine Margot Lane in The Shadow (1994). As the 1990s progressed Miller alternated ever more frequently between television and film, tempering high profile roles in The Shadow (1994) and The Relic (1997) with more intimate small screen roles in mini-series The Last Don (1997) and as the titular character in the true-life television feature The Mary Kay Letorneau Story: All American Girl (2000). If her roles in the following years weren't as high profile as in the previous decade, solid performances in Along Came a Spider (2001) and Rudy: The Rudy Giuliani Story (2003) eventually led to a role in the popular but shortlived Norm Macdonald sitcom A Minute with Stan Hooper. Cast as the titular character's (Macdonald) city-slicker wife, the coupled opted to eschew the city for small town life to Newhart-like effect. Her gift for comedy more obvious than ever, Miller was subsequently cast in the made for television feature National Lampoon's Thanksgiving Family Reunion (2003).

Trivia: Actress Lela Rochon started her career in show business as a bikini-clad party girl in Spuds MacKenzie beer commercials during the '80s. A trained dancer, she was in the background of Breakin', Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, and Lionel Richie's music video for "All Night Long." In 1985, she starred in her first feature, A Bunny's Tale, a TV-movie starring Kirstie Alley as feminist activist Gloria Steinem during her Playboy Bunny days. Rochon went on to appear in the low-budget movies Stewardess Schooland Foxtrap, as well as the Eddie Murphy blockbusters Harlem Nights and Boomerang. Her big film breakthrough came in 1995, when her friendship with author Terry McMillan helped her to get an audition with director Forest Whitaker for the role of Robin in Waiting to Exhale. The film was a surprise Hollywood hit and Rochon was offered several new projects. After joining the cast of the WB series The Wayans Bros. as Shawn Wayans' girlfriend Lisa, she starred opposite Timothy Hutton in the made-for-cable movie Mr. and Mrs. Loving. She showed her versatility in her next few films as a wide array of characters: an exotic dancer in Gang Related, a government aide in The Chamber, a schoolteacher in Why Do Fools Fall in Love, a corporate vice president in Knock Off, and a kooky best friend in Labor Pains. In 2001, she joined the cast of the Lifetime original series The Division as Inspector Angela Reide. She and her husband, director Antoine Fuqua, have two children.

Trivia: Even as a teenaged performer with the Shorewood Players, a Milwaukee community-theatre group, Charlotte Rae thrived in playing characters much older than herself. Example: at 16, Charlotte starred as Dolly Gallegher Levi in a Shorewood production of Thornton Wilder's The Merchant of Yonkers (her 28-year-old "Horace Vandergelder" was future Broadway director Morton DaCosta). Following graduation from Northwestern University, Rae made her Broadway bow in 1952's Three Wishes for Jamie. The following year, she scored a hit as Mrs. Peachum in the long-running off-Broadway revival of Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera, and within three years she was portraying the ancient, wizened Mammy Yokum in Li'l Abner. She was a favorite of TV producer Nat Hiken, who hired her for several guest spots on The Phil Silvers Show. In 1961, Hiken cast the 35-year-old Charlotte as middle-aged hausfrau Sylvia Schnauzer, virago wife of officer Leo Schnauzer (played by fiftyish Al Lewis) on Car 54, Where are You? Rae's other TV series credits include the 1950s daytime drama From These Roots, the 1975 Norman Lear sitcom Hot L Baltimore and the 1976 Summer replacement The Rich Little Show. In 1978, Rae was cast as flibbertigibbet housekeeper Mrs. Garrett on the Gary Coleman series Diff'rent Strokes; the character struck such a responsive chord with audiences that she was spun off into her own starring sitcom The Facts of Life, in 1986. Rae remained with Facts as Mrs. Garrett until 1986, by which time she had been nominated for two Emmies (she has also received Obie and Tony nominations; an actual win is long overdue). More recently, Charlotte has provided voices for such animated offerings as Tom and Jerry: The Movie (1993) and TV's Itsy Bitsy Spider. An off-and-on nightclub and revue performer, Charlotte Rae took her one-woman "Broadway highlights" show on the road in 1994. Rae would continue to act in the decades to come, providing the voice of Nanny on the 101 Dalmations animated series, and appearing in films like You Don't Mess with the Zohan.