Trivia: Born Leonard Rosenberg, Randall moved to New York at age 19 and studied theater with Sanford Meisner and at the Neighborhood Playhouse. His stage debut was in The Circle of Chalk (1941). From 1942-46 he served with the U.S. Army, following which he acted on radio and TV. He began appearing onscreen in 1957 and was a fairly busy film actor through the mid '60s. He is best known for his work on TV, particularly for his portrayal of fastidious Felix Unger on the sitcom "The Odd Couple." He also starred or costarred in the series "One Man's Family," "Mr. Peepers," "The Tony Randall Show," and "Love, Sidney." He frequently appears on TV talk shows, where he is witty, erudite, and urbane. In 1991 he created the National Actors Theater, a repertory company; its purpose is to bring star-filled classic plays to broad-based audiences at low prices.

Trivia: Commenting on his notorious on-set irascibility in 1977, Jack Klugman replied that he was merely "taking Peter Falk lessons from Robert Blake," invoking the names of two other allegedly hard-to-please TV stars. Klugman grew up in Philadelphia, and after taking in a 1939 performance by New York's Group Theatre, Klugman decided that an actor's life was right up his alley. He majored in drama at Carnegie Tech and studied acting at the American Theatre Wing before making his (non-salaried) 1949 stage-debut at the Equity Library Theater. While sharing a New York flat with fellow hopeful Charles Bronson, Klugman took several "grub" jobs to survive, at one point selling his blood for $85 a pint. During television's so-called Golden Age, Klugman appeared in as many as 400 TV shows. He made his film debut in 1956, and three years later co-starred with Ethel Merman in the original Broadway production of Gypsy. In 1964, Klugman won the first of his Emmy awards for his performance in "Blacklist," an episode of the TV series The Defenders; that same year, he starred in his first sitcom, the 13-week wonder Harris Against the World. Far more successful was his next TV series, The Odd Couple, which ran from 1970 through 1974; Klugman won two Emmies for his portrayal of incorrigible slob Oscar Madison (he'd previously essayed the role when he replaced Walter Matthau in the original Broadway production of the Neil Simon play). It was during Odd Couple's run that the network "suits" got their first real taste of Klugman's savage indignation, when he and co-star Tony Randall threatened to boycott the show unless the idiotic laughtrack was removed (Klugman and Randall won that round; from 1971 onward, Odd Couple was filmed before a live audience). It was but a foretaste of things to come during Klugman's six-year (1977-83) reign as star of Quincy, M.E.. Popular though Klugman was in the role of the crusading, speechifying LA County Coroner's Office medical examiner R. Quincy, he hardly endeared himself to the producers when he vented his anger against their creative decisions in the pages of TV Guide. Nor was he warmly regarded by the Writer's Guild when he complained about the paucity of high-quality scripts (he wrote several Quincy episodes himself, with mixed results). After Quincy's cancellation, Klugman starred in the Broadway play I'm Not Rappaport and co-starred with John Stamos in the 1986 sitcom You Again?. The future of Klugman's career -- and his future, period -- was sorely threatened when he underwent throat surgery in 1989. He'd been diagnosed with cancer of the larynx as early as 1974, but at that time was able to continue working after a small growth was removed. For several years after the 1989 operation, Klugman was unable to speak, though he soon regained this ability. He continued working through 2011, and died the following year at age 90.

Trivia: Heavyset, hawk-nosed Italian-American character actor Al Molinaro maintained a constant association with two series roles throughout his career, both down-to-earth and sweet-natured, paternal types: that of Murray Greshner, better known as Murray the Cop, on the small-screen version of The Odd Couple (1970-1983), and that of Alfred Delvecchio, the second proprietor of Arnold's Drive-In, on Happy Days (a role maintained from 1976 through 1982). The Wisconsin-based location of Days hit close to home for Molinaro, as a real-life native of Kenosha, WI. Born in 1919, he began signing for acting roles in the early to mid-'50s and achieved his big break when very briefly cast as Agent 44 on Mel Brooks' spy spoof Get Smart (before Victor French replaced him). Molinaro reportedly met Odd Couple producer Garry Marshall while enrolled in acting classes with Marshall's sister, Penny, and thereby landed the part of Murray. That led, in turn, to the Happy Days casting in the fall of 1976 when series co-star Pat Morita left to headline his own short-lived series, Mr. T & Tina. Following Days, Molinaro signed for very infrequent guest roles on series and permanently settled in Los Angeles, where he did occasional theatrical performances and made public appearances. He retired from acting in the mid-'90s. Molinaro died in 2015, at age 96.

Trivia: Red-haired character-actor Michael Gough was brought to Hollywood in 1948 after 14 years on Broadway. Gough's burgeoning film career was cut short when he was blacklisted on the basis of alleged communist ties; likewise prohibited from working in films was Gough's wife, Karen Morley. The most immediate effect of Gough's blacklisting occurred in the opening titles of RKO's Rancho Notorious (1952); though Gough was prominently cast as the film's principal villain, RKO head man Howard Hughes, a rabid commie-hater, demanded that the actor's name be removed from the credits. Gough retreated to the stage, returning before the cameras in the 1960s, by which time Hollywood's witch-hunt mentality had dissipated. One of his first "comeback" roles was as Michael Axford in the 1966 TV series The Green Hornet. In the 1976 film The Front, Lloyd Gough was reunited with several other former blacklistees, including actors Zero Mostel, Herschel Bernardi and Joshua Shelley, director Martin Ritt and screenwriter Walter Bernstein.

Trivia: Though it may sound like one of his cerebral comedy routines, Albert Brooks came into this world as Albert Einstein. The son of comedian Harry Einstein (better known to millions of radio fans as Parkyakarkus), Brooks briefly attended Carnegie Tech before launching a hills-and-valley career as a standup comic. Like such contemporaries as George Carlin and Robert Klein, Brooks delighted in finding humor in the inconsistencies of everyday life, and had a particular fondness for exploiting clichés that many people never realized were clichés. Two of his most fondly remembered routines involved a talking mime and a ritualistic recital of the ingredients in a carton of Cool-Whip. After appearing as a regular on the 1969-1970 season of The Dean Martin Show (as well as its 1971 spin-off The Golddiggers), Brooks gained instant pop-culture fame for his brilliant short-subject directorial debut, The Famous Comedian's School, which was highlighted on a 1971 installment of The Great American Dream Machine. Even today, comedy buffs can cite from memory the particulars of "The Danny Thomas/Sid Melton School of Coffee-Spitting." In 1975, Brooks won a Grammy for his album A Star Is Bought; that same year, he began filming short sketches for Saturday Night Live. Though often the highlights of that series' first season, Brooks' skits were dropped from SNL because they were considered "too inside." Brooks made his theatrical film debut in 1976, playing Cybill Shepherd's clueless co-worker in Taxi Driver. His subsequent film roles included the first husband of Goldie Hawn in Private Benjamin (1980), Dudley Moore's cuckolded manager in Unfaithfully Yours (1984), and, best of all, his Oscar-nominated turn as the acerbic, freely perspiring TV journalist Aaron Altman in Broadcast News (1987). Even more impressive have been Brooks' credits as writer/director, including the PBS-documentary lampoon Real Life (1979), the angst-driven Modern Romance (1981), the yuppie odyssey Lost in America (1985), and the "Heaven is a Strip Mall" fantasy Defending Your Life (1991). In 1994, Brooks both wrote and acted in the darkly humorous baseball film The Scout. In 1996, he directed, wrote, and starred opposite Debbie Reynolds (making her first screen appearance in over two decades) in Mother. After taking some time off from directing and scriptwriting to appear in such films as Out of Sight (1998), Brooks resumed his director-screenwriter-actor hyphenate with The Muse (1999), starring opposite Andie MacDowell and Sharon Stone as a struggling Hollywood scriptwriter in search of divine inspiration; Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World followed in 2005.Unarguably, Brooks's highest-profile performance came not in one of his directorial projects, but in the 2003 Pixar underwater adventure Finding Nemo. Lending his voice to the film's lead clown-fish, the critically-acclaimed picture went on to be one of the highest grossing movies of all time and also featured the talents of Ellen Degeneres and Willem Dafoe.He became part of the cast of the Showtime series Weeds as the main character's former father-in-law. 2011 turned out to be an excellent year for the revered performer. That year saw publication of his first novel, 2030, a comedy about the future of America. He also played the part of Bernie Rose, the bad guy in the hotly buzzed about action film Drive. Though he captured numerous year-end critics prizes, Brooks was denied an Oscar nomination in the Best Supporting Actor category.

Trivia: Versatile American entertainer Johnny Silver has played character roles on stage, screen, television, and radio. He also performed in nightclubs, vaudeville, and even grand opera. His daughter, Stephanie Silver, became an actress. His other daughter, Jennifer, became a singer/songwriter.