Trivia: American actress Patty Duke (born December 14, 1946) was groomed almost from infancy for a starring career by her manager/guardian John Ross. She studied at the Quintano School for Young Professionals and earned her Equity card at age seven, appearing in numerous TV productions and in such Hollywood films as I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955), The Goddess (1958) (playing young Kim Stanley, the "Marilyn Monroe" character in that film), and Happy Anniversary (1959). Duke also appeared as a quiz-show contestant, and was later compelled to testify as to her honesty during the cheating scandals of 1958 and 1959. Just before her 13th birthday, Duke made her stage debut in the role of Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker; the production won the girl instant stardom and later an Academy Award for the film version of Miracle Worker (1962). Manager John Ross very carefully monitored Duke's public appearances, making certain the world saw her as a sweet, uncomplicated young lady. The truth was that Duke was terribly unhappy, feeling pressured into performing and into suppressing her own emotions. That's not what the world saw in the three seasons of The Patty Duke Show (1963-1966), a sitcom wherein the young actress literally talked to herself in the dual role of cousins Patty and Cathy Lane. She became cynical with stardom in a hurry, and in a bold act of defiance, 18-year-old Duke married a man twice her age, director Harry Falk Jr. Her first grown-up role as a Judy Garland type in Valley of the Dolls (1967) was panned, and it was suggested that she'd lost her talent. The next few years she was cast in a series of unsuccessful films but made a strong comeback with the 1969 TV movie My Sweet Charlie, which won her the first of three Emmys; the others being for the miniseries Captains and the Kings(1976) and a remake of The Miracle Worker (1979) in which she played the role of Annie Sullivan, co-starring with Melissa Gilbert as Helen Keller. In 1972 she married actor John Astin. He raised her son, Sean Astin (actually the biological son of music promoter Michael Tell), as his own; they had Mackenzie Astin together. Duke also briefly changed her professional name to Patty Duke Astin. The Astins worked together prolifically for the duration of their marriage (which eventually ended in divorce). Building up her self-confidence and completely rebuilding her reputation in the '80s, Patty Duke served from 1985 through 1988 as president of the Screen Actor's Guild (the second woman to do so), starred in three separate network sitcoms, and wrote her harrowing best-selling memoirs, Call Me Anna, which in 1990 was adapted into a TV movie that she co-produced and starred in.In 2002, Duke returned to the stage to play Aunt Eller in a production of Oklahoma!, and appeared as a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007 to discuss living with bipolar disorder. The actress replaced Carol Cane as Madame Morrible in the San Francisco production of Wicked in 2009, and joined the cast of The Protector (a short-lived drama from Lifetime) in 2011. Her final role was in a 2015 episode of the Disney channel show Liv and Maddie, fittingly playing a set of identical twins. Duke died in 2016, at age 69.

Trivia: Northwestern University drama student Shelley Long began picking up work in Chicago TV commercials in the mid-1970s. She went on to host the WMAQ-TV "magazine" program Sorting it Out, and honed her comic timing with the Second City troupe. While her actual film debut was in 1980's A Small Circle of Friends, Long prefers to list the 1981 spoof Caveman as her first film. After a handful of TV guest appearances (notably as one of Alan Alda's lady friends on MASH) and an attention-grabbing performance as a freewheeling hooker in Night Shift (1982), Long was cast as the pretentious, garrulous waitress Diane Chambers on the weekly sitcom Cheers. She won an Emmy for this role, but all was not roses on the Cheers set. According to most sources, Diane's overbearing personality spilled over into Long's off-camera behavior; when she left the series in 1987, many of the cast members, especially star Ted Danson, breathed a rather loud and public sigh of relief. Shelley Long's post-Cheers efforts to establish herself as a movie star have thus far fallen short of expectations; her most successful film assignment to date has been as retro housewife Carol Brady in 1995's The Brady Bunch: The Movie. She reprised the role of Carol in the 1996 sequel A Very Brady Sequel. She returned to the part of Diane Chambers with a guest appearance on Frasier in 1996, and she would play Carol Brady again in A Very Brady Sequel that same year. At the beginning of the next decade she had a memorable turn in Robert Altman's Dr. T & the Women, and she would appear again on Frasier in the part that made her famous. There was a third Brady Bunch movie in 2002. She appeared in light fare such as Honeymoon with Mom and A Holiday Engagement.

Trivia: The first time that American actor Bruce Boxleitner set foot on stage, it was with a total of four hours' preparation. While in high school, Boxleitner was forced to jump into the role of My Fair Lady's Henry Higgins when the young man originally cast in the part came down with mononucleosis the day before the show. The applause that greeted Boxleitner's debut was enough to inspire him to continue studying drama at the Goodman Theatre. His first Broadway play flopped, but he managed to secure steady work in a series of villainous supporting roles in Hollywood. With the help of fabled super-agent Jay Bernstein, Boxleitner climbed to stardom, reaching a particularly lofty rung with his four season-stint (from 1983 to 1987) as government agent Lee Stetson on the TV series Scarecrow and Mrs. King. More recently, Bruce Boxleitner was seen as fictional ballplayer "Jumpin' Joe Dugan" in the 1992 Babe Ruth biopic The Babe.

Trivia: During the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, Patrick Duffy quickly evolved into one of prime time's old standbys for handsome, sturdy, dependable, and reliable leading men. Two key patterns hallmarked the majority of Duffy's career choices: he culled his broadest appeal and most substantial workload on television in lieu of the big screen, and exceedingly rare were those occasions in which he played a villain. In terms of audience recognition, Duffy maintained his strongest ties with two ongoing series roles -- his famous portrayal of Southfork Ranch stalwart Bobby Ewing on the blockbuster CBS prime-time soap Dallas (1978-1991), and a subsequent tenure as Frank Lambert on the ABC "TGIF" Friday-night sitcom Step by Step (1991-1998). Born born March 17, 1949, in Townsend, MT, as the second child of two saloonkeepers, Duffy grew up in dire poverty. He attended high school in Everett, WA, then attended the actor's training program at the nearby University of Washington, graduating in 1971. The actor relocated to Southern California and began receiving screen credit only a few years after college, initially with roles in telemovies such as the 1976 Last of Mrs. Lincoln and the lead in the short-lived television series Man from Atlantis (as a half-man, half-fish). Dallas, of course, brought Duffy his big break, and as its ratings shot skyward, turning it into not simply the number one program on the air but an international phenomenon, Duffy's character became intertwined with the program's legacy. The series' premise is by now iconic -- it dealt with the Ewing family, a wealthy Texas oil clan with a history rooted in scandal. Its patriarch, John Ross "Jock" Ewing Sr. (Jim Davis), had driven himself into fabulous wealth by cheating his business partner out of a fortune and his one true love, with whom he started a family and launched an entire oil dynasty. Passing on the family torch were three sons: J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman), the megalomaniacal evil brother; Bobby Ewing (Duffy), the decent and moral brother, who had married the daughter of his father's partner; and the weak-willed Gary (Ted Shackelford), who grappled continually with emotional problems and quickly snagged his own series.As Bobby, Duffy attained popularity second only to that of co-star Hagman -- popularity that prompted national headlines when Duffy opted to leave the program at the end of the 1984-1985 season. Series producer created and aired a scenario where he was killed by a hit-and-run driver, but the audience demand for Bobby Ewing grew so overwhelming during the following season that -- in an obvious bid to re-boost ratings and extend Dallas' longevity -- Hagman personally summoned Duffy to re-join the series. The writers then reposited the entire 1985-1986 season as the bad dream of Bobby's on-camera wife, Pam (Victoria Principal)! It may have seemed far-fetched to many, but as an attempt to bring the actor back to the program and draw a larger audience, it worked like a charm.Not long after Dallas finally wrapped in May 1991, Duffy turned up on ABC's aforementioned Step by Step, a kind of unofficial update of The Brady Bunch; he played Frank Lambert, a divorced Wisconsin contractor with several kids who impulsively married a widowed beautician (Suzanne Somers) with several tykes of her own. Episodes dealt with the complications wrought when the two clans moved under the same roof together. As produced by William Bickley and Michael Warren, that program also connected with a large audience. It folded in 1998.Duffy acted in several Dallas telemovies during Step by Step's run, and then ushered in guest roles on numerous additional series, including Touched by an Angel, Justice League, and Family Guy. Additional made-for-television feature credits in the late '90s and early to mid-2000s included such outings as Heart of Fire (1997), Don't Look Behind You (1998), Desolation Canyon (2006), and Falling in Love with the Girl Next Door (2006). Duffy landed another series assignment in 2006 with an ongoing role -- that of Stephen Logan Sr. -- on the CBS daytime drama The Bold and the Beautiful.

Trivia: Of Lithuanian descent from her mother's side.Grew up in Camrose, Alberta, Canada.Has American and Canadian citizenships.Studied dance in New York City.Worked as a model in New York, London, Germany, Greece and South Africa.Studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York.Is an avid and talented cook.

Trivia: Handsome, dark-haired comedian Ken Marino is one member of the sketch-comedy troupe The State that seems to have broken off from the group in favor of a career in television sitcoms. Born in Long Island, he studied at the Lee Strasberg Institute and N.Y.U. before working in touring companies and off-Broadway plays. In the early '90s, he joined up with the gang that would become The State, the hilarious comedy show that aired on MTV from 1994-1995. His good looks and memorable characters (the Talking Hormone and Louie, the guy who's gonna dip his balls in it) earned him many admiring fans. After the show's cancellation, he was cast in the NBC sitcom Men Behaving Badly. (Starring Rob Schneider and Ron Eldard, the short-lived show was an Americanized version of a popular, long-running British series.) Several guest-starring appearances followed, leading to a recurring role as Professor Wilder on the WB's teen drama Dawson's Creek.Marino made his film debut with a small role in Gattaca, which was followed by several poorly distributed independent comedies (Love Happens, Carlo's Wake, and 101 Ways [The Things a Girl Will Do to Keep Her Volvo]). He also had supporting roles in the more mainstream romantic comedies Tortilla Soup and Joe Somebody. In 2001, he reunited many other members of The State for the teen satire Wet Hot American Summer as sexually desperate camp counselor Victor. Back on NBC, he starred as young San Francisco lawyer Miles Lawton in the series First Years, another short-lived Americanized version of a popular, long-running British TV series. When the show was canceled after a month, he starred in the NBC sitcom Leap of Faith as magazine reporter Andy, best friend of the titular Faith (Sarah Paulson). When this show was canceled after a month, he went back to guest-starring roles on shows like Las Vegas and Rock Me Baby. Projects for 2004 include a leading role in the independent romantic comedy feature Love for Rent opposite Colombian actress Angie Cepeda.In 2006 he made his feature screenwriting debut with Diggers, and followed that up the next year with the script for The Ten, and had his biggest success to date the year after that with his screenplay for Role Models. He was a regular on the short-lived but highly-respected sitcom Party Down, and in 2012 he wrote and had a superb supporting part in the comedy Wanderlust.

Trivia: A curly haired beauty from San Francisco, actress Brigid Brannagh has found a successful niche as a TV guest star, appearing in single episodes of many shows, like Doogie Howser, M.D., NYPD Blue, Ally McBeal, Charmed, Just Shoot Me, 24, Without a Trace, and many more. Brannagh has also enjoyed a number of starring roles, most notably playing Pamela Moran on the Lifetime series Army Wives.

Trivia: Did improv training with Second City in Chicago. Was a member of Chicago theater troupe White Noise in the 1980s and '90s. Guest-starred as a fired department-store Santa in two David E. Kelley series: Ally McBeal and Boston Legal. Originally auditioned for the role of boss Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation, but was instead cast as associate director Jerry.