Trivia: Born in Des Moines, Iowa, Sada Thompson grew up in New Jersey, where her magazine-editor father had been transferred. Active in high school plays, she was all of 16 when she first appeared at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, playing Nick's Ma in a campus production of The Time of Your Life. Graduating from Carnegie with a BFA in 1949, Thompson launched her professional career, playing mature and sometimes elderly women at a time when she herself was barely old enough to vote. While working at New York's 92nd Street YMHA, a Jewish cultural center, she participated in the first-ever reading of Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, which led to her off-Broadway debut in the 1955 staging of that same piece. She spent the next decade in regional theatre, returning to New York for her first real breakthrough performance in the Lincoln Center's production of Tartuffe. A few years later, Thompson won an Obie Award for her work in Paul Zindel's The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, and in 1971 she copped the Tony award for her interpretation of four different women in the Broadway production Twigs. On the strength of this success, she was signed to play the Bunker Family's free-spirited neighbor Irene Lorenzo on All in the Family. After a single taping session, it was obvious that Thompson and producer Norman Lear would never see eye to eye, and she was replaced by Betty Garrett (one unnamed source close to both sides of the argument later claimed that "Sada had too much genuine class and didn't yell loud enough for a Norman Lear show"). While she continued appearing in television specials like Our Town and The Entertainer and miniseries like Sandburg's Lincoln, Thompson would not consider a weekly program until she was personally asked by executive producer Mike Nichols to play matriarch Kate Lawrence on his seriocomic series Family. She remained with Family from its debut in 1976 until its cancellation in 1980, winning a 1978 Emmy Award in the process. Thompson spent her later years occasionally co-starring in such made-for-TV films as 1985's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the controversial Indictment: The McMartin Trial (for HBO). Her last major assignment was a turn as Jackson Pollock's mother in Ed Harris's Pollock (2000). Thompson died 11 years later, of lung disease. She was 83.

Trivia: Authoritative American character actor James Broderick is best known to filmgoers of the flower-power generation for his performance as Alice's husband in the 1969 film Alice's Restaurant. It was but one of many incisive film characterizations for Broderick, who was equally effective in such films as The Group (1966), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975). From 1976 through 1980, Broderick played lawyer/patriarch Doug Lawrence in the weekly TV drama Family; he had previously starred in the detective series Brenner, playing the rookie-cop son of Edward Binns (who wasn't that much older). James Broderick was the father of contemporary film star Matthew Broderick, who paid homage to his dad by prominently displaying the elder Broderick's photograph in the 1990 film The Freshman.

Trivia: Lead and former juvenile actress McNichol is the daughter of a former actress. At age six she began appearing in commercials and was in TV shows by age nine. At 12 she became a regular on the TV series Apple's Way; after that show was canceled she was soon signed to the cast of Family, for which she went on to win two Emmy Awards. She began appearing onscreen in the late '70s, and looked to be on her way to a good film career with her costarring role in Little Darlings (1980), a popular teen-oriented comedy; however, most of her subsequent films were either low-quality or unsuccessful, and she never established herself as a screen actress. In the late '80s and early '90s she costarred on the TV sitcom Empty Nest.

Trivia: Supporting actress Quinn Cummings has spent the bulk of her career on television as a guest star and series regular, but she has also appeared in a few feature films, notably The Goodbye Girl (1977), where her performance earned her a Best Supporting Actress nomination. On television, she may best be remembered for playing Annie Cooper in nighttime sudser Family (1976-1980 -- Cummings joined the show in 1978). In 1980, Cummings appeared in a made-for-TV thriller and then didn't make another film until the 1989 feature Listen to Me.

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.