Trivia: An actor of unusual talent, Edward Norton attained almost instant stardom with his film debut in 1996's Primal Fear. For his thoroughly chilling breakthrough performance as a Kentucky altar boy accused of murder, Norton was credited with saving an otherwise mediocre film and further rewarded with Golden Globe and Oscar nominations. Remarkably disconnected from all of the hype that is usually associated with fresh talent, Norton has gone on to further prove his worth in such films as American History X, The People vs. Larry Flynt, and Fight Club.The son of a former Carter Administration federal prosecutor and an English teacher, as well as the grandson of famed developer James Rouse, Norton was born in Boston on August 18, 1969. He was raised in the planned community of Columbia, MD, and from an early age was known as an extremely bright and somewhat serious person. His interest in acting began at the age of five when his babysitter, Betsy True (who went on to become an actress on stage and screen), took him to a musical adaptation of Cinderella. Shortly after that, Norton enrolled at Orenstein's Columbia School for Theatrical Arts, making his stage debut at the age of eight in a local production of Annie Get Your Gun. Although young, Norton already exhibited an unusual amount of professionalism and took his subsequent roles seriously. After high school, he studied astronomy, history, and Japanese at Yale, and was also active in the university's theatrical productions. After earning a history degree, Norton spent a few months in Japan and then moved to New York, where he worked for the Enterprise Foundation, a group devoted to stopping urban decay. Again, Norton continued acting at every opportunity and eventually decided to become a full-time actor. In 1994, he appeared in Edward Albee's Fragments after deeply impressing the distinguished playwright during an audition. Norton then joined the New York Signature Theater Company, which frequently premieres Albee's plays. With a number of off-Broadway credits to his name, Norton won his role in Primal Fear after being chosen out of 2,100 hopefuls. He nabbed the part after telling casting directors in a flawless drawl that he was a native of eastern Kentucky, the same area where the character came from; legend has it that the actor watched Coal Miner's Daughter to learn the accent. The intensity of Norton's screen test readings stunned almost all who saw them, and the actor became something of a hot property even before the film was released. The same year, Norton was cast as Drew Barrymore's affable fiancé in Woody Allen's tribute to Hollywood musicals, Everyone Says I Love You. Like all of the other actors in the film (excepting Barrymore), Norton did his own singing, further impressing audiences and critics alike with his versatility. Then, as if two completely different films in one year weren't enough, Norton again wowed audiences that same year with his portrayal of a determined defense attorney in Milos Forman's widely acclaimed The People vs. Larry Flynt. In 1998, Norton turned in two more stellar performances. The first was as Matt Damon's low-life buddy, the appropriately named Worm, in Rounders. The fact that Norton's work was more or less overshadowed by the film's lackluster reviews was almost negligible when compared to the controversy surrounding his other major project that year, American History X. Norton's stunningly powerful portrayal of a reformed white supremacist won him an Oscar nomination, but the film itself was both a box-office disappointment and the subject of vituperative disassociation on the part of its director Tony Kaye, who insisted that Norton and the studio had edited his film beyond recognition. Despite such embittered controversy, Norton managed to emerge from the mess relatively unscathed. After serving as one of the narrators for the acclaimed documentary Out of the Past the same year, he went on to star opposite Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter in Fight Club in 1999. Though that film garnered a mixed reaction at the box office, a stellar DVD release helped the film to form a solid fan base and Norton next moved on to the slightly more successful crime drama The Score (2001). After dropping a full-fledged bomb with his appearance as a naive children's show host in Danny DeVito's black comedy Death to Smoochy, Norton assisted love interest Salma Hayek by offering an uncredited re-write of the script. Norton would also make a brief appearance as Nelson Rockefeller in the film. Drawn to the mystique of screen villain Hannibal Lecter, Norton's next major film was that of FBI agent Will Graham in the well-recieved 2002 thriller Red Dragon. Though a virtual remake of Michael Mann's 1986 effort Manhunter, Red Dragon stood tall enough on its own terms to gain the respect of both fans of the previous version as well as fans of the book. His appearance as a drug dealer celebrating one last night on the town before serving a prison term in Spike Lee's 25th Hour drew decent enought reviews, though its ultimate take at the box office proved fairly disappointing. An appearance in the high profile 2003 remake The Italian Job caused something of a rift in industry headlines when Norton made it publicly known that his participation in the film was strictly a result of contractual obligation, and in 2005 the actor would return to quieter, more challenging territory with his portrayal of a delusional cowboy wannabe in Dahmer director David Jacobson's Down in the Valley. A headlining performance as a turn-of-the-century Vienna magician who uses his powers to win the love of the woman he longs for in the romantic fantasy The Illusionist found Norton making a particularly powerful impression opposite Paul Giamatti and Jessical Biel, and later that same year he would return to the screen in director John Curran's screen adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's novel The Painted Veil. Meanwhile, the sneaking suspicion that Norton wasn't quite living up to early career expectations was growing difficult to ignore; though his turn as Bruce Banner in 2008's The Incredible Hulk drew generally favorable reviews (it didn't hurt that the film itself was markedly more exciting than Ang Lee's misguided 2003 take on the material), Norton's next film Pride and Glory proved somewhat forgettable, and his quirky duel role in Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass only received a limited theatrical release before getting lost in the shuffle. Poor reviews for Norton's 2010 film Stone didn't help much to reinvigorate his career, and when it was announced that Mark Ruffalo would be taking over the role of Banner in Joss Whedon's all-star comic book romp The Avengers, some feared that the actor's previous rift with Marvel Studios had come back to haunt him.In 2012, when he took high-profile roles in two eagerly anticipated films -- Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom and Tony Gilroy's The Bourne Legacy, and two years later he earned rave reviews for his supporting turn as a monstrously egotistical and hugely talented actor in Alejandro Inarritu's Birdman, a part that earned him an Oscar nomination and a slew of other industry accolades.

Trivia: Possessing an unusual beauty marked by perhaps the most distinctive set of lips in the business (an inheritance from father Steven Tyler), Liv Tyler unsurprisingly made her entrance into acting via the world of modeling. Since her breakthrough role in 1996's Stealing Beauty, she has emerged as a performer with bona fide talent, dropping her "model-actress" hyphenate in favor of just "actress."Born in New York, NY, on July 1, 1977, to model and former 1970s rock groupie Bebe Buell, Tyler spent most of her youth believing that rocker Todd Rundgren was her father. However, as she grew older, she began to notice more than a passing resemblance between herself and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler, who was a family friend, and she ultimately discovered that he was indeed her biological father. When she was 12, she took Tyler's last name as her own.After experiencing obligatory preteen awkwardness -- hers featured braces and a bit of a weight problem -- Tyler had blossomed enough by the time she was 14 to consider modeling. She moved to New York City in the company of her mother and began to pursue a career. After appearing on the covers of magazines like Seventeen and Mirabella, Tyler got her first taste of acting while filming a television commercial. She made her film debut in 1994, as the sister of an autistic boy in Bruce Beresford's Silent Fall, appearing in the mystery alongside Richard Dreyfuss and Linda Hamilton.Following this fairly auspicious debut, Tyler's next project, 1995's Empire Records, proved a disappointment on both commercial and critical levels. Tyler kept at it, next starring as the unrequited love interest of a reclusive pizza maker (Pruitt Taylor Vince) in James Mangold's Heavy that same year. Her work in the critically hailed film won her wide praise and her career began to take off. Tyler's breakthrough came the following year in Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty. Starring as a 19-year-old who comes to Italy to find her father and lose her virginity, she suddenly became Hollywood's new "It" Girl, appearing on magazine covers and as one of People's "50 Most Beautiful" in 1997.After a lead as one of the titular Abbott sisters in Inventing the Abbotts (1997) and a brief cameo in U-Turn the same year, Tyler stepped into the realm of bloated budgets and even more bloated box-office returns with her role as Bruce Willis' daughter and Ben Affleck's girlfriend in Armageddon (1998). The following year, she returned to the art house circuit with Robert Altman's Cookie's Fortune. The film was widely praised, as was its ensemble cast, which included Tyler, Glenn Close, Julianne Moore, Charles S. Dutton, Chris O'Donnell, and Ned Beatty. The same year, Tyler lent her talents to the 18th century road movie genre, starring opposite Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller in Plunkett and Macleane. She also had a leading role as the object of Ralph Fiennes' jaded affections in Martha Fiennes' Onegin, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival.After taking the role of an irresistibly destructive seductress in the 2001 comedy One Night at McCool's, Tyler took another trip back in time, this time putting her pixyish beauty to ideal use as Arwen, an elf faced with the daunting dilemma of choosing between love and immortality in director Peter Jackson's grandiose, three-film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolken's Lord of the Rings.She was the love interest for Ben Affleck in Kevin Smith's Jersey Girl. In 2007, she stretched her dramatic range in Mike Binder's Reign Over Me, and the next year played the love interest of Dr. Banner in The Incredible Hulk, and also took the lead in the home-invasion thriller The Strangers. She was the love interest for a frustrated wannabe superhero in James Gunn's Super in 2010, and the next year she had a major part in the thriller The Ledge. In 2014, she starred in the HBO series The Leftovers.

Trivia: With lean hangdog looks that make him a natural for the criminals and fringe dwellers he usually plays, Tim Roth has the uncanny and incredibly effective ability to make sleaze look sexy, or at least raggedly photogenic. Since his debut in the made-for-TV Made in Britain at the age of 18, Roth has joined fellow Briton Gary Oldman as one of the leading interpreters of society's underbelly. His ability has been particularly appreciated by director Quentin Tarantino, who helped to propel Roth to international recognition with prominent roles in Resevoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction in the early '90s. Since then, Roth has continued to portray a variety of gritty characters, occasionally making room for the odd sympathetic or lighthearted role.Born in London on May 14, 1961, to a journalist father and landscape painter mother, Roth initially wanted to become a sculptor. After an education at London's Camberwell School of Art, he decided to try his hand at acting, first appearing in a production of Jean Genet's The Screens. Roth's television debut in the 1981 film Made in Britain garnered critical raves for the actor, who portrayed a poverty-stricken juvenile delinquent with profanity-spewing gusto. The same year, he appeared with Gary Oldman in Mike Leigh's Meantime, a made-for-TV movie that was eventually released theatrically, but Roth's bona fide screen debut didn't come until 1984, when he played an apprentice hitman in Stephen Frears' The Hit. Co-starring Terence Stamp and John Hurt, the film did moderately well and earned Roth an Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Newcomer. Thanks to such positive notices, the young actor continued to find work throughout the rest of the decade, making appearances in a variety of films, including former Kinks frontman Ray Davies' 1985 musical Return to Waterloo. In 1990, Roth began to enjoy a limited amount of international attention, thanks to two starring roles, his acclaimed portrayal of Vincent Van Gogh in Robert Altman's Vincent and Theo and a title role in the critically lauded film adaptation of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Starring opposite Gary Oldman, Roth made an impression on many a filmgoer, including Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino cast Roth as undercover policeman Mr. Orange in his 1992 ensemble piece Resevoir Dogs, a film that allowed the actor to prove he could do an American accent and bleed to death convincingly. The success of Resevoir Dogs paved the way for more Hollywood work for Roth. In a drastic departure from his previous work, he next starred in the 1993 comedy Bodies, Rest & Motion alongside Bridget Fonda, Phoebe Cates, and Eric Stoltz. The following year, Roth returned to more familiar territory, as a hit man in Little Odessa and as one of the robbers who catalyzes the action of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. After the enormous success of the latter film, the actor appeared the same year in the psychologically terrifying TV adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness alongside John Malkovich, who played the unhinged Kurtz. After a disastrous third collaboration with Tarantino, the critically and commercially disemboweled Four Rooms (1995), Roth had significantly greater success portraying an ominously prissy English nobleman in Rob Roy, winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his work, along with a Golden Globe nomination and a British Academy Award. Staying true to his habit of jumping from genre to genre, Roth next appeared as a convict with a jones for Drew Barrymore in Woody Allen's musical comedy Everyone Says I Love You (1996) before playing a mobster in 1930s Harlem in Hoodlum (1997). Roth remained in a down and dirty milieu for his next film, Vondie Curtis-Hall's Gridlock'd, which featured the actor, as well as Thandie Newton and Tupac Shakur, as modern-day heroin addicts. Although the film received critical praise, it failed to make a significant impression at the box office. Roth's subsequent films unfortunately suffered from similarly lackluster performances: 1998's Liar went straight to video and the actor's film with Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore, La Leggenda del Pianista Sull'Oceano, remained mired in obscurity. However, Roth continued to keep busy with other projects, appearing in the 1998 Sundance entry Animals (And the Tollkeeper) and making his directing debut the same year with The War Zone. Though it gained positive critical notice for its' downbeat story of a disfunctional family skidding towards oblivion, the subject matter found the film getting little exposure even though it won multiple film festival awards. Roth's next turn as the menacing General Thade in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes (2001) would be arguably his most mainstream, prolific and scenery-chewing role to date. As the sinister simian on an obsessive quest to kill Mark Wahlberg's Capt. Leo Davis at any cost, Roth provided more than enough gusto to adequately fill the film's evil villian quota. While the film was a box-office hit, Roth opted to follow it up by returning to more obscure films. However, his visibility was raised considerably in 2004 by a pair of projects. First, he acted alongside the likes of Oscar-winners Chris Cooper and Richard Dreyfuss in director John Sayles' highly-anticipated political film Silver City and then showed up opposite Jennifer Connelly and John C. Reilly in Dark Water.He starred in the 2007 Francis Coppola film Youth Without Youth as well as the English-language remake of Funny Games. He was one of the main players in 2008's The Incredible Hulk, then enjoyed a well-regarded run on the FOX procedural show Lie To Me. In 2010 he played the title character in Pete Smalls Is Dead, and two years later he acted opposite Richard Gere in the drama Arbitrage.

Trivia: One of the top leading men of the '80s, William Hurt, born March 20th, 1950, is notable for his intensity and effective portrayals of complex characters. Although born in Washington, D.C., Hurt had already seen much of the world by the time he was grown, as his father worked for the State Department. His early years spent in the South Pacific near Guam, Hurt moved to Manhattan with his mother after his parents divorced when he was six years old. He spent the summers with his father, vacationing in a variety of international locales, including Sudan. At the age of ten, Hurt's life again changed dramatically when he became a stepson to Henry Luce III, the heir to the Time-Life empire. His mother's second marriage indirectly led to Hurt's initial involvement with the theater: sent away to a boarding school in Massachusetts, he found comfort in acting.After going on to Tufts University to study theology for three years at his stepfather's urging, Hurt married aspiring actress Mary Beth Supinger and followed her to London to study drama. Upon their return to the U.S., Hurt studied drama at Juilliard. By this time, under the realization that his marriage was failing, Hurt divorced his wife, got a motorcycle, and headed cross country for the Shakespeare festival in Ashland, OR, where he made his professional debut in a production of Hamlet. He later joined New York's Circle Repertory Company, and went on to receive critical acclaim for his work on the New York stage.Hurt made his feature film debut in Ken Russell's Altered States in 1980, but it was not until he appeared opposite Kathleen Turner in Body Heat (1981) that he became a star and sex symbol. Four years later, he won Best Actor Oscar and British Academy awards as well as a similar honor at Cannes for his sensitive portrayal of a gay prisoner in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985). He was again nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his two subsequent films, Children of a Lesser God (1986) and Broadcast News (1987). Further success followed in 1988 when he starred in The Accidental Tourist.As bright as his star shone on stage and screen, by the end of the '80s, a darker side of Hurt was exposed when he was sued by his former live-in love and mother of his daughter Alex, ballet dancer Sandra Jennings, who claimed to be his common-law wife. Despite his personal problems, Hurt continued to stay relatively busy, beginning the new decade with a fine turn in Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World (1991). He subsequently appeared in such acclaimed films as Smoke (1995), Jane Eyre (1996), One True Thing (1998), and Dark City (1998). In 1998, Hurt appeared as the patriarch of one of televisions most beloved sci-fi families in the big-budgeted remake of Lost in Space, and as a gubernatorial candidate with a shadowy past in George Hickenlooper's political drama The Big Brass Ring (1999).Still alternating between stage and screen into the new millennium, Hurt stuck mainly to the small screen in the next few years. After lending his voice to the animated portrayal of the life of Jesus Christ in The Miracle Maker, appearing in the mini-series Dune, and taking the title role of The Contaminated Man in 2000, Hurt returned to features with his role in director Steven Spielberg's long anticipated (post-mortem) collaboration with the late Stanley Kubrick, A.I. As the well-intending scientist who sets the story of an artificial boy capable of learning and love into motion, Hurt's character seemed to provide the antithesis of the regressive experiments his previous character had flirted with in Altered States.Hurt played a supporting role in Changing Lanes (2002), an thought-provoking thriller following two very different New York City residents whose lives fatefully intersect following a car accident, and again in the political thriller Syriana, which would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2005. The actor was praised the same year for his work as a supporting character in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence. In 2007, Hurt starred as the murderous alter ego of a businessman in Mr. Brooks, and co-starred with Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker, and Dennis Quaid for the political thriller Vantage Point (2008). Hurt stars as an ex-con looking to start over for The Yellow Handkerchief (2008), and Gen. Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross, Bruce Banner's nemesis, in The Incredible Hulk (2008).In 2009, Hurt reunited with Vantage Point director Pete Travis for the historical thriller Endgame, for which he played the leading role of philosophy Professor Willie Esterhuyse, an essential member of a team dedicated to securing the release of Nelson Mandela. Director Julie Gavras' 2011 romantic comedy found Hurt starring alongside the legendary Isabella Rossallini. Hurt is slated to work in the The Host, a dystopian thriller adapted from a novel from author Stephanie Meyers, in 2013.

Trivia: An accomplished playwright, screenwriter, director, and actor, former classics major Tim Blake Nelson is perhaps most familiar to the movie audience as the hilariously dim Delmar in Joel and Ethan Coen's goofy Oscar-nominated comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000).Born in Oklahoma, Nelson attended college at Brown University where he became a Latinist in the classics department. Opting for the arts over academia, Nelson headed to New York after college, studying acting at Juilliard and embarking on an Obie Award-winning career as a stage writer. After making his film debut in Nora Ephron's freshman directorial effort This Is My Life (1992), Nelson occasionally appeared in films throughout the 1990s, playing small roles in Hal Hartley's Amateur (1994), the Al Pacino/Johnny Depp mob drama Donnie Brasco (1997), and Terrence Malick's radiant anti-war anti-epic The Thin Red Line (1998). Along with film acting, Nelson turned to filmmaking with the screen adaptation of his play Eye of God (1997), a somber rural drama about a woman's marriage to a pious ex-con with a violent past, which earned positive notice at the Sundance Film Festival. Because of his ability to handle difficult questions of violence and create an ominous mood out of the everyday, Nelson was asked to helm the modernized, teen version of Shakespeare's Othello, retitled O (2001). Shot in 1999, O languished on the shelf in the wake of a series of high school shootings, deemed an inappropriate release because of its violent denouement. In the meantime, Nelson's friend Joel Coen offered him one of the starring roles in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. As comfortable playing rural comedy as directing rural drama, Nelson shined as the dimmest of a trio of hare-brained fugitives in the Coen brothers' shaggy-dog 1930s Southern Odyssey. After his successful stint with the Coens' light-hearted movie, Nelson returned squarely to downbeat material, directing the screen adaptation of his play The Grey Zone (2001). A drama about the only armed revolt at Auschwitz, The Grey Zone was already hitting the film-festival circuit when Lionsgate removed O from its Miramax purgatory, releasing it in August 2001. Impressing some critics with its central performances and evocative Southern Gothic atmosphere (if not always with all aspects of the adaptation), O confirmed Nelson's ability to translate his concern with the complex motivations for (and fall out from) violence to the film medium. Back to being an actor for hire, Nelson scored a summer 2002 hat trick with roles in one glossy big studio blockbuster and two well-regarded independent releases. In Steven Spielberg's Minority Report (2002), Nelson stood out (albeit a bit too much for some critical tastes) as the oddball, organ-playing guardian of the imprisoned "pre"-killers captured by Precrime hotshot Tom Cruise. Refraining from such theatrical eccentricity, Nelson garnered more positive reviews for his turn as a shy technician charged with servicing house arrestee Robin Tunney's ankle bracelet in the singular indie romance Cherish (2002), and as John C. Reilly's doltish, stoner best friend and co-worker in Miguel Arteta's dark comedy The Good Girl (2002). Nelson's roles proliferated through the first years of the new millennium -- he averaged around six to eight A-list features per year, the number doubtless heightened by Nelson's status as a character actor and his resultant tendency to gravitate to bit parts in lieu of leading roles. For the first several years after The Good Girl, Nelson's roles included, among others: Dr. Jonathan Jacobo, the "pterodactyl ghost" in Raja Gosnell's Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (2004); Danny Dalton, a representative of the oil company Killen, in Stephen Gaghan's muckraking drama Syriana (2005); and Tom Loyless, the supervisor of a polio treatment center revitalized by F.D.R., in Joseph Sargent's superior telemovie Warm Springs (2005). Nelson then appeared as Curly Branitt, an entrepreneur determined to build a pancake house and expel the resident animals at the location, in the Jimmy Buffett-produced, family-oriented comedy Hoot (2006). He plays Kevin Munchak in Michael Polish's drama The Astronaut Farmer (2006), starring Billy Bob Thornton, Virginia Madsen, and Bruce Dern; and The North Beach Killer in Finn Taylor's fiendish black comedy The Darwin Awards (2007). He had a major supporting turn in 2008's The Incredible Hulk, and in 2010 he wrote directed and acted in Leaves of Grass. He appeared in the 2011 teaching drama Detachment, and in 2012 he landed a major part in the inspirational drama Big Miracle and appeared in Steven Spielberg's long-planned biopic Lincoln.Nelson is married to the actress Lisa Benavides; they reside in Southern California.

Trivia: Tall and dark actor Ty Burrell has the kind of deep-set eyes and sharp features that make him ideal for roles such as the self-absorbed yuppie who cast a cold gaze in Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead and the authoritative yet undeniably vain plastic surgeon on the CBS sitcom Out of Practice. And while Burrell's background may indeed be in repertory theater, it is in the worlds of film and television that he has truly come into his own.Equally comfortable on screens both large and small, Burrell found his footing before the camera thanks to walk-on roles on Ellen and The West Wing before supporting performances in Ivan Reitman's Evolution and Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down singled him out as a talent to watch for on the big screen. Never one to stay away from the stage for too long a stretch, the Ashland, Oregon, native subsequently returned to the boards to star in the Signature Theatre off-Broadway production of Burn This opposite Edward Norton and Catherine Keener. While subsequent television roles in Law & Order and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit served well to prepare Burrell for his regular role in the comedy series Out of Practice -- a lighthearted affair about a dysfunctional family of physicians -- big-screen roles in Dawn of the Dead, In Good Company, Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, and National Treasure: Book of Secrets virtually ensured a lasting career in film as well. In 2007, he was cast as a regular on the Kelsey Grammer/Patricia Heaton local-news sitcom Back to You as field reporter Gary Crezyzewski, but the show only lasted one season. Burrell bounced back in a big way with a prominent supporting role as Dr. Samson in the summer 2008 release The Incredible Hulk.In 2009 Burrell enjoyed his most high-profile success so far as a member of the ensemble in Modern Family, the hit ABC sitcom that would earn him a number of award nominations. On the big screen in 2010 he had a small but memorable part as a creepy morning-show host in Morning Glory, and the next year played a part in the political satire Butter as a champion butter carver.

Trivia: Thespian Christina Cabot began her acting career with guest roles on television series including The King of Queens, Working, and Six Feet Under during the late '90s and early 2000s, and segued into features in 1999 with bit roles in the A-listers Man on the Moon and Fight Club. Additional big-screen roles of equal exposure followed before Cabot ascended to supporting billing with a turn as a military officer, Major Kathleen "Kat" Spar, in Louis Leterrier's superhero action movie The Incredible Hulk.

Trivia: Born in Ghana as a member of the Ashanti tribe, but raised in England. Worked as an engineer before turning to acting full-time. Made his big-screen debut in the 2000 supernatural thriller Bless the Child. Subsequently appeared in a number of big-budget action and sci-fi films, including Tears of the Sun (2003), 300 (2007) and Avatar (2009). Went through a three-week boot camp to prepare for his role as a gladiator trainer on the Starz historical drama Spartacus: Blood and Sand. Has practiced martial arts since the age of 6.

Trivia: One can trace Canadian performer Greg Bryk's on-camera activity back to the late '90s, but he landed his first significant cinematic break in the 2002 sports comedy Men With Brooms -- with his portrayal of a curling player. After a memorable supporting role as a hardened criminal who sticks up a diner only to meet a bitter end in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence (2005), Bryk tackled at least four major feature assignments in 2007. These included supporting roles in Poor Boy's Game, The Robber Bride, Weirdsville, and Shoot 'Em Up.

Trivia: Born Martin Schienle, Martin Starr (his stage name) began life in Southern California and grew up as the son of an elementary school guidance counselor father and a mother employed as the head of In the Act Productions, a company built around producing networking workshops for aspiring actors. With that familial background, Starr came to show business naturally and began doing commercials from the age of six. The upstart moved to southwest Florida during high school with his dad and stepmom, but remained connected to show business thanks to his mom. He scored his first major career coup in his late teens at the hands of executive producer Judd Apatow, whose short-lived but critically acclaimed seriocomedy Freaks and Geeks reeled in a devoted cult following when it turned up on NBC in the fall of 1999; Starr played Bill Haverchuck, a distinctly geeky but not-so-bright social misfit attending a Michigan high school in 1980. Subsequent years witnessed Starr moving into features and maintaining a multi-film series of collaborations with Apatow and company, including the Knocked Up and Superbad (both 2007), and the bitter, acerbic romantic comedy Good Dick (2007) opposite Marianna Palka, Jason Ritter, and Tom Arnold. He was cast in the cult TV hit Party Down in 2009, landing a major part in the coming-of-age comedy Adventureland that same year. He would go on to appear in A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, 6 Month Rule, and Save the Date.

Trivia: Hailed by many critics as one of the most brilliant and versatile actors of his generation, Robert Downey Jr. chalked up a formidable onscreen track record that quickly launched the young thesp into the stratosphere. Although, for a time, Downey's stormy offscreen life and personal problems threatened to challenge his public image, he quickly bounced back and overcame these setbacks, with a continued array of impressive roles on the big and small screens that never sacrificed his audience appeal or affability.The son of underground filmmaker Robert Downey, Downey Jr. was born in New York City on April 4, 1965. He made his first onscreen appearance at the age of five, as a puppy in his father's film Pound (1970). Between 1972 and 1990, he made cameo appearances in five more of his father's films. The actor's first significant role, in 1983's Baby, It's You, largely ended up on the cutting-room floor; it wasn't until two years later that he began landing more substantial parts, first as a one-season cast member on Saturday Night Live and then in the comedy Weird Science. In 1987, he landed plum roles in two films that capitalized on the Brat Pack phenomenon, James Toback's The Pick-Up Artist, (opposite Molly Ringwald), and Less Than Zero, for which he won acclaim playing cocaine addict Julian Wells.Through it all, Downey cultivated an enviable instinct for role (and script) selection. His turns in Emile Ardolino's classy reincarnation fantasy Chances Are (1989), Michael Hoffman's Soapdish (1992), Robert Altman's Short Cuts (as the Iago-like Hollywood makeup artist Bill Bush), and Richard Loncraine's Richard III (1995) wowed viewers around the world, and often, on those rare occasions when Downey did choose substandard material, such as the lead in Richard Attenborough's deeply flawed Chaplin (1992), or an Australian media parasite in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994), his performance redeemed it. In fact, critics deemed Downey's portrayal as one of the only worthwhile elements in the Chaplin biopic, and it earned the thesp a Best Actor Oscar nomination, as well as Golden Globe and British Academy Award noms.Around this time, Downey's personal life took a turn for the worse. In June 1996, the LAPD arrested the actor (who had already spent time in three rehabilitation facilities between 1987 and 1996) on counts including drug use, driving under the influence, possession of a concealed weapon, and possession of illegal substances, a development which struck many as ironic, given his star-making performance years prior in Less than Zero. A month after this arrest, police found Downey Jr. unconscious on a neighbor's lawn, under the influence of a controlled substance, and authorities again incarcerated him, taking him -- this time -- to a rehab center. A third arrest soon followed, as did another stint in rehab. His stay in rehab didn't last long, as he walked out, thereby violating the conditions of his bail. More arrests and complications followed -- in fact, the actor had to be released from rehab to make James Toback's Two Girls and a Guy -- but he still landed a few screen appearances and won praise for his work in Mike Figgis' One Night Stand (1997) and Altman's otherwise-disappointing Gingerbread Man (1998). In addition, he starred in one of his father's films, the offbeat Hugo Pool (1997). In 1999, he had three films out in theaters: Friends and Lovers, Bowfinger, and In Dreams. He delivered a particularly chilling performance in the latter, as longhaired psychopathic child murderer Vivian Thompson, that arguably ranked with his finest work. But Downey's problems caught up with him again that same year, when he was re-arrested and sentenced to 12 months in a state penitentiary. These complications led to the actor's removal from the cast of the summer 2001 Julia Roberts/Billy Crystal comedy America's Sweethearts and his removal from a stage production of longtime friend Mel Gibson's Hamlet, although a memorably manic performance in Curtis Hanson's Wonder Boys made it to the screen in 2000. Downey's decision -- after release -- to pursue television work, with a recurring role on Ally McBeal, marked a brief comeback (he won a 2001 Best TV Series Supporting Actor Golden Globe for the performance). Nevertheless, series creator David E. Kelley and the show's other producers sacked Downey permanently when two additional arrests followed. During this period, Downey also allegedly dated series star Calista Flockhart.In 2002, a Riverside, CA, judge dismissed all counts against Downey. In time, the former addict counseled other celebrity addicts and became something of a spokesperson for rehabilitation. He starred as a hallucination-prone novelist in The Singing Detective in 2003, and while the film didn't achieve mainstream success, critics praised Downey for his interpretation of the role, alongside Oscar winners Adrien Brody and Mel Gibson. The same could be said for Gothika (2003), the psychological thriller that placed him opposite Hollywood heavyweight Halle Berry. In 2004, Downey appeared in Steven Soderbergh's portion of the film Eros.Downey achieved success throughout 2005 with appearances in George Clooney's critically lauded Good Night, and Good Luck -- as one of Ed Murrow's underlings -- and he paired up with Val Kilmer in Shane Black's directorial debut Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. He continued balancing more mainstream fare, such as Disney's Shaggy Dog remake, with challenging films such as Richard Linklater's rotoscoped adaptation A Scanner Darkly. That same year, Downey wrapped production on Hanson's Lucky You, the story of a card shark (Eric Bana) who faces off against his father (Robert Duvall) at the legendary World Series of Poker, while simultaneously attempting to woo a beautiful singer (Drew Barrymore).Downey continued to show his versatility by joining the casts of Zodiac, David Fincher's highly-touted film about the Zodiac Killer, and the Diane Arbus biopic Fur, with Nicole Kidman. A supporting role in Jon Poll's 2007 directorial debut Charlie Bartlett followed. The biggest was yet to come, however, as 2007 found Downey taking on the roles that would make him an even bigger star than he'd been in his youth, as he took on the leading role of sarcastic billionaire and part-time super hero Tony Stark in the big screen adaptation of the comic book Iron Man, as well as self-important actor Kirk Lazarus in the comedy Tropic Thunder. Both films turned out to be not just blockbuster successes at the box office, but breakaway hits with critics as well, and in addition to major praise, the actor also walked away from 2008 with an Oscar nomination for his performance in Tropic Thunder.After Iron Man premiered, Marvel studios decided to move forward with a film empire, and Downey's Tony Stark became the anchor of the series, starring in his own Iron Man trilogy and appearing in many other films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe like the Avengers (2012) and its sequel Avengers: Age of Ultron (2014). Downey still found time to appear in side projects, like The Judge (2014), which he also produced.

Trivia: In addition to being the man who crafted both the "Marvel Universe" as well as some of the most popular comic book superheroes of modern times, longtime artist and writer Stan Lee played a pivotal role in bringing genuine human emotion into comic book characters, a trait that, up until the creation of such characters as the enduring Spider-Man, was sorely lacking in comics. Born in New York in 1922, it was at the age of 17 that Lee began work as an assistant editor for Timely Comics. Promoted to editor soon thereafter, Lee remained with the company as it changed its name to Atlas and fought slumping sales in the following years. At first simply carrying on with the stories of the characters that had already been created, the company got a fresh burst of creativity when, in 1961, it changed its name from Atlas to Marvel Comics. Soon carrying stories of emotionally complex and multi-dimensional characters such as Spider-Man, The Hulk, and Daredevil, Lee's intelligent story lines -- coupled with artist Jack Kirby's impressive images -- helped Marvel's popularity surge during the '60s. Advancing to the position of publisher and editorial director in 1972, it was during this decade that such popular television series as The Incredible Hulk and The Amazing Spider-Man truly came to life on the small screen. Though many of the characters had appeared in cartoon form on television in the previous decade, their transformation from animated characters to living, breathing humans truly brought comics into a new light and exposed them to audiences who otherwise might have scoffed at such fiction. Of course, this was only the beginning, and throughout subsequent years, Lee's characters made the leap to feature films in such blockbusters as Bryan Singer's X-Men (2000) and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man (2002). In addition to his role as a popular writer in comics, Lee also played a pivotal role in reducing censorship in the medium. Addressing the issue of drug addition in an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man at the request of public health officials, Lee defied the strict rules set by the Comics Code Authority (which banned any portrayal of drug use whether it be in a positive or negative light) and ultimately put the downfall of the CCA into motion. In the decades since, Lee's creations have not only graced the pages of comic books, but have sprung to life as never before with numerous film and television adaptations most successfully in the box-office smash The Avengers.

Trivia: Is the youngest of five children. Began his career as a stand-up comic at Toronto's Second City Cafe Mainstage. Was nominated for a Gemini Award for Best Ensemble Performance in a Comedy Program or Series in 2008 for Billable Hours.

Trivia: A screen actor who specialized in edgy and provocative material, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos first hit his stride during the mid-2000s, with two roles that challenged on all levels and suggested a level of pronounced courage. These included the 2004 Mouth to Mouth, as a hyperkinetic member of a European youth cult, and the 2007 Tracey Fragments, as a kind-hearted gay prostitute who helps a distraught and confused young woman. That same year, McCabe-Lokos also signed for a bit part in the offbeat seriocomedy Lars and the Real Girl.

Trivia: A native of Brooklyn, NY, actor Michael Kenneth Williams fell into a typecast with repeated portrayals of hoods, toughs, and career criminals from project to project. Williams entered acting courtesy of professional dancing, which he began at the age of 22; in that arena, his unique and individualistic moves caught the attention of producers and landed him in a string of music videos. Williams subsequently decided to pursue classical training as an actor, which he received via participation in the National Black Theater Company and New York's La' MaMA Theatre Company, though his breakthrough arrived at the hands of the late gangster rapper Tupac Shakur, who discovered Williams and cast him as his own little brother in the Julien Temple-directed urban crime drama Bullet (1995). Work for Martin Scorsese followed, with a minor role in the grueling psychodrama Bringing Out the Dead (1999), though Williams scored much broader acclaim and exposure via participation in HBO's popular crime drama series The Wire, where he played stick-up man Omar Little for multiple seasons. Williams then moved back into features with a supporting turn as Devin in actor-turned-director Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone (2007), then starred opposite Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron in director John Hillcoat's post-apocalyptic thriller The Road (2008).