Trivia: As semi-reformed bad girl Jennifer Lindley on Dawson's Creek, actress Michelle Williams garnered a certain type of notoriety unavailable to her more morality-inclined co-stars. In spite of this notoriety--or perhaps because of it--the role provided Williams with a wealth of opportunities, making her one of the foremost teen stars of the late 1990s. Born September 9, 1980 in small-town Kalispell, Montana and raised there until she was ten, Williams started acting after her family moved to San Diego. Beginning with roles in community theatre productions, she was soon shuttling back and forth to Los Angeles for auditions. Williams made her film debut in 1994 with Lassie, and then had a small but memorable part as the young version of the nubile and bloodthirsty alien in Species (1995). After the dismal and virtually unseen Timemaster (1995), Williams moved on to more auspicious fare with Jocelyn Moorhouse's A Thousand Acres (1997). Williams was cast as Michelle Pfeiffer's daughter, and the film's small-town setting must have given her some context for her next role, that of Jenn in Dawson's Creek. The show, which premiered in January of 1998, gave Williams her break-out role, and in short time she was besieged with movie offers and a stream of interviews.Williams' first film to exploit her newfound Dawson's fame was Halloween: H2O (1998), in which she starred opposite Jamie Lee Curtis. The film opened to poor reviews but a strong box office performance, and paved the way for her to star in future films, including 1999's thoroughly weird political satire Dick. The film, which looks at the Watergate scandal from the point of view of two teenage girls (played by Williams and Kirsten Dunst), provided Williams with a chance to expand her range beyond the constraints of her Dawson's Creek character. As the new millennium began, Williams found herself more and more comfortable exploring independent film, participating in smaller but often extremely influential projects like Perfume (2001), The Station Agent (2003) and Prozac Nation (2003). In 2005, Williams signed on to appear in the groundbreaking Ang Lee film Brokeback Mountain. The critical acclaim surrounding the movie was overwhelming, bringing Williams a new level of notoriety. Her popularity was also bolstered when the public learned that she and costar Heath Ledger had become involved during filming. The two became engaged and had a daughter together, Matilda, in 2005, and though they would later separate in 2007, they remained close for the well being of their daughter. Tragically, Ledger was found dead of an accidental overdose the following year. The heartbreaking loss for both Williams and her daughter forced the actress to deal with additional public scrutiny at a time when she was most vulnerable, but she coped with the grief as best she could, by investing more energy in her work. In 2008 alone she would appear in numerous films, including the drama Incendiary with Ewan McGregor and the highly anticipated Charlie Kaufman directorial debut Synecdoche, New York.Williams persisted in working with very good directors, as well as indie helmers who could offer her challenging work. She earned strong reviews for her starring role in Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy, and they worked together again on the western Meek's Cutoff. In addition, she worked with Martin Scorsese in his adaptation of Shutter Island.She also continued to earn awards for a steady string of impressive work including Blue Valentine, where her work as the female half of a failing marriage scored her Oscar, Golden Globe, and Independent Spirit nominations for Best Actress. Then in 2011 she took on the challenge of playing Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn, and was rewarded with rave reviews as well as Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild nominations for Best Actress.

Trivia: Paul Dano first caught major attention in 2006, when he played the grumpy, nihilistic teenager Dwayne in the sleeper hit Little Miss Sunshine. Dano had actually been paying his dues in the industry for five years when the indie comedy put him on the map, first starring in the tense 2001 drama L.I.E. at the age of 17, when he performed under the name Paul Franklin Dano. Even before that, young Dano appeared in several Broadway productions including A Christmas Carol and Ragtime. He went on to appear in the crime thriller Taking Lives as well as the critically acclaimed The Ballad of Jack & Rose. Then, in 2006, Dano took the infamous role in Little Miss Sunshine of a surly teenage brother who's taken a vow of silence. He immediately followed it with the subversive Fast Food Nation before signing on to re-team with his Ballad of Jack & Rose co-star Daniel Day-Lewis in the Paul Thomas Anderson historical drama There Will Be Blood. Dano also lent his voice to the big-screen computer-animated adaptation of the classic children's book Where the Wild Things Are, voicing the main character of Alexander. He continued to jungle indie fare like Gigantic, Meek's Cutoff, and Being Flynn with supporting turns in more high-profile projects including Knight and Day as well as Cowboys & Indians.

Trivia: Canadian-born actor Seth Rogen tapped into his skills as a comedian when he was only 13, signing up for comedy classes and honing his deadpan style. He tooled around as an amateur for a few years but eventually took his act down south, hoping to find success as an actor and standup comedian in the U.S. He was soon discovered by Judd Apatow and was cast in his short-lived series Freaks and Geeks. After its cancellation, Apatow cast Rogen in his next series, Undeclared -- for which Rogen significantly contributed as a writer. Undeclared met the same fate as Freaks and Geeks and was canceled mid-season, but both series became surprisingly hot cult hits upon their DVD releases. Rogen went on to write for Da Ali G Show and take minor roles in Donnie Darko and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy before being tapped by Apatow once again for a new project, this time on the big screen. The film was 2005's The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and Rogen's role as Steve Carell's well-meaning friend Cal finally brought him the large-scale success that made his comic skills a valuable commodity. Rogen also acted as co-producer on the film, which was touted as the funniest movie in years by critics and audiences alike, eventually grossing well over a hundred million dollars. There was obviously good chemistry on the set of The 40 Year Old Virgin, so Rogen signed on to appear in Apatow's 2007 comedy Knocked Up. Appearing alongside his old cast mates Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann, Rogen starred as a man who is forced to deal with serious unforeseen consequences when his one-night stand becomes pregnant. After the filmmakers' initial plans to cast Anne Hathaway in the opposite role fell through, Grey's Anatomy star Katherine Heigl signed on to star as the female lead. The smash success of Superbad made him one of the biggest comedy stars of his generation and led to Pineapple Express, a pot comedy opposite James Franco. He was Zack in Zack and MIri Make a Porno, and took a screenwriting credit on Drillbit Taylor in 2008. He lent his distinctive gravelly voice to a number of animated films including Kung Fu Panda and Monsters vs. Aliens. In 2009 he stretched himself, reteaming with Apatow for Funny People, and taking the lead in the black comedy Observe and Report. In 2011 he was The Green Hornet, but he also appeared as the best friend to a young cancer victim in the comedy 50/50. He also played the husband of Michelle Williams in Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz.

Trivia: Worked as a baby model.Started acting at age two.Director Quentin Tarantino sought her for the role of Trudi Fraser in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) after seeing her on American Housewife.Was asked by director Quentin Tarantino to watch the western series Lancer to prepare for her role in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) as she had never seen a western before.Co-star Leonardo DiCaprio invited her, and her parents, to his house to rehearse lines for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).Before meeting actor Brad Pitt, she thought he was a musician.Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) costar Leonardo DiCaprio has described her as a young Meryl Streep.

Trivia: Born March 15th, 1935, Bronx-native Judd Hirsch attended CCNY, where he majored in engineering and physics. A blossoming fascination in the theatre convinced Hirsch that his future lay in acting. He studied at the AADA and worked with a Colorado stock company before his 1966 Broadway debut in Barefoot in the Park. He spent many years at New York's Circle Repertory, where he appeared in the first-ever production of Lanford Wilson's The Hot L Baltimore. After an auspicious TV-movie bow in the well-received The Law (1974), Hirsch landed his first weekly-series assignment, playing the title character in the cop drama Delvecchio (1976-77). From 1978 to 1982, he was seen as Alex Reiger in the popular ensemble comedy Taxi, earning two Emmies in the process. While occupied with Taxi, Hirsch found time to act off-Broadway, winning an Obie award for the 1979 production Talley's Folly. In the following decade, he was honored with two Tony Awards for the Broadway efforts I'm Not Rappoport and Conversations with My Father. His post-Taxi TV series roles include Press Wyman in Detective in the House (1985) and his Golden Globe-winning turn as John Lacey in Dear John (1988-92). Judd Hirsch could also be seen playing Jeff Goldblum's father in the movie blockbuster Independence Day (1996). In 2001, Hirsch co-starred with Paul Bettany and Christopher Plummer in the multi-Award winning biopic A Beautiful Mind. The actor once again found success on the television screen in CBS' drama Numb3rs, in which he took on the role of Alan Eppes, father of FBI agent Don Eppes (Rob Morrow) and Professor Charlie Eppes (David Krumholtz). After appearing on all four seaons of Numb3rs, Hirsch took a small role in director Brett Ratner's crime comedy Tower Heist (2011).

Trivia: The daughter of actress/director Elaine May, Jeannie Berlin made a name for herself cinematically in Ms. May's The Heartbreak Kid (1974). For her portrayal of a whiny, dumped-on new bride, Jeannie was nominated for an Academy Award. Though Heartbreak Kid was touted as her film debut, Jeannie had been acting professionally since 1970, playing small roles in Getting Straight and in the made-for-TV The Baby Maker. Briefly retiring from filmmaking after Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York (1975), Jeannie Berlin turned to writing and directing; in 1990, she was back before the cameras in In the Spirit, which was directed by her mother and which she also co-wrote.

Trivia: Started her professional acting career in 1974.At the start of her career, learned to type to work in offices while also auditioning in New York.In 2008, was awarded the School of Theatre Distinguished Alumni Award by the Boston University College of Fine Arts.Has played a teacher in multiple projects, including Lean on Me (1989), If Looks Could Kill (1991), Curb Your Enthusiasm and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.In 2016, was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female for her work in the film H. (2014).

Trivia: The youngest of eight siblings, most of whom work in the creative arts. Was a member of his family's band, the Wee Urchins, and performed at fairs and events. According to his mother, grew up not watching television. Asked his parents if he could try acting after his older sister got into acting. Did a lot of improv during his audition for Lights Out (2016). As of 2016, he has never taken acting classes or used acting coaches.

Trivia: Tall, dark, and scarecrow-thin, James Urbaniak is probably best known to art house audiences for his work in Hal Hartley's Henry Fool (1997) and The Book of Life (1998). Urbaniak, who met Hartley in the mid-1990s, made his film debut courtesy of the director, who cast the actor in his short Comedy Central film Opera No. 1 (1994), which also featured Adrienne Shelly and future Henry Fool co-star Parker Posey.A product of New Jersey, where he was born in 1963, Urbaniak graduated from high school in 1981. Following a brief stint at community college, he spent the next several years "bumming around" (in his own words) New Jersey, working odd jobs, and doing community theatre. A 1987 introduction to theatre director Karin Coonrod led to the creation of the Arden Party theatre company, which had its debut on the Jersey shore that same year. The company moved to New York the following year and eventually became something of a downtown theatre institution with productions of such works as The Importance of Being Earnest and Romeo and Juliet. In addition to his work as the co-founder of the Arden Party, Urbaniak also performed with a number of other off-off-Broadway theatre companies, and in 1996, he won a Village Voice Obie award for his performance in avant-garde director and playwright Richard Forman's The Universe.After becoming acquainted with director Hartley, who cast him in his aforementioned 1994 film debut, Urbaniak starred in Henry Fool as Simon Grim, an unassuming and oft-abused garbage man who turns out to be a Nobel Prize-winning literary genius. The film, and Urbaniak's performance, earned a number of positive reviews and a strong art house showing, and the following year the actor could be seen in Hartley's Book of Life, a comedy about Christ's Second Coming that premiered at the Cannes Festival. In addition to his work for Hartley, Urbaniak began appearing in the films of other directors, most notably Hilary Brougher's The Sticky Fingers of Time (1997), which cast him as a 1950s science editor who travels across time; and Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown (1999), which featured the actor in a small role as a musician in Sean Penn's band.

Trivia: Something many fans of Greg Grunberg may have noticed is that the actor has appeared in a noticeably large number of projects by producer J.J. Abrams. This is because Grunberg and Abrams, in fact, grew up together and remained friends. His first big break came when his friend set to work on a one-hour dramedy called Felicity. Grunberg was cast in the role of Sean Blumberg -- a role he would continue to play for all of the show's four-year run. His next notable part came when he assumed the recurring role of Agent EricWeiss on the spy show Alias. He then popped up in the Abrams pilot for the series Lost, as the pilot of the crashed airplane, before joining the cast of the wildly popular sci-fi series Heroes as police officer Matt Parkman, whose superhuman power is that he is able to hear other people's thoughts.

Trivia: From the beginning of his career, David Lynch quickly established himself as the Renaissance man of modern American filmmaking, an acclaimed and widely recognized writer-director as well as television producer, photographer, cartoonist, composer, and graphic artist. Walking the tightrope between the mainstream and the avant-garde with remarkable balance and skill, Lynch brought to the screen a singularly dark and disturbing view of reality, a nightmare world punctuated by defining moments of extreme violence, bizarre comedy, and strange beauty. More than any other arthouse filmmaker of his era, he enjoyed considerable mass acceptance and helped to redefine commercial tastes, honing a surrealistic aesthetic so visionary and deeply personal that the phrase "Lynchian" was coined simply to describe it. Born January 20, 1946, in Missoula, Montana, David Keith Lynch grew up the archetypal all-American boy. The son of a U.S. Department of Agriculture research scientist, he was raised throughout the Pacific Northwest, eventually becoming an Eagle Scout and even serving as an usher at John F. Kennedy's presidential inauguration. Originally intending to become a graphic artist, Lynch enrolled in the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1963, falling under the sway of expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka and briefly studying in Europe. By the early weeks of 1966, he had relocated to Philadelphia, where he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and began his first experimentation with film.The violence and decay which greeted Lynch in Philadelphia proved to have a profound and long-lasting effect, as his work became increasingly obsessed with exploring the dark corners of the human experience. From his first experimental student film (1967's "moving painting" Six Men Getting Sick, onward, his vision grew more and more fascinated with the seedy underbelly of everyday life. He received an American Film Institute Grant and made The Alphabet, a partially animated 16 mm color film, soon after, but then turned away from the cinema to renew his focus on fine art. His next short film, The Grandmother, did not appear until 1970.In 1972, Lynch began work on his first feature effort, Eraserhead. A surreal nightmare borne of the director's own fears and anxieties of fatherhood, the film took over five years to complete, finally premiering in March 1977. An instant cult classic, it was also a tremendous critical success, launching Lynch to the forefront of avant-garde filmmaking. Eraserhead not only established Lynch's singular world view but also cemented the team of actors and technicians who would continue to define the texture of his work for years to come, including cinematographer Frederick Elmes, sound designer Alan Splet, and actor Jack Nance.The success of Eraserhead brought Lynch to the attention of Mel Brooks, who was seeking projects to produce besides his own comedies. He recruited Lynch to helm 1980's The Elephant Man, the tale of John Merrick. Complete with a cast including such celebrated talent as John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins, Anne Bancroft, and John Gielgud, the film marked Lynch's acceptance into the Hollywood mainstream, even netting an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture as well as a nod for Best Director. For a time, Lynch opted to advance his script Ronnie Rocket at Francis Coppola's Zoetrope Studios, but when this failed to materialize, he went to work for Dino De Laurentiis, adapting the Frank Herbert science fiction novel Dune. The first of Lynch's films to star actor Kyle MacLachlan, the 1984 big-budget effort was a commercial and critical disaster -- Lynch himself even disowned the project after it was re-edited for release without his consent.Lynch had agreed to make Dune for de Laurentiis in order to film 1986's Blue Velvet, a long-simmering tale exploring the dark underbelly of small-town life. Insisting upon complete artistic control, he made the picture for under seven million dollars, casting actors ranging from MacLachlan to model Isabella Rossellini to Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell, former stars whose popularity had suffered in recent years. The completed film was an unqualified masterpiece, a hypnotically violent creep show which earned Lynch his second Oscar nomination as well as boosting the careers of all involved. In 1990, Lynch mounted his most commercially successful work, the ABC television series Twin Peaks. A surrealist soap opera created in conjunction with former Hill Street Blues producer Mark Frost, Twin Peaks became a cultural phenomenon, spurred by the mystery of "Who killed Laura Palmer?," the series' central plot thread. Suddenly, Lynch was a cultural figure of considerable renown, a filmmaker perhaps more famous than any of his actors. His fame was bolstered when his fifth feature, 1990s hallucinatory road movie Wild at Heart, grabbed the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. As quickly as the media had built Lynch up, however, they tore him down. Wild at Heart received mixed reviews from American critics, while Twin Peaks was scuttled off to a poorly suited Saturday-night slot, leading to its demise in early 1991. Two other Lynch-created series, the documentary anthology American Chronicles and the situation comedy On the Air, also met with premature deaths. In 1992, he released Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a feature-film prequel to the television series. An ambitious, fractured work featuring Sheryl Lee as the ill-fated Laura Palmer, the picture was savaged by critics, leaving a wounded Lynch to plot his next move. He spent the next few years away from the limelight. Finally, in 1997, Lynch resurfaced with the enigmatic Lost Highway, another experimental, dream-like effort that polarized viewers' responses. He enjoyed more renown in 1999 when The Straight Story was released at the Cannes Film Festival. The film, based on a true story, marked a departure from Lynch's previous subject matter; the simple tale of a man (Richard Farnsworth) who gets on his tractor and drives 350 miles to see his brother, it offered few of the dark undertones and twisted subtext that had come to be known as the director's trademarks. That notion would continue with 2001's Hollywood-set thriller-melodrama, Mulholland Drive. Like Twin Peaks, the project was originally developed with ABC as a series pilot; unlike Lynch's first foray into television, however, Mulholland was scrapped before it could make a prime-time premiere. Although Lynch tinkered with the two-hour pilot several times in an attempt to satisfy the network brass, they remained unsatisfied. The frustrated director then turned to European financing in order to sculpt a feature film out of his material. Premiering at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, Mulholland garnered much acclaim, snagging Lynch the fest's Best Director award, and cementing his career resurgence.Lynch spent the next few years immersed in the world of digital video, first on his exclusive website -- members of which were allowed access to never-before-seen short films -- and then on the highly experimental feature Inland Empire. Crafted over a series of years using a light, mobile video camera and very few crew members, the film was Lynch's declaration of true artistic independence; the director himself heralded it as a breakthrough. The meandering, non-narrative, 3-hour opus, however, left critics and fans sharply divided as they tried to make sense of such disparate elements as a tortured, ghostly ingenue (played by Laura Dern), a Polish film crew, and Justin Theroux wearing a rabbit's-head mask. Dissatisfied with the response from possible buyers at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, Lynch chose to distribute the film himself, even mounting his own Oscar campaign -- stationing himself on various L.A. streetcorners, no less -- for Dern. In the years that followed, the director continued to immerse himself in experimental video, with short subjects including Boat, More Things That Happened and Lady Blue Shanghai - each of which alternately beguiled and delighted longtime Lynch adherents.