Trivia: As the son of comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara Ben Stiller's decision to establish himself as a comic writer and actor surprised almost no one.Born in New York City on November 30, 1965, Stiller began to shoot his own comic films from the age of ten. After high-school graduation, Stiller attended UCLA and landed bit parts in several features, notably the Steven Spielberg-directed, Tom Stoppard and Menno Meyjes-scripted, late 1987 opus Empire of the Sun.Meanwhile, Stiller continued to turn out comedy shorts, including the 30-minute Elvis Stories (1989), a spoof of obsessive Elvis fans featuring an already-established John Cusack. One of Stiller's shorts, a Tom Cruise parody called The Hustler of Money, won him a spot as a writer and player on Saturday Night Live in 1989. His stint on the show was short-lived, but led to his own eponymous series, The Ben Stiller Show, first on MTV (1990) and later on Fox (1992-1993). The program failed to draw a substantial audience, and folded within a couple of months on each network, but Stiller netted an Emmy for comedy writing in 1993.The following year, Stiller debuted as a feature film director with the twentysomething angst romcom Reality Bites (1994), in which he also starred alongside Winona Ryder and a memorably grungy Ethan Hawke. The film was a relative critical and commercial success and scored with Gen-Xers; unfortunately, Stiller's next directorial effort, 1996's The Cable Guy failed to register with critics and audiences. After a small part as nursing-home orderly Hal in the Adam Sandler comedy Happy Gilmore (1996), Stiller rebounded with a starring role in David O. Russell's Flirting With Disaster (1996). The relatively positive reception afforded to that comedy helped to balance out the relative failure of Stiller's other film that year, If Lucy Fell. It was not until two years later, however, that Stiller truly stepped into the limelight. Thanks to starring roles in three wildly, wickedly different films, he emerged as an actor of versatility, equally adept at playing sensitive nice guys and malevolent hellraisers. In the smash gross-out comedy There's Something About Mary (1998), Stiller appeared as the former type, making comic history for outrageous sight gags that involved misplaced bodily fluids and mangled genitalia. That same summer, Stiller did time as a gleefully adulterous theatrical instructor in Neil LaBute's jet-black evisceration of contemporary sexual mores, Your Friends and Neighbors. Finally, Stiller starred in the intensely graphic and disturbing addiction drama Permanent Midnight, earning critical acclaim for his portrayal of writer-cum-heroin addict Jerry Stahl -- a personal friend of the Stiller family from Stahl's days scripting the TV series ALF. Now fully capable of holding his own in Hollywood, with the license to prove it, Stiller starred alongside William H. Macy, Paul Reubens, Hank Azaria, and pal Janeane Garofalo in the fantasy comedy Mystery Men (1999) as the leader of a group of unconventional superheroes. Stiller also landed a supporting role in The Suburbans, a comedy about the former members of a defunct new wave band. The following year, Stiller starred as a rabbi smitten with the same woman as his best friend, a Catholic priest (Edward Norton), in the well-received romantic comedy Keeping the Faith (2000), which Norton also co-produced and directed. Stiller found his widest audience up to that point, however, with the Jay Roach-directed madcap comedy Meet the Parents. As the tale of a nutty father-in-law to be (Robert De Niro) who wreaks unchecked havoc on his daughter's intended (Stiller) via covert CIA operations and incessant interrogation, this disastrously humorous tale of electrical interference gone wild scored with ticket-buyers and qualified as the top box-office draw during the holiday season of 2000.In the autumn of 2001, Stiller brought one of his most popular MTV Video Music Awards incarnations to the big screen in the outrageously silly male-model comedy Zoolander, in which he successfully teamed with (real-life friend) Owen Wilson to carry stupidity to new heights.In 2001 Stiller once again teamed with Wes Anderson collaborator Wilson for the widely praised comedy drama The Royal Tenenbaums. Cast as the estranged son of eccentric parents who returns home, Stiller infused his unmistakable comic touch with an affecting sense of drama that found him holding his ground opposite such dramatic heavies as Gene Hackman and Anjelica Huston. Though his work in 2002 offered little more than a few cameo performances and some vocal contributions to various animated children's shows, the busy comedic actor returned to the big screen for the 2003 comedy Duplex, directed by Danny DeVito. Though the film pairs Stiller and Hollywood bombshell Drew Barrymore as a couple willing to go to horrific extremes to land the much-desired eponymous living space, reviews were unkind and the comedy died a quick death at the box office. Stiller's next film -- the romantic comedy Along Came Polly -- fared considerably better on a fiscal level, but suffered from an implausible premise.Spring 2004 promised a rebound when the electrifying duo of Stiller and Owen Wilson returned to the big screen with director Todd Phillips' celluloid recycling job Starsky & Hutch. Though Stiller and Wilson seemed the ideal pair for such a conceptually rich re-imagining of 1970s television, and the film boasted wonderful villainous turns by rapper Snoop Dogg and Vince Vaughn, reviews were once again lackluster and the film struggled to find an audience. Yet Starsky & Hutch did actually reap a profit, which (in a business sense) placed it miles ahead of Stiller's next film. Released a mere two months after Starsky & Hutch, the Barry Levinson comedy Envy sports a wacky premise; it explores the comic rivalry that erupts between two longtime friends and neighbors when one invents a product that makes dog excrement disappear. It also boasts a marvelous cast, replete with Stiller, the maniacal Jack Black, and the brilliant Christopher Walken. But for whatever reason (speculated by some as the film's inability to exploit the invention at the story's center) the film's sense of humor failed to catch fire and Envy died a quick box-office death. Stiller fared better with the ribald, anarchic summer 2004 comedy Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, starring himself, Vince Vaughn, and Rip Torn. For the following two years, Stiller once again contented himself largely with bit parts (2004's Anchorman: the Legend of Ron Burgundy, 2006's Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny) until the Christmas 2006 release A Night at the Museum. In this effects-heavy fantasy, adapted from the popular children's book by Milan Trenc, Stiller plays Larry Daley, the new night watchman at New York City's Museum of Natural History, who discovers that the exhibits all spring to life after hours, from a giant skeletal Tyrannosaurus Rex to a waxen Teddy Roosevelt -- and seem content to hold Larry hostage. The effort split critical opinion, but shot up to become one of the top three box-office draws during the holiday season of 2006.Meanwhile, Stiller signed on to team with the Farrelly brothers for The Heartbreak Kid (2007), a remake of the 1972 Elaine May comedy of the same title; he also produced Blades of Glory, a comedy with Will Ferrell and Jon Heder as rival figure-skating champions vying with one another for Olympic gold. He wrote, directed and starred in the hit comedy Tropic Thunder (2008) as a moronic Hollywood actor toplining a war film, voiced Alex in the same year's animated picture Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, and in 2009, reprised his Larry Daley role for Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. Stiller's emphasis on sequels then continued with 2010's Little Fockers and 2012's Madagascar 3. In 2013, Stiller picked up the role originally made famous by Danny Kaye, as the lead in the remake The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which Stiller also directed and produced. The following year, he appeared in the next film in the Night at the Museum series, Secret of the Tomb.

Trivia: Whether he's acting or co-writing brilliantly quirky character studies with director/writing partner Wes Anderson, Owen C. Wilson's work exudes an insouciant yet earnest charm and eccentric comic sensibility, making him one of the most promising new talents to emerge in the 1990s.Born in Dallas on November 18th, 1968, Wilson raised enough hell in high school to get expelled from one institution in tenth grade, but he managed to attend college at the University of Texas in Austin and graduate in 1991. Along with his degree, Wilson's Austin years resulted in a budding partnership with a like-minded creative classmate, aspiring filmmaker Wes Anderson. Their first film together, a short about a bookstore heist called Bottle Rocket, played at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival, attracting the attention of producer Polly Platt and writer/director James L. Brooks. With Brooks' support, Wilson and Anderson expanded the short into a feature, indie cult favorite Bottle Rocket (1996). Though it made little impression at the box office, Anderson and Wilson's distinctly offbeat, wry, and optimistic tale about aspiring criminal Dignan and his best friend Anthony (played by Wilson's brother Luke Wilson) earned ardent fans among cinéastes. Wilson's inspired performance as Dignan, not to mention his blond hair, large grin, and affable drawl, became his Hollywood calling card. That same year, Wilson also began a fertile association with actor/director Ben Stiller, appearing in one memorable scene as a smooth, ill-fated date in Stiller's black comedy The Cable Guy (1996).Alternating between supporting roles in Hollywood spectacles, collaborations with Anderson and Stiller, and smaller independent projects, Wilson worked steadily for the rest of the 1990s. Though he always seemed to fill the generic slot of Guy Marked for Death, Wilson still managed to bring a reliably laid-back, humorous spark to the bombastic proceedings in Anaconda (1997), Armageddon (1998), and The Haunting (1999). On a more artistically successful front, Wilson's next script with Anderson resulted in the lauded coming-of-age film Rushmore (1998). With its singular cast of characters, distinctive combination of deadpan humor and true emotion, and superb performances by Jason Schwartzman as teen prodigy Max Fischer and Bill Murray as depressed millionaire Blume, Rushmore earned prizes from the critics (if not the Academy) and proved that Bottle Rocket was no fluke. As far as acting, Wilson's ability to suggest complexity beneath a breezy surface earned positive notice for his unsettling performance as a laconic, self-styled Good Samaritan serial killer in indie thriller The Minus Man (1999).By 2000, Wilson began to take center stage in larger Hollywood projects as well. Though it was another Jackie Chan vehicle, Wilson's hilarious co-starring turn as a surfer dude-tinged outlaw in the chop socky Western Shanghai Noon (2000) nearly stole the movie. Wilson's brief appearance as a Jesus-loving, super rich romantic rival to Ben Stiller's put-upon Greg Focker was a comic highlight of the hit Meet the Parents (2000). Stiller's supermodel farce Zoolander (2001) further sealed Wilson's status as a superlative comic actor. As Zoolander's rival Hansel, Wilson's offbeat timing made him the ultimate bubble-headed mannequin; his catwalk competition with Stiller provided the biggest laughs in a hit-or-miss movie. Even as he flourished in broad Hollywood comedy, Wilson continued his partnership with Wes Anderson, co-writing with Anderson and co-starring (with his brother Luke and Stiller among others) in the unusual family story The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). Branching out into serious roles, Wilson then co-starred with The Royal Tenenbaums patriarch Gene Hackman in the military drama Behind Enemy Lines (2001). An increasingly prevalent figure in action films following the millennial turnover, Wilson followed Behind Enemy Lines with I Spy (2002) and the Shanghai Noon sequel Shanghai Knights (2003) before appearing opposite Morgan Freeman in the critical and commercial disappointment The Big Bounce and co-starring in the underwhelming big screen adaptation of Starsky & Hutch. He made his third appearance in a Jackie Chan vehicle in the 2004 Disney production Around the World in 80 Days; though poised to be a blockbuster, the mega-budgeted film was one of the biggest flops of the season.A rebound was in order, and if his supporting turn in the 2004 holiday-season blockbuster sequel Meet the Fockers wasn't enough, Wilson found his greatest leading-man success to date as foil to the bawdy Vince Vaughn in 2005's raunchy, runaway hit The Wedding Crashers. The Wilson-Vaughn pairing challenged the Wilson-Stiller hilarity quotient as a pair of divorce consultants who bide their free time crashing weddings to get laid. The $200-million smash was indeed a tough act to follow, and while 2006's You, Me and Dupree - a thematic reprise of his Wedding Crashers role in which he plays an irritating houseguest who refuses to vacate - was something of a letdown, Wilson more than made up for it that same year with a leading voice role in Pixar's Cars and a supporting turn in Stiller's special-effects comedy A Night at the Museum.For the next couple of years, Wilson continued to stick with what worked - collaborations with Anderson (The Darjeeling Limited (2007), Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)) and sequels in his hit franchises (Night at the Museum: Battle for the Smithsonian (2009), Little Fockers (2010) and Cars 2 (2011)). He also starred in Woody Allen's Mightnight in Paris (2011), earning a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy.Romantically linked, by turns, with a pre-Ashton Demi Moore, rocker Sheryl Crow, and actress Kate Hudson, Wilson, with his shaggy blond mane, blue eyes, and (as one magazine cited humorously in its front cover headline) "unusual nose," also found himself the unlikely forebear of a new wave of Hollywood sex symbols.

Trivia: Blonde supporting and occasional lead actress Christine Taylor started appearing on television and in feature films in her early teens. Fans of the The Brady Bunch Movie (1995) and its sequel will recognize her for playing Marsha. In The Craft (1996), Taylor was memorable for playing the snotty cheerleader who teased a young witch and ended up losing her hair in the shower. In The Wedding Singer (1998), she played Madonna-wannabe Holly. On television, Taylor briefly starred in her own series, Party Girl, on the Fox network. She had a recurring role on Ellen as a dim-bulb blonde in Ellen's book group and was on Seinfeld as Jerry's too perfect girlfriend. On Friends, she concealed her long, golden tresses under a rubber cap to play Bonnie, Phoebe's bald friend. Raised in Allentown, PA, Taylor started performing in local stage productions at age three. On television, Taylor's first major regular role was on the Nickelodeon network's first original series Hey Dude. She then played Marilyn in a Fox movie updating an old sitcom, Here Come the Munsters. On stage, she found success appearing at Los Angeles' Westwood Playhouse in the 1992 production of The Real Live Brady Bunch. Though The Brady Bunch Movie was her first starring role in a major feature, Taylor had already gained movie experience in the direct-to-video Night of the Demons 2 (1994), which she claims to have done to provide an outlet for the terror she experienced after someone threatened her with a gun and carjacked her in Los Angeles. Following roles in A Very Brady Sequel (1996), Taylor attempted to break the Marsha mold with roles in such romantic comedies as The Wedding Singer (1998) and Overnight Delivery (1998). Taylor would marry funnyman Ben Stiller in May of 2000, and later appear onscreen with her husband in the zany comedy Zoolander (2001). She again starred with her husband in the sports comedy Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story alongside Vince Vaughn in 2004, and had prominent roles in Kabluey and License to Wed. She had a brief appearance, opposite her husband yet again, in 2008's Tropic Thunder playing the female star of Simple Jack. She was away from screens for four years, but returned with a small part in the teen romance The First Time.

Trivia: Another member of the Saturday Night Live Screen Actors Guild, Will Ferrell made his major film debut as Steve Butabi, one of the spectacularly clueless brothers who serve as the protagonists of A Night at the Roxbury (1998). The character originated on SNL, where Ferrell had been a regular since 1995, entertaining audiences with his celebrity impressions and such characterizations as Craig the Spartan Cheerleader and junior high-school teacher Marty Culp.Born in Irvine, CA, on July 16, 1967, Ferrell attended the University of Southern California, graduating with a degree in sports information. Following graduation, he worked as a sportscaster on a weekly cable show, but he soon found his interests leaning toward acting and standup comedy. He enrolled in classes and workshops given at a local community college, and after only a year of training, he was invited to join the Groundlings, an infamous L.A. comedy improv group. Ferrell's involvement with the Groundlings led to his SNL discovery; from that point on, the previously unknown comic found himself enjoying growing recognition and a steady paycheck.Although A Night at the Roxbury turned out to be a complete and utter flop, it did little to prevent Ferrell from finding more screen work; the following year, he could be seen as journalist Bob Woodward in Dick and as the object of fellow SNL castmate Molly Shannon's unwanted affection in Superstar. A series of scene-stealing supporting roles followed for Ferrell in such films as Drowning Mona, Zoolander, and, most-notably, Old School. In the 2003 Todd Phillips film, Ferrell sunk his teeth into the role of Frank "The Tank", delivering several lines that would forever be quoted by frat guys the world over.But it was Ferrell's other 2003 film that truly announced his arrival as a Hollywood star. As the oversized titular character in director Jon Favreau's holiday comedy Elf, Ferrell delighted audiences and critics alike, making the modestly-budgeted film a surprise box-office smash.In the wake of Elf's success, Ferrell's 2004 plate was full, starring as fictional '70s TV newscaster Ron Burgundy in Anchorman (a film which had enough outtakes to merit an entire second feature upon being released to home video), taking a role in the Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda, and signing on for lead roles in two long-anticipated projects: the filmed adaptation of John Kennedy Toole's cult novel A Confederacy of Dunces and the big-screen version of the classic sitcom Bewitched. Though the curse that had plagued the big-screen adaptation of Confederacy seemed to persist when, by mid-2006, there still seemed to be no signs that the film would be going before the cameras anytime soon, Ferrell continued to crack-up audiences with a hilarious cameo in the popular Vince Vaughn/Owen Wilson comedy Weddng Crashers, as well as a memorable turn in The Producers - a big screen adaptation of the smash Broadway hit that was inspired by Mel Brooks' 1968 comedy classic of the same name. As the 2000's unfolded, it became clear that Ferrell's comic fame could not be matched. He would score box office gold with many movies to comes, such as Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Stranger Than Fiction, Blades of Glory, Step-Brothers, Everything Must Go, and The Campaign, in addition to popular runs on TV series like The Office and Eastbound & Down.

Trivia: One known for straddling careers as a model, singer and actress, performer Milla Jovovich sported an utterly unique square-jawed look and the starkest of features that betrayed her Eastern European origins. Born to a Russian actress and a Yugoslavian doctor in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev on December 17, 1975, Jovovich moved with her family to Sacramento, CA, when she was five. She began her professional modeling career at the age of 11, spending most of her teen years displaying her exotic, blue-eyed beauty on the covers of numerous magazines and in service of countless products.While pursuing a successful modeling career, Jovovich also began acting, appearing in Zalman King's softcore Two Moon Junction (1988) as Sherilyn Fenn's little sister and Return to the Blue Lagoon, the 1991 sequel to the endearingly awful Brooke Shields flesh-fest Blue Lagoon (1980). Following a role in Richard Linklater's high-school slacker opus Dazed and Confused (1993), Jovovich took a break from acting and also put her modeling career on hold. She turned instead to music, recording an album, The Divine Comedy, that received surprisingly good reviews. After touring for a few months, Jovovich returned to California and revived her acting career with the help of French director Luc Besson, who cast her in The Fifth Element in 1996. An incredibly stylish sci-fi chase film set in the 23rd century, it featured Jovovich as a tangerine-haired alien, speaking in gibberish and wearing little more than artfully placed ace bandages designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier. The film put her back on the Hollywood radar, something given further assistance by Jovovich's marriage to Besson (married in 1997, the two divorced in 1999). The following year Jovovich had a substantial role as a prostitute in Spike Lee's He Got Game, and, in 1999, she again stepped in front of the camera for Besson, this time to play the title role in The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. She received strong notices for her work, although the film itself earned less than a warm reception. The following year, Jovovich appeared in Wim Wenders' futuristic The Million Dollar Hotel as a mental patient in the titular establishment. In 2001, Jovovich once again stepped into the lead, this time battling the undead in the action-oriented film version of the popular survival horror video game Resident Evil (2002).As the years progressed, that assignment would continue to color and define Jovovich's choices, as she soon agreed to headline each of the follow-ups, Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) and Resident Evil: Extinction (2007). The films received critical excoriation for their mindless, effects-heavy setups and nearly incoherent premises, but no matter: the franchise caught on with the public in a big way and turned Jovovich into an A-list action star, paving the way for the lead role in the nearly indistinguishable outing Ultraviolet (2006). In the meantime,Jovovich occasionally tackled varied material. She delivered a particularly off-beat and quirky performance as a singer who drifts into a Yiddish music career in the comedy-drama Dummy (2004), and in the role of Drusilla in director Gore Vidal's remake of Caligula.She worked alongside Robert DiNiro and Edward Norton in 2009's psychological drama A Perfect Getaway, and returned to the Resident Evil series in 2010 with Resident Evil: Afterlife. Jovovich played Milday de Winter in 2011's The Three Musketeers, and headlined yet another Resident Evil in 2012, Resident Evil: Retribution. In 2014, she appeared in an updated version of Shakespeare's Cymbeline.

Trivia: To the public at large, Jerry Stiller is best known as the husband and comedy partner of actress/director Anne Meara, and as the father of comedian Ben Stiller. For those addicted to the NBC sitcom Seinfeld, Stiller will never be anyone else than Frank Costanza, the eternally kvetching father of born-loser George Costanza (Jason Alexander). While Stiller would be the first to welcome recognition on these terms, to acknowledge him for the above-mentioned reasons alone would be grossly unfair. A stage performer from the age of 10, Stiller majored in drama at the University of Syracuse, then took to the road in a touring company of Peter Pan. Honing his comic timing to perfection under the tutelage of revue director Billy Barnes, Stiller chose to concentrate his laughmaking skills in the Classics, specifically Shakespeare. He made his off-Broadway debut in a 1953 production of Coriolanus, and subsequently paid homage to the Bard of Avon as a member of such prestigious troupes as the Stratford (Connecticut) Shakespeare Festival and Joseph Papp's Shakespeare in the Park. Stiller made his Broadway bow in 1975 as ill-tempered gangster Carmine Vespucci in Terence McNally's The Ritz, a part he recreated in the 1976 film version. Among his many other film credits are Lovers and Other Strangers (1970), Hairspray (1988) and the made-for-television Seize the Day (1987). The actor's series-TV resumé includes the roles of Barney Dickerson in The Paul Lynde Show (1972), Gus Duzik in Joe and Sons (1975) and Sid Wilbur in Tattinger's (1988). He also co-starred with wife Anne Meara in the syndicated Take Five with Stiller and Meara (1977), and provided voiceovers for the animated Linus the Lionhearted (1964) and the multipart Ken Burns TV special Baseball (1994). Jerry Stiller has been honored with the Radio Advertising Bureau's Voice of Imagery Award for his persuasive radio and TV spots on behalf of the Public Broadcasting System.Notable later roles included an extended run on the hit TV series The King of Queens starting in 1998, as well as appearances in son Ben's 2001 male model comedy Zoolander, and the 2007 musical Hairspray. In 2000 Stiller received a Grammy nomination for Best Spoken Word Album for the audio version of his autobiographical book "Married to Laughter: A Love Story Featuring Anne Meara." Stiller and Meara received a joint star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2007, and three years later, Stiller and his wife launched the YahooWeb series Stiller & Meara, in which the pair discuss current events from their living room, which ran until Meara's death in 2015. Their son, Ben, produced the segments.

Trivia: Rocketing from obscure bit player to TV's resident über-sex god thanks to his role as FBI agent Fox Mulder on The X-Files, David Duchovny can claim to have had one of the 1990s' more remarkable career metamorphoses. Although his initial attempts to translate his TV stardom into celluloid success proved less than memorable, the tall, classically handsome actor has continued to enjoy a great deal of popularity, evidenced in particular by the countless estrogen-drenched internet shrines erected in his honor.Born in Manhattan on August 7, 1960, to a Jewish father and a Scottish mother, Duchovny did his undergraduate work at Princeton and then went on to pursue a Master's degree in English Literature at Yale. While working toward his degree, he began commuting to New York to study acting, and he was soon appearing in a few off-Broadway plays. His interest in acting ultimately eclipsed his dedication toward earning his degree, and Duchovny dropped out of Yale to pursue a career as a performer. He got his first break starring in a beer commercial, and in 1988, he made his film debut with a breathtakingly abbreviated appearance as a party guest in Mike Nichols's Working Girl. Work in a number of diverse and usually obscure films, including starring roles in Julia Has Two Lovers (1991), The Rapture (1991), and Kalifornia (1993), followed, but the actor was able to command a more steady paycheck from his TV work. Before The X-Files debuted in 1993, Duchovny was best-known to TV viewers as Dennis/Denise, Twin Peaks' resident transvestite detective. As The X-Files steadily grew from cult favorite to mainstream success, becoming recognized as one of the most groundbreaking shows of the decade, Duchovny also began to enjoy both industry respect and huge audience popularity. Dubbed as the latest in a long line of thinking women's sex symbols, he would also appear in films like Playing God and Return to Me.Duchovny would The X-Files during the show's seventh season, much to fans' dismay, returning only for the series finaly. Post X-files, Duchovny would continue to act on screen, most notably in films like Trust the Man and another X-Files movie, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, as well as on the debaucherous TV series Californication.

Trivia: The son of a Czech-American golf pro, Jon Voight was active in student theatricals in high school and at Catholic University. In 1960 he began studying privately with Neighborhood Playhouse mentor Sanford Meisner, and made his off-Broadway debut that same year in O Oysters, receiving a daunting review which opined that he could "neither walk nor talk." Fortunately, Voight persevered, and in 1961 took over the role of "singing Nazi" Rolf in the Broadway hit The Sound of Music (his Liesl was Laurie Peters, who became his first wife).Blessed with handsome, Nordic features, Voight kept busy as a supporting player on such TV series as Gunsmoke, Coronet Blue, and NYPD, and in 1966 spent a season with the California National Shakespeare Festival. The following year, he won a Theatre World Award for his stage performance in That Summer, That Fall. Thus, by the time he became an "overnight" star in the role of wide-eyed hustler Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy (1969), he had nearly a decade's worth of experience under his belt. The success of Midnight Cowboy, which earned Voight an Oscar nomination, prompted a fast-buck distributor to ship out a double feature of two never-released mid-'60s films: Fearless Frank, filmed in 1965, starred Voight as a reluctant superhero, while Madigan's Millions was a 1968 turkey featuring Voight's Cowboy co-star (and longtime friend) Dustin Hoffman.Entering the 1970s with dozens of producers clamoring for his services, Voight refused to accept roles that banked merely on his youth and good looks. Instead, he selected such challenging assignments as crack-brained Army officer Milo Minderbinder in Catch 22 (1970), a political activist known only as "A" in The Revolutionary (also 1970), reluctant rugged individualist Ed Gentry in Deliverance (1972), and real-life teacher/novelist Pat Conroy in Conrack (1974). In 1978, he won both the Oscar and the Cannes Film Festival award for his portrayal of paraplegic Vietnam veteran Luke Martin in Hal Ashby's Coming Home. The following year, he earned additional acclaim for his work in the remake of The Champ.Devoting increasing amounts of time to his various sociopolitical causes in the 1980s and 1990s, Voight found it more and more difficult to fit film roles into his busy schedule. A reunion project with Ashby, on the godawful gambling comedy Lookin' to Get Out (produced 1980, released 1982), failed dismally, with many reviewers complaining about Voight's terrible, overmodulated performance, and the paper-thin script, which the actor himself wrote. Voight weathered the storm, however, and enjoyed box-office success as star of the 1983 weeper Table for Five. He also picked up another Oscar nomination for Andrei Konchalovsky's existential thriller Runaway Train (1985), and acted in such socially-conscious TV movies as Chernobyl: The Final Warning (1991) and The Last of His Tribe (1992). He also produced Table for Five and scripted 1990's Eternity. Voight kept busy for the remainder of the decade, appearing in such films as Michael Mann's Heat (1995), Mission: Impossible (1996), and The General, a 1998 collaboration with Deliverance director John Boorman, for which Voight won acclaim in his role as an Irish police inspector. During the same period of time, a bearded Voight also essayed a wild one-episode cameo on Seinfeld - as himself - with a scene that required him to bite the hand of Cosmo Kramer from a parked vehicle. In 1999, Voight gained an introduction to a new generation of fans, thanks to his role as James Van Der Beek's megalomaniacal football coach in the hit Varsity Blues, later appearing in a handful of other films before teaming onscreen with daughter Angelina Jolie for Tomb Raider in 2001. After essaying President Roosevelt later that same year in Pearl Harbor, Voight went for laughs in Ben Stiller's male-model comedy Zoolander, though his most pronounced role of 2001 would come in his Oscar nominated performance as iconic newsman Howard Cosell in director Michael Mann's Mohammad Ali biopic, Ali.Taken collectively, all of Voight's aformentioned roles during the mid-late 1990s demonstrated a massive rebound, from the gifted lead of '70s American classics to a character actor adept at smaller and more idiosyncratic character roles in A-list Hollywood fare ( the very same transition, for instance, that Burt Reynolds was wrongly predicted to be making when he signed to do Breaking In back in 1989). To put it another way: though Voight rarely received first billing by this point, his volume of work per se soared high above that of his most active years during the '70s. The parts grew progressively more interesting as well; Voight was particularly memorable, for instance, in the Disney comedy-fantasy Holes, as Mr. Sir, the cruel, sadistic right-hand-man to camp counselor Sigourney Weaver, who forces packs of young boys to dig enormous desert pits beneath the blazing sun for a mysterious reason. Voight then signed for a series of parts under the aegis of longtime-fan Jerry Bruckheimer, including the first two National Treasure installments (as John Patrick Henry) and - on a higher-profiled note - the audience-rouser Glory Road (2005), about one of the first all-black basketball teams in the U.S.; in that picture, Voight plays Adolph Rupp, the infamous University of Kentucky coach (nicknamed 'Baron of the Bluegrass') with an all-white team vying against the competitors at the center of the story.In 2007, Voight tackled roles in two very different high-profile films: he played one of the key characters in Michael Bay's live-action extravaganza Transformers, and portrayed a Mormon bishop who perishes in a Brigham Young-instigated massacre, in the period drama September Dawn, directed by Christopher Cain (Young Guns. He appeared in 24: Redemption, and became a part of that show's regular cast for its seventh season. Voight is the father of Angelina Jolie, and has often been the subject of tabloid coverage because of their occasionally fraught public bickering.

Trivia: In his public appearances, standup comedian Judah Friedlander usually wears big glasses and a trucker hat over his shaggy head of dark hair. He's one of those guys who has the decency to appear untainted by his own mediocre brand of stardom. In other words, he can play in Hollywood movies that show at major theaters, yet still maintain a safe comedic distance from slimy show business. This has mostly been accomplished by doing short scenes in smallish comedies, starting with Meet the Parents (starring Ben Stiller). Friedlander then did the walk-on role of no-good husband Ron in the hilarious spoof Wet Hot American Summer. (He was the guy with sideburns to trying to win back his wife [Molly Shannon].) Other bit parts came about in the mock documentary Endsville and the MTV movie Spring Break Lawyer. He worked with Stiller again in Zoolander and had a small part in the stoner comedy How High. In 2002, he had a brief speaking role in the terrible action comedy Showtime, starring Eddie Murphy and Robert De Niro. Friedlander is perhaps best known for his unforgettable portrayal of Genuine Nerd Toby Radloff in American Splendor, the innovative documentary/biography about comic book author Harvey Pekar. The film was a festival success and earned Friedlander a nomination for Best Supporting Actor at the Independent Spirit Awards. Television audiences may remember him as the guy who gives out hugs in the popular Dave Matthews Band video for "Everyday." He's also made numerous appearances on late-night variety shows and various sitcoms. Projects for 2004 include Along Came Polly (starring Stiller again) and Palindromes (directed by Todd Solondz).In 2006 he began work on the award-winning sitcom 30 Rock playing Frank Rossitano, the ball-cap wearing, most vulgar member of the TGS writing staff. This was his most high-profile success to date, but he continued to land pars in big-screen projects like the Project Greenlight horror film Feast, The Wrestler, Meet Dave, and Beware the Gonzo.

Trivia: Began acting at 7 years old, but quit at 13 to concentrate on his education. Served in the Swedish military, but returned to acting as a career once he was out of his teens. Lent his support to the Tails for Whales campaign, a global initiative calling for stronger whale protection sponsored by the International Fund for Animal Welfare. The online petition features photos of people making whale tails with their upturned hands. With co-director Björne Larson, won Grand Prix and Press Awards at the 2003 Odense International Film Festival in Denmark for Att döda ett barn (To Kill a Child), a short film narrated by his father, Stellan Skarsgård. Appeared in Lady Gaga's music video for "Paparazzi." Is a fan of the Swedish soccer club Hammarby IF in Stockholm. Nominated for the Swedish Film Institute's Guldbagge ("Golden Beetle") Award for Best Supporting Actor for Hundtricket in 2002.

Trivia: His no-nonsense glare and distinctive comb-over as instantly recognizable as his landmark, the Fifth Avenue skyscraper, Donald Trump, born on June 14th, 1946, established himself as one of Manhattan's most successful real-estate developers before moving on to become the catchphrase-spouting host of reality television's most competitive series -- The Apprentice, and eventually, politics.As a young, aspiring businessman the Queens, NYC native wheeled and dealed alongside his father, Fred, in the pair's Sheepshead Bay office for five years, later striking out on his own to construct not only the world-renowned Trump Tower, but such luxury residential building as Trump Palace, Trump Plaza, Trump Parc, Trump World Tower, and Trump Park Avenue as well. Of course, Trump was never one to shy away from a challenge, so in addition to the residential construction he also found success in the gaming arena by establishing The Trump Organization as one of the world's largest operators of hotels and casinos. After opening three world-class casinos and hotels in Atlantic City, NJ (including Trump Plaza, Trump Marina, and Trump Taj Mahal), Trump boldly began expanding westward with the construction of The Trump Casino in Buffington, IN, and Trump 29 Casino in Palm Springs, CA. Trump also catered to the wealthy elite with construction of various high-profile golf clubs and luxury private clubs throughout the United States.Trump's outspoken nature repeatedly found the tireless business tycoon making headlines throughout the 1990s, and moving into the new millennium it began to appear that Trump's high-profile career in real estate was taking a back seat to his increasingly prolific public persona. Trump also became the subject of much gossip as a result of his turbulent marriages to former wives Ivana Trump and Marla Maples. He expounded on his personal philosophy of profit in such best-selling books including The Art of the Deal, Surviving at the Top, and The America We Deserve. However popular his writings were, it was his stint as the host of the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants that began to move Trump to the forefront of popular culture. In 2004, any question of Trump's status as a media icon was instantly put to rest with the premiere of the hit reality television series The Apprentice. An instant hit with audiences, The Apprentice showcased the heated competition between a variety of contestants as they vied for the coveted position of personal assistant to The Donald himself. Each episode, one unfortunate contestant would be coldly dispatched by Trump with the decidedly curt and unmistakable catchphrase "You're Fired," which instantly became as essential a component of the public lexicon as The Fonzie's "Heeeeeeeeey!," Arnold's "Whatch talkin' 'bout Willis?" or Ralph Kramden's "One of these days, Alice" had in decades previous. Trump's position in popular culture only grew in the years following, as The Apprentice continued to fare well, despite a notorious feud with Martha Stewart following poor ratings on her season hosting the series in 2005. Trump openly discussed the possibility of running for public office many times over the course of the 2000's, suggesting himself as a candidate for everything from Governor of New York to President of the United States, and considering affiliations ranging from the Reform Party to the GOP. Always looking for the most attention grabbing position, Trump registered with the Democratic Party in 2001, but later sided with the Republicans in 2009. In 2011, he announced he was beginning a primary campaign to run for president on the Republican ticket in 2012, and subsequently began seeking publicity through stunts like affiliating himself with the conspiracy-theorist "birther" movement, and dropping the f-bomb in public statements about gas prices. He eventually ran for president in 2016, and garnered enough electoral college votes to become the presumptive candidate for the Republican party. After defeating Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election, Trump became the 45th President of the United States on January 20, 2017.

Trivia: Born into a show business family -- father Michael Hawkins is a stage actor and mother Mary Jo Slater is a casting director -- Christian Slater made his acting debut at age eight after his mother cast him in the television soap opera One Life to Live on a lark. The following year Slater was on Broadway starring opposite Dick Van Dyke in The Music Man. Slater would remain on Broadway for at least two more productions. As a youth, Slater attended Manhattan's Professional Children's School. He made his television debut in the movie Living Proof: The Hank Williams Junior Story (1983) and his film debut two years later when he was only 16 in The Legend of Billy Jean. Slater earned some of his first favorable notice starring opposite Sean Connery in The Name of the Rose (1986). He next appeared in Tucker, a Man and His Dream (1988), and more films followed after that, but Slater did not become a star until he co-starred opposite Winona Ryder in the darkly satirical Heathers in which he played an anarchic sociopath. His maniacal over-the-top performance led to comparisons with Jack Nicholson. After Heathers, it looked as if Slater was destined to be typecast into playing lunatic villains or seriously troubled youths. In the latter regard, life seemed to mirror his art.In 1989, he was arrested in West Hollywood for leading the police on a drunken car chase that ended when Slater crashed his car into a telephone pole. While trying to escape the car, he kicked a cop with his cowboy boot and then attempted to flee over a fence. In 1994, he was arrested for taking a gun aboard a plane. In 1997, Slater was arrested for attacking his lover and biting a police officer in the belly while drinking heavily; he was sentenced to spend 90 days in a suburban jail in early 1998, all this just one day after his newest film, Hard Rain, premiered. Shortly after sentencing, Slater admitted that he had also been taking cocaine and heroin at the time. As part of his sentence, he had to serve post-jail time in a drug/alcohol rehab program and attend a year-long program on preventing domestic violence. Despite his personal struggles, Slater has maintained a film career starring as a high school geek with a cool secret life in Pump Up the Volume (1990) to the romantic Bed of Roses (1996) to high-voltage actioners like Broken Arrow (1996). In his 1997 production Julian Po, he gained weight, grew a mustache, and appeared as a suicidal bookkeeper who embezzles money from his company so he can fulfill one final wish. Though subsequent roles in such critically-panned films as 3000 Miles to Graceland, Windtalkers, and Alone in the Dark did little to advance Slater's career, recurring roles in such popular television series' as Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing and J.J. Abrams' Alias offered not only more exposure, but a chance to reestablish himself on the small screen as well. Meanwhile, a promising debut as a secret agent with a duel personality on NBC's My Own Worst Enemy proved a bit of a false start when the network never offered the show a chance to find its legs. Ever resiliant, Slater quicky bounced back with ABC's The Forgotten in 2009 and Fox's Breaking In in 2011, though neither series failed to catch on, leaving the veteran actor to take up arms as a vengeful gunslinger in the 2012 western Dawn Rider, and get caught up in one of history's most notorious blood feud's in Fred Olen Ray's Bad Blood: The Hatfiends and McCoys.

Trivia: Distinguished and versatile actor Cuba Gooding Jr. spent many years in bit roles before finally becoming a star. The son of Cuba Gooding, lead singer for the '70s pop group the Main Ingredient, he was born in the Bronx on January 2, 1968, but moved to Los Angeles after his father's group had a hit single with "Everybody Plays the Fool" in 1972. Unfortunately, the elder Gooding abandoned his family two years later. The subsequently tumultuous nature of Gooding Jr.'s upbringing did not deter him from achievement: During his teens, he attended four different high schools but managed to become class president of three of them. Gooding Jr. made his professional debut in 1984 as a breakdancer for Lionel Richie's show at the Olympics. As an actor he was discovered by an agent while performing in a high school play, and began working steadily in television commercials, which led to a bit part on an episode of Hill Street Blues. The experience inspired him to take acting lessons and after attending workshops and classes, he began to get a few more parts in television and films. He made his first feature-film appearance in Coming to America (1988) in which he was credited as "Boy Getting Haircut." Gooding Jr.'s first real break came when he was cast as Tre Styles in Boyz 'N the Hood (1990). The film earned him considerable acclaim and seemed to offer the promise of a great career. Sure enough, Gooding began landing fairly substantial parts in feature films. Unfortunately, save for a few exceptions like A Few Good Men (1992), most of the films were not well regarded, and the actor continued to work in relative obscurity. The comic talents he demonstrated as Paul Hogan's sidekick in 1994's Lightning Jack were overshadowed by further mediocre films, and it was not until 1997 that he truly came into the spotlight. That year, he starred as a loyal football player in Cameron Crowe's Jerry Maguire and won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his efforts. Following this triumph, Gooding Jr. next appeared in the acclaimed As Good as It Gets alongside Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, and Greg Kinnear. Two relatively obscure films, the suspense drama A Murder of Crows and the mockumentary Welcome to Hollywood, followed before Gooding Jr. took part in another high-profile picture, What Dreams May Come. Starring opposite Robin Williams, Gooding Jr. played the deceased Williams' tour guide to heaven. Unfortunately, the film was critically savaged and failed to do much business at the box office. In 1999, Gooding Jr. kept busy with both television and film. In addition to starring in a series of Pepsi commercials, the actor appeared opposite Anthony Hopkins in Instinct and had a lead role in Chill Factor, an action extravaganza which featured him as an ice cream man trying to keep a top-secret military chemical safe with the help of a short-order cook (Skeet Ulrich). Gooding Jr. would star opposite screen legend Robert De Niro in 2000's military drama Men of Honor, in which he portrayed the real life experience of Carl Brashear, the first African-American to serve as a diver in the United States Navy. Just one year later, he stepped into the role of an ill-fated serviceman in Pearl Harbor, though he took a break from heady, big-budget war dramas in favor of comedies Rat Race (2001) and Snow Dogs (2002). The year 2003 would prove another busy year for the actor, who starred in three wildly different movies including Boat Trip, a comedy of errors in which he played an unwitting straight man aboard an entirely gay cruise; Radio, which featured Gooding Jr. as the film's mentally challenged protagonist; and The Fighting Temptations, a musical comedy starring Beyoncé Knowles. In 2004, the young actor lent his vocal chords to voice the role of Jake the Horse in Disney's Home on the Range. He next appeared in Lee Daniels' directorial debut, Shadowboxer, playing a contract killer opposite Helen Mirren. In 2007, he appeared in the critically reviled Norbit, playing a supporting role to Eddie Murphy, and also starred in Daddy Day Camp, the sequel to Daddy Day Care, replacing Murphy in the lead role. Gooding again played a Tuskegee pilot in 2012's Red Tails (he had previously appeared in the 1995 HBO made-for-TV movie The Tuskegee Airmen). In 2013, he re-teamed with director Daniels on The Butler and had a small role in Robert Rodriguez's Machete Kills.

Trivia: With an Oscar before the age of 30, repeated comparisons to Audrey Hepburn, and the drool of a thousand critics at her feet, Natalie Portman has emerged as one of the most promising actresses of her generation. Born in Jerusalem on June 9, 1981, to an artist mother and doctor father, Portman moved to New York when she was three. Raised on Long Island, she was discovered by a modeling agent who signed her on the spot. Her modeling stint led to an audition for Luc Besson's Leon (or The Professional, as it was called in the United States). Due to her age (she was 12 when the film was cast), Portman was initially turned down for the lead role of Mathilda, a girl who asks a hit man (Jean Reno) to train her as an assassin to avenge her brother's death and falls innocently in love with him in the process. However, she ultimately won the part and her 1994 film debut earned a number of positive notices. In interviews, Portman allowed that making her first film in the toughest sections of Spanish Harlem was frightening, but not quite so frightening, she claimed, as going back to school once shooting wrapped.Portman then took on the role of Al Pacino's step-daughter in another demanding film, Michael Mann's Heat (1995). She followed this up with lighter fare, like Mars Attacks! (1996), Everyone Says I Love You, and Beautiful Girls. After turning down title roles in both Lolita and William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Portman took on another title role with her 1997 Broadway debut in The Diary of Anne Frank. She stayed with the show until May 1998, during which time she received positive notices for her performance. After lending her voice to The Prince of Egypt (1998), Portman took on her most talked-about role to date, that of Queen Amidala in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999). Despite very mixed reviews, the film went into box-office hyperdrive, further propelling Portman toward her status as a rapidly emerging talent for the new millennium. She would end the 20th century with projects like Wayne Wang's Anywhere But Here and Where the Heart Is. Offscreen, Portman also did some growing up, enrolling for her college education at Harvard University. A psychology major, she made it clear upon her enrollment that, aside from her role as Queen Amidala in the Star Wars films, she would not accept any film roles for the duration of her education. Perhaps to the disappointment of fans, she stuck to her word, remaining absent from the screen (save Star Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones) until she received her degree in 2003. Luckily, upon her return to acting, it was immediately evident that it had been worth the wait.Portman's first foray following graduation was the 2003 Civil War ensemble drama Cold Mountain, alongside Renee Zellweger and Nicole Kidman. But in 2004, Portman was at the forefront of both Garden State, a moody dramedy that endeared her to fans, and Closer, a taught, intimate drama that earned her massive critical accolades, as well as her first Oscar nomination. In 2005, as the curtain finally closed on the Star Wars franchise with the release of Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Portman could be seen with a now iconic pixie haircut after shaving her head for a role in the graphic-novel adaptation V for Vendetta. The dystopic action thriller received mixed reviews, but Portman's performance, as usual, earned accolades. Per her usual M.O. as an actress, she would complete a number of independent, arthouse, or otherwise challenging projects for every blockbuster under her belt, like the 2006 Milos Forman directed period drama Goya's Ghosts, and the Wes Anderson 2007 road (or rather, train) movie The Darjeeling Limited. After appearing opposite Scarlett Johansson and Eric Bana as Anne Boleyn, the famously beheaded wife of King Henry VII in the 2008 period drama The Other Boleyn Girl, Portman turned her high-brow image on its ear the very next year, playing a small town cheerleader turned army wife in the Iraq War drama Brothers. Portman had even more impressive turns awaiting her, however, as 2010 brought the lead role in the hallucinatory Darren Aronofsky film The Black Swan, about an obsessively diligent ballerina who, in order to play both the innocent and dark sides of femininity with the leading role in Swan Lake, must battle her own conflicting inner demons as a woman. Portman trained in ballet rigorously for six months to perform the role, and her efforts paid dividends. Her performance received massive adoration from critics and audiences alike, and she emerged with an Academy Award for Best Actress - which Portman accepted while five months pregnant with a baby she was expecting with fiancé Benjamin Millepied, her choreographer whom she met while filming.Professionally, Portman had a mind to keep a balance with her choice of roles. In a change of pace from the gritty material in The Black Swan, she appeared in the stoner comedy Your Highness, the rom-com No Strings Attached, and the comic-book action thriller Thor.Portman had her first child with husband Benjamin Millepied in June of 2011.

Trivia: Surrounded by musicians as a child due to his parents' friendships with such jazz legends as Count Basie, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Bobby Short and Sarah Vaughan. Family moved from New York to L.A. when he was 10. Sang with the California Boys Choir as a youth. Beverly Hills High School classmates included guitarist Slash and singer Maria McKee. Cowrote and produced Madonna's No. 1 hit "Justify My Love" in 1990; has also written songs for Vanessa Paradis and collaborated with Aerosmith and Mick Jagger. Founded Kravitz Design, an interior-design firm, in 2003.

Trivia: Was on her high-school swim team. Started her own fashion label, named L.A.M.B., in 2003. Brother Eric has worked as an animator for The Simpsons. Played Jean Harlow in Martin Scorsese's Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator (2004). Released her first solo album, Love. Angel. Music. Baby., in 2004. Donated $1 million in March 2011 to aid relief efforts in Japan after the country was devastated by an earthquake and tsunami. Announced in June 2011 that she was quitting her solo music career and would focus musically on the band No Doubt.

Trivia: A supermodel with the savvy to create her own empire, Heidi Klum hit gold with a perfect amalgam of high fashion and reality TV. Born in Germany, Klum began modeling when she was just a teenager, after submitting photos to a German modeling agency on a whim. She toured Europe as a model, eventually coming to the United States, where she found even greater success -- cemented by her posing for the coveted cover of Sports Illustrated in 1998. Klum became a spokesmodel for Victoria's Secret, and also began taking some small roles in films, like 2000's Blow Dry. In 2004, she became the executive producer and host of a show on Bravo called Project Runway, in which fashion design hopefuls were presented with a variety of challenges and judged on their talent and ability, facing an elimination in every episode until a winner was crowned. The show was a huge hit, and Klum became even more of brand in and of herself, hosting for many seasons to come.Klum was married to celebrity hairstylist Ric Pipino in 1997, though the couple divorced in 2002. She also had a relationship with Formula One manager Flavio Briatore, and though it did not last, the couple had a daughter together, Helene (aka "Leni"). In 2005, Klum married singer and musician Seal, who Klum raised a family with, but the couple separated in 2012.

Trivia: Is the second cousin once removed of former United Kingdom Secretary of State for Defence, and prominent British politician, Sir Malcolm Rifkind. His mother, Ann, was married to musician Mick Jones; the couple, plus Mark and his twin sisters, moved to New York when Mark was 8. Appeared in a 1999 Tommy Hilfiger advertisement. Began his career in music as a disc jockey in New York. Released his debut album, Here Comes the Fuzz, in 2003, featuring artists like Rivers Cuomo and Jack White. Formed his own record label, Allido Records, with businessman Rich Kleiman in 2004. Co-producer of Amy Winehouse's 2006 album Back to Black, and co-wrote the album's title track. Named 2008 Man of the Year by Glamour Magazine. Appeared in a 2009 PETA ad with his dog, Maude. His 2014 single, "Uptown Funk," featuring vocals from singer Bruno Mars, held the top spot on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart for 14 straight weeks and set a record for most streams in the U.S. over a one-week span.

Trivia: At one point, it would have been hard to define Paris Hilton. "Career heiress" doesn't cut it; nor does "party girl" or "high-ranking socialite-cum-model-cum-actress," and "American royalty" was arguably too dramatic a label for a woman whose true breakout role cost less to film than a night in a budget room at the neighborhood Hilton hotel. Luckily, as lackluster economies are wont to do, the early 2000s looked toward the financial elite and borrowed heavily from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous in hopes of creating a new rush of money envy. Enter MTV Cribs, The Osbournes, Rich Girls, VH1's The Fabulous Life, and Paris Hilton, celebutante.Heiress of hotel guru Conrad Hilton, Paris became famous for possessing the ingredients of fame, albeit minus the resumé. As she grew skinnier, blonder, wilder, and richer, society joyfully embraced her as gossip fodder and allowed her to adopt a movie-star mystique while waiving the irksome requirement of having starred in an actual movie. This is not to say Hilton has no film credits to her name; in 2001, she landed a cameo role as herself in Ben Stiller's Zoolander and later stretched her acting chops to play a rowdy clubber in The Cat in the Hat (2003). Unfortunately for Hilton, her small role in James Cox's crime thriller Wonderland that same year was overshadowed by a larger role in an explicit homemade sex video, which her ex-boyfriend promptly sold to the salivating Internet hoards. Interestingly enough, the ensuing lawsuit and barrage of negative publicity did nothing but bolster the ratings of The Simple Life, a reality show starring Hilton and fellow heiress Nicole Richie. The series chronicled Hilton and Richie's reactions to the pitfalls of "simple" living, such as holding a job and shopping in outlets that don't stock haute couture. While the show could never quite decide who the novelty was -- the ridiculous rich girls or "hayseed" townsfolk -- The Simple Life was, nonetheless, a huge success.Still basking in the warmth of paparazzi camera flashes across the globe, Paris Hilton continued looking to further her acting career. She took on her biggest role at the time in Nine Lives, a straight-to-video supernatural thriller directed by newcomer Andrew Green. Attempts at horror and comedy followed, with, respectively, House of Wax (whose publicity proudly offered the opportunity to "See Paris die!") and the straight-to-video National Lampoon's Pledge This! Luckily for Hilton, she could fall back on a successful, prefab pop album (2006's Paris) and further seasons of The Simple Life, despite her falling out with Richie. In 2007, Hilton geared up for what would no doubt be the most challenging project of her young life, as she was sentenced to a short jail stay for driving with a suspended license. The media, predictably, anticipated the event with the fervor of a Roman audience waiting for a Christian to be thrown to hungry lions. She dropped off the radar following her legal troubles, though she continues to make the occasional cameo in film and television series.

Trivia: One of the great chameleons of contemporary pop music, David Bowie long displayed a gift for remaking his image to suit his creative needs, which, when coupled with an approach that carried far more intellectual and creative weight than that of the average rock star, made him a better candidate than most musicians to become a solid screen actor. While David Bowie never graduated into a full-fledged movie star, over the years he established himself as a gifted (if idiosyncratic) thespian with a taste for offbeat projects.David Bowie was born David Robert Jones in the multi-cultural working-class city of Brixton, England on January 8, 1947. Jones developed an interest in creative matters early on, and picked up the saxophone at age 13. At 16, Jones left school and began a career as a commercial artist, while singing and playing sax with rock bands in his spare time. By 1966, Jones had recorded singles with three different combos, none of which fared well commercially, when he decided to set out on his own as a solo act; he also took on the stage name David Bowie to avoid confusion with Davy Jones, who had just become an international star with the pre-fab pop group the Monkees. After recording an unsuccessful solo album, Bowie dropped out of the music business for a spell and began to study mime with Lindsay Kemp; in 1969, Bowie even formed his own mime troupe, Feathers, as well as an experimental art ensemble, the Beckenham Arts Lab. Neither was a sure moneymaker by any stretch of the imagination, so Bowie signed a deal to record another album, which included an offbeat number called "Space Odyssey." Around the same time, Bowie made his screen-acting debut with a very small part in the film The Virgin Soldiers; that same year, he also appeared in an obscure experimental film called The Image, as well a promotional reel called David Bowie: Love You Till Tuesday, which remained unseen until the early 1970s; the film includes footage of Bowie playing his music and performing with the Feathers group.Bowie's next album, 1970's The Man Who Sold the World, represented a move toward a harder rock sound, and in 1972, he'd score his breakthrough with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, a concept album about a gender-bending rock star from outer space. Released as the glam rock scene was beginning to peak, Ziggy Stardust made Bowie a full-fledged superstar in both England and the United States, and D.A. Pennebaker shot a celebrated documentary about the final date of the group's 1973 tour. In 1976, with Bowie confirmed as a major international pop star, director Nicolas Roeg cast Bowie in his first leading role as an unhappy alien who becomes a famous industrialist and pop star as he tries to find a way home in The Man Who Fell to Earth; while the film was a few shades too arty and offbeat to become a box-office blockbuster, the story seemed made-to-order for Bowie's public persona, and he gave a fine performance which helped the film become a modest box-office success. Bowie's busy touring and recording schedule, however, kept him from taking another major film role until 1979, when he played Paul in Just a Gigolo, an ambitious but unsuccessful film best remembered for featuring Marlene Dietrich's final screen performance. For the next few years, Bowie's screen work was for the most part limited to contributing music to films, most notably Cat People, for which he provided the theme song, and Christane F., in which Bowie briefly appeared as himself in a concert sequence.In 1983, Bowie's album Let's Dance brought him to new heights of commercial success, and his next major film, Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence found him receiving top billing for what was essentially a supporting role. Despite Bowie's busy touring schedule, he continued pursuing film work, playing a key role in the offbeat vampire film The Hunger and lending a cameo to the comedy Yellowbeard, while also providing music for Hero, The Falcon and the Snowman, and Boy Meets Girl. In 1986, Bowie scored one of his rare leading roles in a mainstream film when he starred in the big-budget fantasy Labyrinth, which found George Lucas collaborating with Jim Henson; Bowie also played a small but highly distinctive role in the British pop-culture musical Absolute Beginners that same year, as well as penning and performing the title tune. Two years later, Bowie landed perhaps his most unusual role, playing Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese's controversial adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ.In the 1990s, while Bowie remained an international star in music circles, his following began to scale itself back, and as he spent less time on the road, he began devoting more time to his acting, playing mostly supporting roles in idiosyncratic projects such as The Linguini Incident, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and Basquiat, the latter of which found him playing pop art icon Andy Warhol. Bowie also continued to provide music for films, most notably the British satire The Buddha of Suburbia. He turned in a very amusing cameo as himself judging the "walk-off" between Hansel and Zoolander, and his music was used rather distinctly by Wes Anderson in The Life Aquatic. Bowie tackled his largest acting role in quite some time in 2006 when he was cast in Christopher Nolan's film about magicians, The Prestige. He lent his voice to an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, appeared in various music documentaries and concert films, and appeared as himself in the teen comedy Bandslam in 2009. Bowie released a new album, Blackstar, on his 69th birthday in January 2016; he succumbed to cancer only two days later.

Trivia: More than a few actresses started their professional careers as models, but Tyson Beckford is one of the few men to follow that career arc. Beckford escaped a rough childhood after being noticed by a fashion expert who worked for the magazine The Source. He quickly rose to the top of the ladder, working with such celebrated names as Herb Ritts. In the early '90s, he began a long association with Ralph Lauren. As the 21st century dawned, Beckford segued into an acting career with appearances in some small films, eventually landing substantial parts in the action films Biker Boyz and Into the Blue.

Trivia: A musician turned actor/director primarily associated with his tenure as the frontman and co-founder of the popular rap-metal act Limp Bizkit, Fred Durst began his occupational life as a tattoo artist after his honorable discharge from the Navy. He formed Bizkit in Florida circa 1994 at the age of 23 by teaming up with percussionist John Otto, guitarist Wes Borland, and bassist Sam Rivers. Another act, Korn, soon got its hands on the group's demo tape and felt so impressed that it passed it along to producer Ross Robinson. That coup helped Limp Bizkit land a spot opening for The Deftones and House of Pain; a contract with Flip/Interscope Records and numerous albums followed, catapulting the outfit to the forefront of the rap metal genre.Unsurprisingly, Durst's early film-oriented work consisted primarily of music videos for Bizkit, but by the mid-2000s, he began to branch out into non-musical acting roles, where the rough-cut, tattoo-laden rapper made a unique and memorable impression among audiences. Assignments included a small supporting role in the psychologically charged social issues drama Sorry, Haters (2005) and a lead opposite Jeremy Sisto in the small town-set supernatural thriller Population 436 (2006). Durst then stepped behind the camera with a pair of directorial efforts: the psychodrama The Education of Charlie Banks (2007) weaves the tale of a disturbed young man (Jason Ritter) who aggressively insinuates himself into the life of a college student (Jesse Eisenberg) in whom he provoked fear and terror during childhood. The much different picture The Longshots, on the other hand, is a sports comedy about an ex-football player (Ice Cube) who trains his sports-happy 11-year-old niece to qualify as the first female quarterback in her children's football league.

Trivia: 'N Sync bass singer Lance Bass may be known to hordes of adoring teenage female fans for his crooning in one of the most phenomenally successful boy bands of the 1990s, though the singer also launched an acting career in the new millennium with roles in Longshot (2000) and the romantic comedy On the Line (both alongside fellow 'N Syncer Joey Fatone) the following year. Born May 4, 1979, in Laurel, MS, the playful and optimistic blond singer also turned up as the host of MTV's Who Knows the Band game show in 2001. Always keeping busy, the young singer also founded a music production company (Free Lance Entertainment Group Inc.) and a film production company (A Happy Place) in addition to his hosting and singing duties. Bass launched a successful voice-over career, voicing a character in the popular Kingdom Hearts video game series and working on several television series, including Handy Manny. He competed on Dancing with the Stars in 2008, coming in third place Bass also continued his producing work, producing the documentary Kidnapped for Christ in 2014.

Trivia: Born Kimberly Jones in 1975, rapper Lil' Kim (her stage name) grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant borough of Brooklyn, NY. Just after her ninth birthday, her parents divorced and she fell into the custody of her father, who threw her out of the house several years later. She thus spent her teenage years in a state of virtual homelessness, living with friends and on the streets, but her life turned a promising corner when she encountered maestro rap producer Biggie Smalls. Smalls immediately sensed her ability to rap, reinvented her as Lil' Kim, and signed her to a recording contract, first as a member of Junior M.A.F.I.A., then as a solo artist. In the recording sphere, Kim distinguished herself with an unabashed sexually provocative image and some of the most explicit and graphic lyrics by any female performer in the rap genre.In terms of cinema, it was perhaps inevitable that Lil' Kim would make her strongest impression in urban material, not unlike rap contemporaries Snoop Dogg and Ice Cube. Thus, even though she first bowed in the Freddie Prinze, Jr.-headlined teen comedy She's All That (1999), Kim fell into a niche with projects including Juwanna Mann (2002), the adult-oriented animated feature Lil' Pimp (2003), and the urban comedy Nora's Hair Salon (2004). In 2008, Kim joined Leslie Nielsen, Drake Bell, and others for the genre spoof Superhero Movie. She served a one-year prison sentence for her knowledge of a shooting.

Trivia: Comedian Garry Shandling was best known for his top-rated, award-winning parody of television talk shows The Larry Sanders Show, which aired on the HBO cable network from 1993 to 1998. He started out as a comedy writer for other sitcoms and as a standup comedian. He landed his first television show, the It's Garry Shandling's Show, on Fox in 1985. The show was heavily autobiographical, to the point of replicating his apartment on a soundstage. Shandling, however, made his biggest impression with Larry Sanders, a show about the trials, tribulations, and double-dealing that goes on behind the scenes of a latenight talk show. Much of the show's material was drawn from experiences Shandling endured or witnessed on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where he was a popular guest star.In addition to performing live and on television, Shandling has also played character roles in feature films, beginning with The Night We Never Met in 1993 and continuing with such varied projects as Hurly Burly and Dr. Doolittle, both in 1998. The actor tried his hand at starring with the 2000 extra-terrestrial comedy What Planet Are You From, a box-office dud Shandling also produced and wrote.As the decade wore on, Shandling's significant big screen roles were limited to the 2001 Warren Beatty picture Town & Country, before emerging in 2006 by lending his voice to the animated adventure Over the Hedge and appearing in a supporting part in Trust the Man. Meanwhile, on the small screen, he kept television viewers laughing as host of the 52nd and 55th Annual Prime Time Ammy Awards in 2000 and 2003 respectively. Though brief cameos in Iron Man 2 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator followed, the one-time comedy superstar largely continued to maintain a low-profile in his later years. He died suddenly in 2016, at age 66.

Trivia: Balancing independent film and Hollywood, Stephen Dorff made his name as a versatile actor with a particular talent for playing assorted rebels and villains. The son of composer Steve Dorff, the younger Dorff opted for the acting side of show business instead. Entering the industry as a teenager, Dorff cut his acting teeth on TV in the late '80s with guest spots on several series, including Roseanne and Married With Children, and roles in TV movies, including I Know My First Name Is Steven (1989). Dorff jumped to feature films with the starring role as a socially conscious South African boxer in The Power of One (1992). Voted the National Association of Theater Owners' Male Star of Tomorrow in 1992, Dorff next earned attention with his lead performance as Beatle manqué Stu Sutcliffe in the British biopic Backbeat (1993). He also appeared in the genre thriller Judgment Night that same year, with Emilio Estevez and Cuba Gooding Jr. Despite his Hollywood beginnings, Dorff focused more on independent productions in the mid-'90s, including the media satire S.F.W. (1994). His nuanced performance as Warhol Factory transvestite superstar Candy Darling in Mary Harron's acclaimed I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), though, definitively revealed that Dorff could be more than a pretty, brooding face. Dorff further held his own opposite Jack Nicholson in neo-noir Blood and Wine (1997) and against Harvey Keitel in crime drama City of Industry (1997), but neither film made a box office impression. Dorff scored a summer popcorn hit, however, as Wesley Snipes' flamboyant vampire nemesis in the comic book adaptation Blade (1998). Displaying his range, Dorff starred opposite Susan Sarandon in the romance Earthly Possessions (1999) for HBO, and put two different spins on movie director characters in Phil Joanou's film à clef Entropy (1999) and John Waters' black comedy Cecil B. Demented (2000). Branching out into another medium, Dorff starred in Quantum Project (2000), the first film produced for the Internet. Dorff continued to do work in a series of independent films, but occasionally would appear in more mainstream fare such as fear dot com, Cold Creek Manor, and Alone in the Dark. He had his largest profile film in years in 2006 as part of the cast of Oliver Stone's 9/11 film World Trade Center. He maintained his footing in the independent film world by starring opposite Milla Jovovich and Aisha Taylor on that same year's .45.Over the next several years, Dorff would find an ongoing series of roles in an impressive variety of projects, like Michael Mann's Public Enemies, Sophia Coppola's Somewhere, and Tarsem Singh's Immortals.

Trivia: German beauty Claudia Schiffer has parlayed her statuesque elegance into international fame, becoming one of the world's most recognizable supermodels. Along with such contemporaries as Cindy Crawford and Elle MacPherson, Schiffer took the catwalk world by storm in the early '90s, and made a predictable move into acting soon after. Claudia Schiffer was born on August 25, 1970 in Rheinberg, Germany, and raised in Dusseldorf. Originally eager to follow in her father's footsteps by becoming a lawyer, Schiffer warmed to modeling after being discovered in a nightclub in 1987. With her 5'11" frame and striking angular countenance, Schiffer was a natural, first gracing the cover of Elle magazine, then in 1989, landing the coveted spot as the centerpiece of the Guess? jeans advertising campaign. The sultry black-and-white ads turned her into a familiar face, and paved the way for over 500 magazine covers throughout her career. Schiffer made her first appearance on celluloid in Richie Rich (1994), as an aerobics instructor. The role apparently encouraged some real-world pursuits, as she would release a line of workout videos the following year. Also in 1994, she was a natural to cameo in Robert Altman's fashion industry send-up Ready to Wear, the first of Schiffer's many film appearances as herself, including Ben Stiller's Zoolander (2001). She took on a larger role in the romantic comedy Friends & Lovers (1999), and earned real credibility by getting cast in James Toback's cinéma vérité approach to multiracial youth culture, Black and White (1999). Schiffer is one of the owners of the Fashion Café chain of trendy restaurants, along with fellow supermodels Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, and Elle MacPherson.

Trivia: Acclaimed by innumerable publications for her ability to combine poise, glamour, formidable acting ability, and a commitment to social activism, powerhouse model-turned-actress Veronica Webb spent around a decade gracing the covers of such magazines as Ebony, Essence, and Vogue. She then made a dynamite transition into an acting career with two roles for Spike Lee -- one in his 1991 interracial romance Jungle Fever, and another with the 1992 epic blockbuster Malcolm X. As time rolled on, however, Webb spent more time modeling than tackling characterizations in features, save small roles in such films as For Love or Money (1992) and The Big Tease (1999). In 2007, Webb signed on to appear as the sidekick of "fashion counselor" Tim Gunn in the Bravo network's reality/makeover show Tim Gunn's Guide to Style (2007).

Trivia: Born April 16, 1976, to a painter father and singer/screenwriter mother, actor Lukas Haas was discovered at age four in his West Hollywood, CA, elementary school. Haas' kindergarten principal spotted acting potential in the young student and encouraged his parents to set their sights on a movie career for the boy. They did so and Haas got his first film role in 1983's Testament, in which he played the youngest of the doomed children of post-apocalyptic housewife Jane Alexander. In 1985, Haas got his big break in the title role of Witness (1985), playing an Amish boy who witnesses a murder and must accept the protection of cop Harrison Ford. Haas received positive reviews for his performance in the widely lauded film and went on to further raves -- and an Emmy nomination -- four years later for his TV portrayal of AIDS victim Ryan White in The Ryan White Story. In-between came roles in such high-grade, sensitive teen fare as The Lady in White and The Wizard of Loneliness (both 1988).Haas then disappeared for awhile, making occasional appearances in films such as Rambling Rose (1991), which cast him as a sweet, sexually inquisitive adolescent. 1996 marked the beginning of a new stage in his career, when he appeared in four very different films. No longer the cute little Amish boy in Witness, the now tall, gawky actor showcased his talents in Woody Allen's musical comedy Everyone Says I Love You, Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, the coming-of-age Boys (in which he co-starred with Winona Ryder), and Johns, in which he and David Arquette played down-and-out prostitutes in Los Angeles.In 1998, the indignity of having his scenes deleted from Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line was partially allayed by the praise Haas received for his lead role in David and Lisa, a made-for-TV movie co-produced by Oprah Winfrey. He went on to star as Bunny Hoover in the screen adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, a role which put him in the company of such actors as Albert Finney, Bruce Willis, Nick Nolte, and Barbara Hershey.After a smattering of minor roles -- and a stint in a band with Vincent Gallo -- Haas was very much in demand as an edgy supporting player as he approached his 30th birthday. Festival audiences got a double-dose of the actor in two high-profile 2005 indies: First as the gang kingpin known simply as Pin in the high-school noir Brick, then in a minor but memorable part as a friend to Michael Pitt's doomed rock star in Gus Van Sant's Last Days. Two higher-profile films of wildly different stripes followed: 2006's gritty crime drama Alpha Dog and the Duff sisters' bubblegum flop Material Girls.

Trivia: With his handsome looks and playful demeanor, Justin Theroux made a memorable feature debut as a determined revolutionary in the successful indie film I Shot Andy Warhol.A graduate of Bennington College who was born and raised in Washington, D.C., Theroux later relocated to New York to pursue a career in the visual arts before stumbling across acting and immersing himself in the stage. Gaining momentum in off-Broadway plays before making the leap to features, Theroux made appearances in such popular television shows as Sex and the City and Ally McBeal while gravitating toward the big screen in Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion (1997), American Psycho, and eccentric director David Lynch's Mullholland Drive. After appearing in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and the dud Duplex, Theroux appeared in a couple of episodes of the critically respected HBO series Six Feet Under. Over the next couple of years he combined little independent projects like The Baxter and Strangers with Candy with more high-profile films like Michael Mann's Miami Vice. He reteamed with David Lynch for Inland Empire alongside other former Lynch collaborators Laura Dern, and Hayy Dean Stanton. He played Jesus in the religious-themed comedy The Ten, and in 2008 he co-wrote Ben Stiller's Hollywood satire Tropic Thunder, which led to an assignment writing the hit sequel Iron Man 2. In 2012 he co-starred in Wanderlust opposite Jennifer Aniston who he ended up in a high-profile relationship with. That same year he had a screenwriting credit on the hair-metal musical Rock of Ages. Theroux next starred in the bleak HBO drama The Leftovers and wrote the screenplay for Zoolander 2.

Trivia: Comedian Andy Dick triumphed over personal tragedy, drug and alcohol addiction, and bad press to become one of Hollywood's most unforgettable -- and unconventional -- jokesters. Born on December 21, 1965 in Charleston, SC, Dick is the adopted son of the late Allen and Sue Dick. His father, an officer on a nuclear submarine, carted the family with him all over the world: Dick and his brood lived in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York, and Yugoslavia before settling in Illinois. There, at Joliet West High School, Dick learned that the way to keep people's attention was to make them laugh. He began honing his comedic skills by giving a spontaneous standup routine during freshman orientation and eventually won the race for Homecoming King with the slogan, "Don't vote for a jock, vote for A. Dick." After graduation, Dick briefly attended a local college before abandoning school work for the Chicago comedy scene. He studied improv under Del Close and performed at Chicago's celebrated Second City and the ImprovOlympics while appearing in various commercials. By his early twenties, Dick was doing standup or improv every night of the week, but still worked various day jobs to support his then-wife, Ivonne, and their young son. Dick labored as a delivery guy, a waiter, and as a tour guide before leaving Chicago for Los Angeles in 1988. The move was not an immediate success: Dick's agent dropped him upon arrival, and the comedian could not find a new one. He and Ivonne divorced a year later. Dick continued to perform at coffee houses and open-mike nights when Ben Stiller (whom he met in Chicago) tapped him to appear in the short film Elvis Stories (1989). Three years later, Stiller gave Dick his big break on Fox's The Ben Stiller Show. Performing opposite the likes of Stiller, Janeane Garofalo, and Bob Odenkirk, Dick created the memorable characters Manson Lassie and Skank the sock puppet for the Emmy-winning, but short-lived, sketch comedy program. Dick went on to guest-host Talk Soup and appear on The Nanny, before making a cameo in Stiller's first feature film, Reality Bites (1994), and stealing the Pauly Shore vehicle In the Army Now (1994) from its star. In the meantime, Dick met and romanced artist Lena Sved, with whom he had a son and daughter. In 1995, Dick played the son of agents 86 and 99 on Fox's doomed remake of Get Smart. That same year he had much better luck as the naive, bewildered cub reporter Matthew Brock on NBC's NewsRadio. The sitcom was a critical smash, making Dick a tabloid favorite. During breaks from NewsRadio, he appeared in the independent Bongwater (1998) and opposite Stiller in Permanent Midnight (1998), as well as lent his voice to the villain Nuka in The Lion King II: Simba's Pride (1998). Meanwhile, Dick instantly made headlines for his frequent drinking and marijuana use, as well as his unique living arrangement: Dick, Sved, and their two children shared a house with Dick's first wife, Ivonne, their son, and her boyfriend. For a time, this unconventional lifestyle appeared to work, more or less. But then, warning bells began to sound for Dick. It began when his Alcoholic Anonymous sponsor and friend since his Chicago days, comedian Chris Farley, died of a drug overdose in December 1997. Then, after a painful drugged-out phone call to The Howard Stern Show during which he discussed his narcotics addiction and disclosed his bisexuality, Dick checked himself into a rehab center. Shortly after his release, Dick's NewsRadio costar and surrogate father Phil Hartman was killed by his wife in a murder-suicide. A year later, Dick's mentor and friend Del Close also passed away. The next day, at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, CO, the obviously inebriated Dick shocked audiences during a reunion of The Ben Stiller Show by accosting Stiller and Garofalo. A couple of weeks later, he went bar hopping in Vegas with actor David Strickland, who tragically killed himself later the same night. NBC canceled NewsRadio, which could not recover from the death of Phil Hartman. On the heels of the show's last episode, Dick crashed his car into a Hollywood streetlight and then fled the scene, which was filled with drug paraphernalia. He spent the night in jail before being sentenced to weeks of rehab. Dick emerged later that year with an awe-inspiring comeback. He guest starred as David Spade's romantic rival on Just Shoot Me and appeared as himself in Being John Malkovich (1999). He toured with his rock opera, Andy Dick's Circus of Freaks, and recorded voices for the cartoons Hey Arnold!, Dilbert, and King of the Hill. Dick appeared in several independent pictures and filmed memorable cameos in Road Trip (2000), Loser (2000), and Dude, Where's My Car? (2000). He also reunited with NewsRadio alum Maura Tierney for Spade's prime-time animated series Sammy, before headlining the Family Channel Christmas movie Special Delivery (2000). Tierney then tapped him to appear in her husband Billy Morrissette's directorial debut, Scotland, PA (2001). Dick's biggest coup came in 2001, when MTV let him write, direct, and star in The Andy Dick Show. With such characters as Daphne Aguilera (Christina's mother's friend who lives on the same block) and Zitty McGee (an acne-infested supermodel wannabe), the series became one of the network's highest-rated shows and attracted scores of celebrity guest stars. Rolling Stone dubbed The Andy Dick Show "the funniest thing on TV" and gushed over the first installment of its 2002 season, which opened with an E! True Hollywood Story-like parody of Dick's life entitled, "The Little Angel Clown Who...That Cries." Never complacent, the drug-free, alcohol-free Dick followed up his show's success with roles opposite Luke Wilson and Will Ferrell in Old School (2003) and on television in Less Than Perfect. Dick contributed a monologue to The Aristocrats (2005), then voiced the character of Boingo in the late 2005 animated feature Hoodwinked, a kind of madcap, CG-animated reworking of the Little Red Riding Hood story. 2006 marked Dick's busiest year yet, as the seemingly inexhaustible actor immersed himself in three major productions. Employee of the Month, a fall 2006 frat-boy comedy starring Dane Cook and Dax Shepard as fellow clerks comically vying for the affections of a sensuous co-worker (Jessica Simpson), finds Dick in an unusually low-key turn (as Lon, one of Cook's buddies). That same year, Dick provided a voice for Queer Duck: The Movie, the feature version of a Showtime animated series about a gay mallard (Jim J. Bullock). In 2006, Dick also agreed to be interviewed for Fired, Annabelle Gurwitch's celebrity-studded documentary about what it means to be sacked in the American economy.Meanwhile, Dick voiced Mambo in director Paul J. Bolger's Happily N'Ever After (2007), an animated, revisionist satirical version of the Cinderella story; other stars in the cast include George Carlin, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze, Jr.. Dick was markedly less successful in the following years, largely due to his addiction to drugs and alcohol (he appeared in VH1's reality series Sober House in 2009). The same year he appeared as himself in the comedy drama Funny People, and in 2012 he joined Billy Burke and Crispin Glover for a supporting role in the crime comedy drama Freaky Deaky.

Trivia: Of Indian Sikh descent.In the 1970s, moved to Montreal; and in the 1980s, moved to New York.Worked for Morgan Stanley in New York before starting his career in the hotel industry in 1999.The first Sikh model featured in Vogue Magazine.Founder of Vikram Chatwal Hotels.

Trivia: A character actress who has used her blond, voluptuous features to shrewd comic effect, Jennifer Coolidge appeared in some of the most celebrated film and TV comedies of the 1990s. Perhaps best known by mainstream audiences for her role as Stifler's mom in American Pie (1999), she has also done equally memorable work in films like Christopher Guest's Best in Show (2000), which cast her as the lesbian trophy-wife of a frail and oblivious old multimillionaire.Originally hailing from Boston, Coolidge began her professional acting career when she moved to New York, where she became a member of the Gotham City Improv group. Work with the group led her to Los Angeles, where she continued to nurture a career in improvisational acting as a member of the Groundlings, the city's legendary improv troupe. In the early '90s, Coolidge broke into television-acting through spots on various shows, including Seinfeld and the animated King of the Hill, and segued into films with her debut in the forgettable 1997 comedy Trial and Error. The actress earned her first dose of recognition for her scene-stealing cameo as a high school student's seductive mother in the blockbuster comedy American Pie. The breakout role made Coolidge a mainstay in the realm of comedy, and she would henceforth appear in numerous projects a year, most memorably in Best in Show, Zoolander, Legally Blonde, A Cinderella Story, For Your Consideration, and on shows like 2 Broke Girls and The Secret Life of the American Teenager.

Trivia: Comedic actress Nora Dunn has frequently played acerbic character roles in films and TV as foils to generally likeable leads. She was a regular cast member on Saturday Night Live from 1985 to 1990, when she left due to the controversial episode with musical guest Sinead O'Connor and host Andrew Dice Clay. During her five-year run, she played several talk show hosts and was one of the Sweeney Sisters, along with Jan Hooks. She made her film debut in Mike Nichols' Working Girl (1988) as a jaded office worker, followed by Savage Steve Holland's How I Got Into College (1989) as an SAT coach. Her next few films were less successful: Stepping Out, Born Yesterday, and I Love Trouble. She turned back to TV and joined the cast of the NBC drama Sisters as the lesbian TV producer Norma Lear, followed by the CBS comedy The Nanny as Dr. Reynolds. In the late '90s, she had a few small yet funny roles in the more successful films The Last Supper, Bulworth, Drop Dead Gorgeous, and Three Kings. She also used her vocal talent to provide voices for the animated TV shows Futurama, The Wild Thornberrys, and Histeria! In 2001, she played the mom in Max Keeble's Big Move, a fashion designer in Zoolander, and Miss Madness in Heartbreakers. Her 2003 projects include the independent comedy Die Mommie Die, the Jim Carrey feature Bruce Almighty, and the romantic comedy Laws of Attraction.

Trivia: A native of Talinn, Estonia, and the son of Estonian pop musician Tarmo Urb (of the Urb Brothers fame), model-cum-actor Johann Urb immigrated to Finland with his parents at the age of ten, and spent the remainder of his childhood in that country. Urb subsequently moved to New York City, where he modeled on a contract with the Ford Agency and formally studied drama at the prestigious Lee Strasberg Institute. The actor took one of his first feature bows in 2006, with a small supporting role opposite Dominique Swain (Lolita) in the gambling drama All In; that same year, he also essayed a lead in actor/director Brad Jurjens' gritty, direct-to-video action thriller The Bank Job. Urb achieved his most prominent Hollywood billing, however, two years later, in the Paris Hilton/Christine Lakin gross-out comedy The Hottie & the Nottie (2008). He had a role in the apocalyptic disaster movie 2012 in 2009, and that same year he was cast in the short-lived TV series Eastwick. He followed that up with parts in Hard Breakers and Resident Evil: Retribution.

Trivia: A native of Stillwater, Oklahoma, where he was born on September 18, 1973, Marsden grew up with a sister and two brothers. Following a short stint at Oklahoma State University, he dropped out of school to move to Los Angeles and pursue his interest in acting. Marsden's move led to work as a Versace model and to a brief role as the original Griffin on Fox's Party of Five (the part would later be taken over by Jeremy London), as well as brief stints on a variety of other TV series. Marsden's growing fan base got another boost when he was cast alongside Katie Holmes and Nick Stahl in David Nutter's Disturbing Behavior; despite the film's lackluster performance, in part abetted by an overabundance of teen horror films, Marsden was able to nab the plum role of Cyclops in Singer's X-Men. One of the most highly anticipated films of 2000, it allowed the actor to work alongside the likes of Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Anna Paquin, and Famke Janssen. Marsden's rising popularity was reflected in his busy schedule the following year; among his projects was Sugar and Spice, a black comedy that cast him opposite fellow up-and-comer Mena Suvari. In 2003 Marsden would once again appear as Cyclops in the big-budget X-Men sequel, X2. Marsden continued to work steadily insuch films as The Notebook and Heights before returning for trhe third installment of the X-Men franchise. Although he appeared again as Cyclops, he in fact scored more screen time in Bryan Singer's Superman Returns playing Lois Lane's husband who must contend with the fact that his wife is in love with the man of steel. He also played opposite Amy Adams in Enchanted a romantic fable that combined live-action with animation. Marsden would go on to enjoy a growing leading-man status, appearing in movies like The Box, Death at a Funeral, and a remake of Straw Dogs. Marsden would also appear in a memorable arc on 30 Rock.

Trivia: The gifted young comedian Patton Oswalt first carved a name for himself as a bit player in television programs, where he seemingly made the perfect everyman. Even those who fail to recognize the comic's agnomen doubtless encountered him as early as the mid- to late '90s, on such hit programs as NewsRadio, Dr. Katz, Mr. Show, and Seinfeld. (He was particularly memorable in the latter, as the video-store clerk who refuses to proffer a customer's address to a conniving George Costanza.) Oswalt also penned sketches for the long-running series MADtv and frequently lent his voice to Comedy Central's Crank Yankers, as one of the program's below-the-belt prank callers. Beginning in 1996 (and for at least four years thereafter), Oswalt began touring the country with his standup act and hitting comedy clubs; in 1997, he hosted his first standup special on HBO and received a positive response. Unabashedly iconoclastic and atheistic, with many routines devoted to excoriating Christianity and what he perceives as the hypocrisies of middle-American values, Oswalt buries his anti-establishment cynicism beneath a deceptively soft exterior (setting himself apart from, say, the more openly caustic and rave-happy George Carlin). Whatever the subject at hand, Oswalt displays a quick wit, a fearlessness to speak his mind, and an ability to unveil ironies behind practically everything. Regardless of one's personal convictions, Oswalt is also frequently hilarious, with his well-known impersonations of such personalities as Robert Evans and Nick Nolte absolutely unparalleled and definite high points in his routines, as are his riffs on pornography and bizarre sexual proclivities. In 1998, Oswalt landed his second recurring role on a television series, and his highest billing up through that time: that of Spence Olchin, one of the three buddies of Kevin James' Doug Heffernan, on the sitcom The King of Queens; he remained with the series for several seasons. Scattered movie roles followed -- typically bit parts at first, such as that of the scuba diver who experiences a bizarre death in the prologue of Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (1999) and Hedges in Blade: Trinity (2004). Around 2004, Oswalt took a temporary siesta from acting, and re-launched himself into the arena of standup comedy. He and several friends (Brian Posehn, Zach Galifianakis, and Maria Bamford) formed the "Comedians of Comedy" troupe and mounted a coast-to-coast tour; that ensemble headlined an eponymous 2005 concert film. Oswalt issued his first standup album, Feelin' Kinda Patton, in 2004; it drew critical raves and impressive sales. He followed it up with a joint effort alongside Galifianakis, the 2005 recording Patton vs. Alcohol vs. Zach vs. Patton, and the 2006 concert film Patton Oswalt: No Reason to Complain. A sophomore solo recording, Lollipops and Werewolves, appeared in the summer of 2007.That same year, Oswalt voiced the character of Remy -- a French rat with a refined culinary instinct who single-handedly overturns Parisian haute cuisine -- in the Pixar animated film Ratatouille. It marked Oswalt's first reception of premier billing in an A-list feature and his debut work for Pixar.In 2009 he had the lead in the underrated indie drama Big Fan, as a man assaulted by the best player on his favorite football team, appeared in The Informant, and recorded the stand-up special My Weakness Is Strong. In 2011 he had a memorable turn in A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas, released the stand-up concert Finest Hour, and earned the best reviews of his career playing opposite Charlize Theron in Young Adult.Oswalt's most consistent work, though, was in television. He amassed a slew of memorable TV roles, with one-offs, recurring gigs and voice-over roles. A seasons-long arc on United States of Tara coincided with other gigs on Bored to Death and Caprica. In 2013, he had a highly-regarded and publicized guest stint on Parks and Recreation, playing a character giving a filibuster on Star Wars. That same year, he started a recurring role on Justified and began doing narration work on The Goldbergs (playing an older version of the main character, Adam Goldberg). The following year, he played identical brothers on Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., allowing Oswalt to return even if his character had been killed. In 2015, he played the VP's Chief of Staff on Veep. Oswalt also voices several characters on shows like BoJack Horseman and We Bare Bears.

Trivia: Son of Nigerian immigrants.Grew up in Chicago.Was a member of the University of Illinois' varsity football team.Discovered his comedic talent at a talent show in college doing impressions of his teammates and coaches.Refined his comedic skills at the All Jokes Aside comedy club.

Trivia: Known for the first portion of her career as "Posh Spice," Victoria Beckham (born Victoria Adams) was in fact raised in the kind of wealthy environment that her nickname implies. Embarrassed to be driven to school in her father's Rolls-Royce, Beckham later attended Lanie Arts, where she studied performance. It was during that time that she answered an ad in The Stage magazine looking for girls who could sing and dance. Beckham, of course, passed the audition and became one of the five Spice Girls, a heavily marketed girl group in which each member had a nickname that corresponded with a specific persona. Beckham was "Posh Spice," while her bandmates were known as "Baby Spice," "Sporty Spice," "Scary Spice," and "Ginger Spice."The girls became a worldwide phenomenon, and the names and faces of the Spice Girls could be seen on everything from candy to notebook paper. In keeping with her character's luxurious image, Beckham usually appeared in Gucci dresses and the highest of high heels. The group even released a movie, Spice World, which was a hit with their tween audience, but despite being one of the biggest bands of the '90s, they didn't last long after "Ginger Spice," Geri Halliwel, announced that she was leaving the project in 1998. Beckham released a self-titled solo record in 2000 to medium reviews.In 1997, she started dating celebrated British soccer player David Beckham, and the couple became instant media darlings, followed closely by the press. By 1999, they were married and had their first child, Brooklyn Joseph; in 2002, son Romeo followed, and Cruz, another boy, was born in 2005. Beckham continued to be a fashion icon, dashing around town in the chicest and most daring of clothes, and soon she began working in the fashion world herself, designing a line of clothing for Rock & Republic, as well as her own line. In 2007, David Beckham rather famously left his team Real Madrid and signed on with the L.A. Galaxy for a massive sum of money. This happened to coincide with a Spice Girls reunion, which was announced that same year. The Beckhams decided to move from their native England to L.A., and Bravo opted to document the couple's journey with a reality special, Victoria Beckham: Coming to America. Occasional guest host appearances on popular shows as American Idol and The View followed, and in 2010 she voiced the character of Queen Amphitrite on an episode of Spongebob Squarepants.

Trivia: Initially known as a musician, for his work as the gravelly voiced frontman of the post-grunge band Bush (Sixteen Stone, Golden State), British entertainer Gavin Rossdale undertook his first major foray into acting with a key supporting role as the demon Balthazar, one of the more over-the-top villains in the Keanu Reeves-headlined supernatural thriller Constantine (2005). Rossdale followed it up with a more conventional and low-key portrayal of a 1950s soccer player in the sports drama The Game of Their Lives, then joined Erika Christensen, Nick Stahl, and others as one of the leads in the caper-themed crime comedy How to Rob a Bank (2007). He played a musician in a 2009 episode of Criminal Minds, and also appeared in a 2011 episode of Burn Notice. Rossdale played a small role in Sofia Coppola's 2013 film The Bling Ring and made a guest appearance in an episode of Hawaii Five-0.

Trivia: Following her breakthrough in 1988's Beetlejuice, Winona Ryder emerged as one of the most celebrated actresses of her generation. Adept at playing characters ranging from depressed, angst-ridden goths to Edith Wharton debutantes, the saucer-eyed, porcelain-skinned Ryder has attained critical respect in addition to widespread popularity.Ryder was born in and named after the city of Winona, MN, on October 29, 1971. The daughter of communal hippies and the goddaughter of LSD guru Timothy Leary, she grew up on a commune in Northern California. Ryder's family moved to Petaluma when she was ten; following regular abuse from her classmates, who targeted her for her unconventional, androgynous appearance (she was once jumped by a group of boys who had mistaken her for a gay boy), she was home schooled. At the age of 11, she joined the American Conservatory Theatre, and was soon trying out for movie roles. An audition for the part of Jon Voight's daughter in Desert Bloom failed to yield a role but did land the actress an agent, and at the age of 14, Ryder -- who had changed her last name from Horowitz -- made her film debut in Lucas (1986).Finding popularity with her turn as a suicidal teen who has more in common with the ghosts living in her attic than with her yuppie parents in Tim Burton's black comedy Beetlejuice, Ryder quickly became one of the most steadily employed actresses in Hollywood. She continued to corner the alienated and/or confused teen market with starring roles in a number of offbeat films, including the 1989 cult classic Heathers, Great Balls of Fire (in which she played Jerry Lee Lewis' 13-year-old bride), Burton's Edward Scissorhands, and Mermaids.The early '90s saw Ryder begin to branch out from teen roles toward parts requiring greater maturity. Following a turn as a taxi driver in Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth (1991), the actress starred in Francis Ford Coppola's lavish adaptation Bram Stoker's Dracula and then went on to play Antonio Banderas' lover in the critically disembowelled The House of the Spirits. Greater success came with Martin Scorsese's 1993 adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. Ryder won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Daniel Day-Lewis' picture-perfect wife, and in the process started getting taken seriously as an actress capable of playing more adult characters.A second Oscar nomination -- this time for Best Actress -- followed the next year for Ryder's portrayal of Jo March in Gillian Armstrong's adaptation of Little Women. The same year, the actress took on an entirely different role in Reality Bites, in which she played a twentysomething suffering from post-graduation angst. Similar twentysomething angst followed in How to Make an American Quilt (1995) but was then traded for Puritanical adultery, hair extensions, and another turn with Daniel Day-Lewis in Nicholas Hytner's 1996 adaptation of The Crucible.Following a starring role in the highly anticipated and almost as highly criticized Alien Resurrection in 1997, Ryder had a turn as the waif-ish object of Kenneth Branagh's affections in Woody Allen's Celebrity. She managed to escape much of the criticism leveled at both of these films, and in 1999 and 2000, she reappeared with lead roles in two films, Girl, Interrupted, in which she played a mental institution inmate in the female answer to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the supernatural thriller Lost Souls. Winona shed her skin once more in 2002, when she took the romantic lead in Mr. Deeds, a typically goofy Adam Sandler vehicle. This was a surprising move for Ryder, who, despite making a niche for herself in nearly every imaginable genre, has rarely delved into the world of madcap romantic comedies. Of course, 2001-2002 wouldn't be complete without mention of Winona's inexplicable thievery; the young millionaire was convicted for stealing $5,500 worth of merchandise from a Beverly Hills Saks Fifth Avenue. 2003, meanwhile, meant more unfamiliar territory for Ryder -- she left fiction behind for a part in the documentary The Day My God Died. An uncredited turn as a warped child psychologist in director Asia Argento's The Heart is Decietful Above all Things showed without question that Ryder was still willing to shake things up on the silver screen, and in 2006 she would play an insurance claims investigator assigned the task of investigating a curious death in the aptly titled comedy The Darwin Awards. Later that same year, Ryder would be rotoscoped for a supporting role in director Richard Linklater's animated adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel A Scanner Darkly. The next few years found the maturing actress eschewing Hollywood for roles in smaller independent features such as Sex and Death 101 and David Wain's The Ten, and on the heels of a brief yet memorable turn as Spock's mother in 2009's Star Trek, Ryder channeled her dark energy into the role of a former ballet ingenue on the decline in Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan. Meanwhile, in 2012, a voice role in Tim Burton's canine creature feature Frankenweenie found Ryder reuniting with the director who helped launch her to cinema stardom in the late-1980s.

Trivia: An actor whose strong features and sinewy 6'4" physique appear to have been chiseled from a slab of testosterone, Vince Vaughn is Hollywood's closest human approximation of a Chevy pick-up. Born March 28th, 1979, Vaughn's roles invariably reflect these qualities, and have given him a genial affability among middle Americans. Thanks to Vaughn's skills as a performer, however, he continues to resist typecasting, lending effortless portrayals to characters ranging from slick bachelors to raging psychopaths to morally conflicted limo drivers. A tried-and-true Midwestern boy, Vaughn was born in Minneapolis on March 28, 1970, and raised in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Lake Forest. The son of a self-made businessman and a stock and real-estate broker, Vaughn diverged from the upwardly mobile path forged by his parents. A hyperactive teen (and lackluster student), Vaughn spent time in special ed. and ran with a fast crowd (though he later claimed that he never felt the need for all-out rebellion). Despite his poor scholastic performance, Vaughn derived ambition from his interest in acting -- an interest that first blossomed at the age of seven -- and even served as senior class president. Upon graduation, with only his diploma and a role in a Chevy commercial as his credentials, Vaughn headed for Hollywood. Upon arrival, he proceeded to work in almost complete obscurity for the next seven years.During this period, Vaughn made the acquaintance of Jon Favreau, another struggling actor who hailed from the East. Their ensuing friendship and real-life adventures provided the inspiration for their ticket to the bigtime, 1996's Swingers. Directed by Doug Liman, the comedy stars Vaughn and Favreau (who also co-wrote the script) as two amiable, Rat Pack-obsessed, "so money" bachelors prowling the streets and bars of L.A. for "beautiful babies" and the occasional job opportunity. This irreverent-but-insightful Miramax release became a bona-fide sleeper hit. Vaughn, whose character, Trent, was the film's resident fast-talking ladies' man, emerged as a sex symbol in the making. A supporting role in Steven Spielberg's The Lost World: Jurassic Park heightened the actor's profile and revealed his ability to transition with great fluidity between indie films and box-office blockbusters. Nevertheless, Vaughn subsequently took the small, quiet film route, starring in The Locusts (1997), an overheated but half-baked melodrama in debt to both Tennessee Williams and East of Eden, and A Cool, Dry Place, a family drama that garnered a cool, dry reception from both audiences and critics. In 1998, the actor fared substantially better with his turn as a limo driver who is called upon to make a great sacrifice for a friend in Joe Ruben's Return to Paradise, and he brought a fine admixture of dark humor and sublimated menace to his part as a charismatic sociopath in Clay Pigeons. Vaughn evoked colossal mental dysfunction as Norman Bates in Gus Van Sant's truly ugly and ill-advised remake of Psycho that same year. Critics and viewers regarded his performance -- like the film itself -- with a tepid blend of indifference and bewilderment. After that egregious misfire, Vaughn wisely took a couple of years off before re-emerging with a number of projects in 2000. These included The Cell, a surrealistic horror picture co-starring Jennifer Lopez and Vincent D'Onofrio, Prime Gig, with Vaughn as California's best telemarketer, and South of Heaven, West of Hell, an ensemble western that marked the directorial debut of country singer Dwight Yoakam. Following-up with a part in writer Favreau's Made, Vaughn's next big role arrived in the form of a deceptive stepfather harboring a dark secret in the thriller Domestic Disturbance. Unfortunately, the film bombed on a critical front. Vaughn again ducked out of sight for several years, but Todd Phillips's 2003 comedy Old School brought him back to the top of the heap. Teaming Vaughn with Will Ferrell and Luke Wilson as a trio of over-the-hill party animals who relive their Animal House days by returning to frat house life, Old School became a sleeper hit, and inspired the press to term Vaughn, Wilson, Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Jack Black and others as The Frat Pack. The next of the "Frat Pack" vehicles arrived in 2004, with Todd Phillips's spoofy retread of the 1970s hit Starsky & Hutch, featuring Vaughn as the slimy villain, Reese Feldman. The picture (predictably) became a mega-hit, and the actor's newfound momentum continued to build when, only a few months later, he starred in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. Apparently channeling Bill Murray circa-1985, Vaughn received positive reviews for playing the good-guy opposite muscle-bound baddie Ben Stiller.Vaughn next graced the Will Ferrell vehicle Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) with a small but memorable role, before he made an about-face for the comedy-drama Thumbsucker. Vaughn impressed critics with his characterization and received praise for his funny and heartfelt performance. He returned to the popcorn humor that initially made him a star, however (and joined the $200-million-gross club in the process) with a leading part in the comedy The Wedding Crashers, a raunchy, R-rated film that proved once and for all the actor could open a movie.Throughout 2006, rumors swarmed about Vaughn's offscreen life, and alleged romantic relationship with newly divorced Jennifer Aniston -- a relationship that blossomed on the set of The Break-Up (ironically, a comedy about an couple ending their two-year relationship and trying to divide their possessions, friends and condo without killing each other). Gossip amped up anticipation and heightened curiosity. Meanwhile, Aniston aggressively denied rumors of an engagement. Upon release, The Break-Up bolstered Vaughn's reputation as a strong comic lead, and became another surprise hit.In the holiday comedy Joe Claus -- which marks Vaughn's third outing with director David Dobkin -- he plays the title character, the no-account, loser brother of Santa Claus who teams up with his more famous sibling at the North Pole to defeat villain Kevin Spacey. Vaughn undertook a personal venture for the documentary Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show, tooling around the country on a tour bus with four aspiring stand-up comics as they travel from gig to gig. And he stayed true to form with another "Frat Pack" comedy, Outsourced. In the years to come, Vaughn would remain an ever present force in the comedy world, appearing in movies like Four Christmases, Couples Retreat, and The Watch, as well as producing projects like The Internship and the sitcom Sullivan & Son.

Trivia: Actor Billy Zane kicked off his stage career in his hometown of Chicago. Able to harness his spoiled-brat countenance and quirky gestures to invoke either sympathy or repulsion, Zane has been seen principally in secondary roles in such films as Back to the Future (1985), Memphis Belle (1990), Orlando (1992), and Posse (1993). His most flamboyant role was as the young drifter who -- obvious to everyone but the hero and heroine -- is not what he seems in the Australian thriller Dead Calm (1989). Zane had a rare starring role in the filmization of the once popular comic strip The Phantom (1996), in which he showed off his lithe, muscular physique in a form-fitting purple body suit and performed many of the stylish film's daring stunts himself. The following year he had a lead role in the most successful film of his career, playing Kate Winslet's vile fiancé in Titanic. Zane is the younger brother of film and TV actress Lisa Zane.

Trivia: Anne Meara started out and ended up a distinguished dramatic actress--and in between, scored high marks as a comedienne, playwright and screenwriter. Launching her career in summer stock in 1950, Meara won an Obie Award for her intensely dramatic performance in the 1955 off-Broadway production Maedchen in Uniform; during this period, she was also a semi-regular on the NBC TV daytime soaper The Greatest Gift. Auditioning for an opera in 1954, she met another struggling actor, Jerry Stiller; they were married the following year. Forming the comedy team of Stiller & Meara, The team skyrocketed to stardom via their many appearances on such 1960s variety series as The Ed Sullivan Show and The Steve Allen Show. One of their richest sources of material was the difference in their ethnic backgrounds, especially in their famous "Hershey Horowitz/Mary Elizabeth Doyle" routines (an Irish Catholic, Meara converted to Judaism upon her marriage to Stiller). They also appeared together on Broadway, in the supporting cast of the 1971 sitcom The Paul Lynde Show, and in an obscure 1975 syndicated TV comedy "filler" series Take Five With Stiller and Meara. On her own, Meara has provided comic and noncomic support to several films, including Lovers and Other Strangers (1970), The Out-of-Towners (1970) and Fame (1980). She starred in the 1975 TV lawyer series Kate McShane, and co-starred as tavern owner Mae on The Corner Bar (1973), divorced airline stewardess Sally Gallagher on the 1976-77 season of Rhoda, acid-tongued cook Veronica Rooney on Archie Bunker's Place (1979-83), and mother-in-law Dorothy Halligan on Alf (1987). In 1983, Meara won the Writers Guild "outstanding achievement" award for her script for the made-for-TV feature Another Woman, and ten years later was nominated for a Tony Award for her portrayal of Marthy in the Broadway revival of Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie. Anne Meara is the mother of comic actor Ben Stiller and worked with her son in his directorial feature debut, Reality Bites (1994), Zoolander (2001) and Night at the Museum (2006). She recurred on Sex and the City, playing Miranda's mother-in-law, Mary, and later reprised the role in the feature film. Meara died in 2015, at age 85.