Trivia: Actor, producer, and director Tim Reid has committed himself to projects that show American blacks in a more positive light than are generally seen in Hollywood through his United Image Entertainment company. As an actor Reid is best remembered for playing cool disc jockey Venus Flytrap on WKRP and for his short-lived sitcom Frank's Place (1987-1988). Fans of the crime-drama Simon and Simon (1981-1988) will remember him for playing Lt. Downtown Brown. Reid first appeared on television in Frankie Avalon: Easy Does It (1976). He then worked on The Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Hour (1977) and The Richard Pryor Show (1977). He made his feature film debut in Dead Bang (1989) and since then his feature film appearances have been sporadic. As a director, Reid debuted with the acclaimed Once Upon a Time...When We Were Colored (1997). As a writer, Reid has penned scripts for a series of animated videos chronicling Frank Baum's Oz tales. He also produced the feature films Out-of-Sync (1995) and Spirit Lost (1996). On television, Reid starred in the sitcom Sister-Sister (1994). In 1999 he directed the moody thriller Asunder. Though he appeared on screens only intermittently as the 21st century got under way, he did appear in You Wish! And The Reading Room, as well as the gritty 2007 drama Trade.

Trivia: Family moved to New York City's Harlem when she was 9. At 14, she landed the role of the King in an all-girls production of The King and I. Taught American History at Brooklyn Technical High School for two years. In 1987, became the first African-American to win an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. Filmed a pilot for her own series, Jackee, following her success on 227; the pilot was never picked up, but aired as an episode of 227. In a 2013 episode of Celebrity Ghost Stories, she claims that when she was a child, the spirit of her late uncle saved her from an attack by a home invader.

Trivia: Gen Y-ers will doubtless remember Tia Mowry as Tia Landry, one of the long-estranged, suddenly reunited titular siblings on ABC's Friday night "TGIF" sitcom Sister, Sister -- a role Tia played opposite her identical twin, Tamera, from 1994-1995, and carried over into an extended run on the then-fledgling WB network from 1995-1999. Though this hardly constituted the actress' premier role (she had already essayed a sequence of guest appearances on various U.S. series during her early teenage years), it did generate substantial audience attention and paved the way for additional onscreen work. Whereas many other multiple-birth actresses and actors (for instance, the Olsen Twins and the Sprouse Twins) first tackled projects that called for twin roles, then forked off into divergent paths, the Mowrys cut back and forth between joint casting and separate casting. They co-headlined the family-oriented comedy Seventeen Again (2000), the teen movie The Hot Chick (2002), and the 2005 Disney Channel telemovie Twitches (a kind of rehash of the Sister, Sister premise, with an occult twist), but essayed individual roles from time to time. Tia provided one of the main voices for the 2005 animated musical Bratz: Rock Angelz (and the accompanying Bratz TV series); she also signed for the lead in the sitcom The Game (2006), as Melanie Barnett, a med student who transfers from John Hopkins to a small San Diego college to be near her professional football player boyfriend. A spin-off of the CW hit Girlfriends, The Game was still going strong in 2012.

Trivia: The millions of Gen-X television devotees who attached themselves to The Cosby Show will have no difficulty recalling actor Deon Richmond -- he was Kenny, the frank and hip friend of the youngest Huxtable charge, Rudy (Keshia Knight Pulliam), though she and the other characters in the clan insisted on referring to him as Bud. Richmond joined the series in 1986, two years into its eight-year run, and remained with it until it wrapped in 1992. Richmond subsequently took several years off to concentrate on his education, until the early 2000s, when he appeared predominantly in teen-oriented films -- both sex comedies (Not Another Teen Movie [2001], National Lampoon's Van Wilder [2002]) and slasher pictures (Scream 3 [2000], Hatchet [2006]). In Hatchet, Richmond received his highest billing to date, playing one of two happy-go-lucky Mardi Gras partiers who take a haunted swamp tour and wind up playing cat-and-mouse with a deformed, homicidal maniac.