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.