Trivia: Instantly recognizable for her cute overbite, raucous voice, and broad Bronx accent, Penny Marshall successfully made the transition from popular comic actress to a respected director and producer of popular mainstream feature films. A New York native (born Carole Penny Marsciarelli), Marshall is the daughter of an industrial filmmaker and a dance instructor. She started dancing herself as a toddler and as a teen competed on The Ted Mack Amateur Hour with a dance troupe comprised of several friends. The group also appeared on The Jackie Gleason Show. By the time she was a young adult and had graduated with degrees in math and psychology from the University of New Mexico, her older brother, Garry Marshall, had established himself as a successful television writer. It was Garry who provided Marshall with her first film role in his feature film debut effort as a screenwriter and producer in How Sweet It Is (1968).When her brother began creating and producing situation comedies, he made sure Marshall had parts in his shows, the first of which was My Friend Tony and the second was The Odd Couple, where she had a recurring role. Marshall also guest starred on other comedies, including The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but her big break didn't come until her brother cast her and her friend Cindy Williams as Laverne and Shirley in an episode of his popular series Happy Days. Her portrayal of a wiseacre working-class broad and Williams' take on the more innocent Shirley gained an instant fan base and so Garry Marshall was inspired to build a sitcom around the characters. Laverne and Shirley debuted in 1978 and ran through 1983. During this period, Marshall was married to actor-turned-director Rob Reiner. She divorced him in the early '80s. At that time, it was apparent that her acting career was on a dead-end street and Marshall decided to try out directing. Beginning with television movies and series such as The Tracey Ullman Show, Marshall learned to direct. She made her feature film directorial debut with the Whoopi Goldberg vehicle Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986) which had originally been slated for director Howard Zieff. Returning her brother's favors, she gave him a part in the film and also created a part for her daughter, Tracy Reiner (the offspring from Marshall's first marriage to Michael Henry). The film was a critical and box-office dud, but this did not deter Marshall from trying again. Her second attempt at directing, Big (1988), the story of a boy whose wish is granted and so finds himself stranded in a man's body, made actor Tom Hanks a movie star and established Marshall as a respectable big-league filmmaker. Still, she took two years to finish her next film, Awakenings (1990). This was due in part to 20th Century Fox's reluctance to have the story filmed until Marshall had engaged her friends Robin Williams, in a rare subdued dramatic role, and Robert De Niro. A well-made and poignant drama, Awakenings received three Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture. For her next film, Marshall offered up a sentimental, funny, and ebullient look at the women who kept professional baseball alive when all the young men were off fighting during WWII in A League of Their Own (1992). It was a well-crafted effort that has grown in popularity on video and netted star Geena Davis a Golden Globe nomination. Since then, Marshall's directorial output yielded uneven results and her films, while still loaded with mainstream appeal, had yet to reach the degree of popularity of her earlier work. In the late '90s, she and her much-younger pal, comedian Rosie O'Donnell, became popular for a series of television commercials for K-Mart. In addition to directing and producing, Marshall occasionally continued to work as an actress on television and in films, and earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (alongside her Laverne and Shirley co-star Cindy Williams) in 2004. Though at the time it appeared that Marshall had taken a hiatus from the director's chair, she would later resurface to direct episiodes of According to Jim and United States of Tara before lending her voice to the animated comedy series The Life and Times of Jim, and making an appearance in Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein's hipster-skewing sketch series Portlandia.

Trivia: A name that carries its own connotations, Hugh Marston Hefner not only founded the billion-dollar Playboy Enterprises, but did much to spearhead the "sexual revolution" -- first by publishing Playboy magazine in 1953, then by expanding his girlie magazine into supper clubs, cable networks, book publishing, apparel, adult-entertainment home videos, and scores of other arenas. Playboy Magazine itself began with a well-known business coup: Hefner purchased nude photographs of an extremely young Marilyn Monroe and published them in his magazine, in December 1953, making the first issue an instant, must-have American phenomenon. This provided the necessary boost to get the publication underway. Whereas other purveyors of entertainment for men, such as Larry Flynt and Al Goldstein, would later hone in on the gritty underbelly of the market, Hefner aggressively (and successfully) attempted to make eroticism and nudity more palatable to average middle-class citizens, gradually bringing increasingly explicit printed material into mainstream America's living rooms and thus reshaping the country's moral and sociocultural landscape. To Hefner's credit, he never failed to underestimate the intelligence of his readers, filling each issue with the finest literary work, criticism, interviews, and nonfiction journalism, alongside his erotic centerfold photographs -- thus giving the magazine some class. Film historians might be intrigued to know that Hefner's cinematic activities are not by any means limited to softcore adult entertainment. He has occasionally produced critically lauded mainstream pictures, such as Roman Polanski's X-rated (for violence, not sex) Macbeth (1971), Arthur Hiller's cult classic The Crazy World of Julius Vrooder (1974), and (as part of a legal settlement) Peter Bogdanovich's extraordinary character study Saint Jack (1979).Hefner was portrayed by Cliff Robertson in Bob Fosse's Star 80, Jack Fitz in American Gangster, and Randall Batinkoff in the telemovie Hefner: Unauthorized. In the 21st century he was the star of the reality series The Girls Next Door, which focused on his relationship with three former playmates, and in 2008 he played himself in the Anna Faris comedy The House Bunny.

Trivia: Born in Brooklyn, David L. Lander was raised in Bronx. Lander attended drama classes at Carnegie Tech, where he befriended fellow student Michael McKean. The two budding comedians joined a Hollywood improv group called the Credibility Gap (another member was Harry Shearer), gaining a huge fan following with their manic appearances on an LA radio station. Hired by producer Gary Marshall as writers/consultants for the '70s TV sitcom Laverne and Shirley, Lander and McKean immediately wrote themselves into the first show. Lander played Andrew "Squiggy" Squiggman and McKean portrayed Lenny Kosnowski, two adenoidal, terminally stupid truck drivers for Milwaukee's Shotz Brewery. The boys remained with the series from 1976 to 1983, then pretty much went their separate ways. Lander played comic character roles in films, and was prominently featured in the off-the-wall television efforts of David Lynch, notably the 1992 series On the Air, in which he was cast as unintelligible TV director Vladja Gochktch. Since providing the voice of the title character in the 1970 animated cartoon series Will the Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit Down?, Lander has been a busy and versatile voiceover artist, most recently as Lechner in the USA Network's Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills (1994-95). Also for USA, he played the recurring role of Elvis the mechanic in the 1995 series Pacific Blue. David L. Lander's credits are sometimes confused with those of British actor David Lander.

Trivia: For a time at the tail-end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, Marcia Rodd seemed poised for stardom, either on the big-screen or on television. She was, at the outset of the 1970s, the ideal "gently" liberated woman. Rodd was one of the first actresses who looked good in the briefly fashionable, close-cropped female hairstyle (a sort of attractive version of the "Moe Howard" cut) of the period, conveying intelligence and sensitivity as well as independence. What's more, her first two film appearances included a starring role in Alan Arkin's fashionable black comedy Little Murders (1971) and a major supporting role in Herbert Ross' high-profile adult romance T.R. Baskin, and she was also a recipient of choice roles from television producer Norman Lear. Rodd was born in Lyons, KS, and attended Northwestern University at the end of the 1950s and the start of the 1960s as a drama major, studying under Alvina Krause; her fellow undergraduates included Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Arriving in New York during the early '60s, she made her off-Broadway debut at the Provincetown Playhouse in Oh Say Can You See! in 1962, which got her onto her first cast album as part of a quartet called "the Girls"; she also appeared in the showcase Talent 64. She made her Broadway debut in the replacement cast of Oh! What a Lovely War and later appeared in The Mad Show. In 1968, she managed to appear in two different adaptations of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Love and Let Love, and Your Own Thing (as Olivia), and played Bobbi Mitchell in Last of the Red Hot Lovers, working opposite James Coco. In 1970, she was cast as the doomed Patsy Newquist in Little Murders (1971), Alan Arkin's dark comedy of life in New York City, based on Jules Feiffer's off-Broadway play. Her supporting role in T.R. Baskin followed later in 1971, and then Rodd began her first foray into television, principally through the work of Norman Lear in the second season of All in the Family; she played a harried single mother driven to desperate measures to make a decent life for her young son, and in episode No. 37, which was the pilot for the series Maude, Rodd played Carol, the divorced daughter of the title character. Rodd declined to portray the role when the series was picked up, however, and the part went to the more physically endowed but less professionally adept Adrienne Barbeau. Rodd busied herself in New York theater during the early '70s, including a production of The Merry Wives of Windsor at The New York Shakespeare Festival. She was also very briefly in the cast of the ill-fated musical Mack and Mabel as Mabel Normand (succeeded by Kelly Garrett and then Bernadette Peters). She then moved to Los Angeles, where she continued her stage work and also acted in two successive films by director Jonathan Demme, Citizens Band (1977) and The Last Embrace (1979). By the 1980s, she was no longer in the running for starring roles, but was a busy working actress in television, portraying Jack Weston's wife in the short-lived series The Four Seasons and playing the wife of Dr. Stanley Riverside on Trapper John, M.D. During the 1990s, Rodd returned to doing occasional feature films. She has also done a one-woman play about the life of Diana Vreeland, and guest starred on such series as Home Improvement and Sisters.

Trivia: Though she was a best-selling author and screenwriter, many fans will always associate Carrie Fisher with the role of Princess Leia from George Lucas' Star Wars trilogy. She was the daughter of movie stars Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher and grew up wanting to follow in their footsteps. When Fisher was quite young, her father left the family to marry Elizabeth Taylor. Reynolds raised Fisher and her younger brother, Todd Fisher, alone, but then remarried. As a performer, she started appearing with her mother on Vegas nightclub stages at age 12. When she was 15, Fisher left high school to focus on her show business career. The following year, she was a dancer in the Broadway revival of Irene, which starred her mother. Soon after that, Fisher enrolled at London's Central School of Speech and Drama where she studied for 18 months.Fisher made her film debut playing a sexy young thing who succumbs to womanizing Warren Beatty's seduction in Shampoo (1975). Next came the Star Wars films. Her feisty portrayal of the courageous young princess made Fisher a star. But with sudden stardom came a price. In November 1978, she hosted the NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live. There she met and became friends with John Belushi, and with him got heavily involved with illegal drugs. Fisher became romantically involved with singer/songwriter Paul Simon and married him in the early '80s. Due in part to her drug problems, the marriage lasted less than a year. A near overdose led Fisher to drug and alcohol rehabilitation. She detailed her experiences with drugs and recovery in her witty first novel, Postcards From the Edge (1987). Two years later, Fisher adapted the tale for Mike Nichols' charming and moving screen version which starred Meryl Streep as a drug-addicted daughter trying to make a comeback and compete with a glamorous movie star mother (Shirley MacLaine) who always outshines her.Throughout the '80s, Fisher continued appearing sporadically in feature films, but made little impact as an actress. By the latter part of the decade, her acting career began perking up again with such films as When Harry Met Sally (1989), in which she played Meg Ryan's best friend. Fisher appeared in a few more films and also in the television series Leaving L.A. through 1992 and then abandoned acting for the next five years to focus on child rearing and her writing career. Subsequent novels include Surrender the Pink, a semi-autobiographical novel exploring her relationship with Paul Simon, and Delusions of Grandma. In 1997, Fisher returned to feature films playing a small role in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. She also experienced renewed fame when George Lucas released restored and enhanced versions of his Star Wars series in 1996. Although she became better known for her writing than her acting, she continued to appear in movies such as Lisa Picard Is Famous, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, Fanboys, and the 2008 remake of The Women. In 2010 her one-woman show Wishful Drinking, in which she recounted her career and her life, was filmed. In 2015, she returned to her most iconic character, now General Leia, in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Fisher suffered a fatal heart attack in 2016, and died at age 60.