Trivia: Actress Valerie Harper's fame largely rests on her colorful portrayal of television's "New Yawk-er" Rhoda Morgenstern. After growing up in Oregon, Michigan and Jersey City, Harper became a chorus dancer in the Big Apple, hoofing with the Radio City Rockettes and performing in such Broadway musicals as Li'l Abner, Take Me Along, Wildcat and Subways Are for Sleeping. Her first film appearance was in the 1959 movie adaptation of Li'l Abner. While spending her nights on stage, she attended Hunter College and the New School for Social Research, supporting herself between dancing gigs as a telephone canvasser and hat-check girl. During the 1960s, she did comedy-improv work with Second City and Paul Sill's Story Theatre (one of her co-workers during her Sills years was her first husband, comic actor Richard Schaal). In the popular mid-1960s comedy record album When You're in Love, the Whole World is Jewish, Harper can be heard offering an embryonic version of Rhoda Morgenstern, a character she based on her childhood friend Penny Almog. So well-grounded was she in Rhoda-like characterizations by 1970 that she was hired for The Mary Tyler Moore Show (her first regular TV-series gig) on the basis of a one-sentence audition. After winning three Emmies for her Mary Tyler Moore work, Harper was spun off into her own series in 1974, titled Rhoda. Though it opened to excellent ratings (thanks largely to the one-hour episode in which Rhoda married her blue-collar fiance Joe [David Groh]), Rhoda was never as big a hit as Mary Tyler Moore, and it left the air in 1978. During this period, Harper made her formal film debut in Freebie and the Bean (1974), earning a Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of a Puerto Rican housewife. After toting up several stage and TV-movie credits, she returned to the weekly-series grind in 1986 with Valerie. She walked out on the show over a salary dispute, whereupon the producers fired her and retooled the series into The Hogan Family, which ran without Harper until 1991. She has starred in two series since leaving Valerie (1990's City and 1995's The Office) but has been unable to latch onto a character with the staying power of Rhoda Morgenstern. Additional appearances in Melrose Place, Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives, and Drop Dead Diva followed, Extremely active in prosocial causes off-camera, Valerie Harper was co-founder of an anti-hunger organization called LIFE (Love Is Feeding Everyone).

Trivia: The son of an architect, David Groh entered Brown University as an engineering major, but gradually gravitated to the Fine Arts department. Following a few summers with the American Shakespeare Festival, Groh received a Fulbright scholarship to study acting in England. Returning to New York, he was at first limited to "classical" roles, beginning with his off-Broadway bow in The Importance of Being Earnest. He enrolled at the Actors Studio to get some "modern" grounding: evidently he succeeded, inasmuch as his subsequent Broadway credits included such contemporary efforts as The Hot L Baltimore and Chapter Two. During the 1960s and 1970s, he worked steadily in the soap-opera mills, appearing in a dual role on Dark Shadows and as D L Brock in General Hospital. Told by his friends that he might have a future in Hollywood-based cop shows, Groh moved to LA in 1974--where, within a matter of months, he was cast as Rhoda Morgenstern's fiancé Joe Gerard on the popular sitcom Rhoda. The Joe-Rhoda wedding, telecast October 28, 1974, earned the series its highest-ever ratings; but the chemistry was never really there, and in 1977 the Gerards were divorced (many viewers, assuming that Groh and Harper were really married, sent letters of condolence to the two actors). In April of 1978, Groh was back on the small screen in his own sitcom, Another Day (1978), which lasted but a month. David Groh thereafter concentrated on stage work, with occasional forays into films and such TV miniseries as The Dream Merchants and Tourist.. Groh died at age 68 in February 2008.

Trivia: Possibly in defiance of the old adage "those that can't do, teach," American actor Harold Gould gave up a comfortable professorship in the drama department of the University of California to become a performer himself. Building up stage and TV credits from the late '50s onward, Gould made his first film, Two for the Seesaw, in 1962. He divided his time between stage and screen for the rest of the '60s, winning an Obie Award for the off-Broadway production Difficulty of Concentration. Gould was prominently cast in such slick '70s products as The Sting (1973), Woody Allen's Love and Death (1975), and Mel Brooks' Silent Movie (1976) (as a classically gesticulating villain). Often nattily attired and usually comporting himself like a wealthy self-made businessman, Gould was generously employed on TV for three decades. He co-starred with Daniel J. Travanti in the 1988 American Playhouse production of I Never Sang for My Father, played WASP-ish Katharine Hepburn's aging Jewish lover in the TV movie Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry (1986), and had regular stints on such series as The Long Hot Summer (1965), He and She (1967), Rhoda (1974) (as Rhoda's father), The Feather and Father Gang (1977), Washington: Behind Closed Doors (1977), Park Place (1981) Foot in the Door (1983), Spencer (1984) and Singer and Sons (1990). However, when the time came in 1974 to make a series out of the pilot film for Happy Days, an unavailable Harold Gould was replaced by Tom Bosley.

Trivia: Born in Brooklyn, NY, on December 29, 1936, actress/dancer/rubberfaced comedienne Mary Tyler Moore went on to star in the definitive television comedies of both the 1960s and the 1970s: The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1966) and The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977). For her performances as Laura Petrie and Mary Richards, Moore won five Emmy Awards, in 1965, 1966, 1973, 1974, and 1976.Moore got her start in television commercials, acting as Happy Hotpoint, the Hotpoint Appliance Elf during The Ozzie and Harriet Show in 1955. She then progressed to a stint as the disembodied voice and legs of Sam, the answering service lady, on Richard Diamond, Private Detective (1957-1960). Three unsuccessful shows and a series of TV specials followed her more notable series: Mary (1978), the Mary Tyler Moore Hour (1979), and Mary (1985-1986). Her dramatic career took off in 1981, when she was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of the repressed mother in Ordinary People. Moore had Broadway success with Whose Life Is It Anyway?, appeared in the highly acclaimed Finnegan, Begin Again with Robert Preston on HBO, and won a CableACE Award in 1993 for her performance as an evil orphanage director in Stolen Babies. In 1996, Moore gained the appreciation of a new generation of fans with her hilarious turn as Ben Stiller's neurotic mother in David O. Russell's Flirting With Disaster. She also experienced a sort of renaissance through her mention in other films, notably Douglas Keeve's 1995 frockumentary Unzipped, which featured a beatific Isaac Mizrahi extolling the virtues of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and singing its theme song. In addition to her television and film work, Moore, as a well-known diabetic, has been a longtime representative of the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. And though her film and television roles would become more sporadic moving into the new millennium, Moore could still be seen in the occasional theatrical release (Cheats, Against the Current) or made-for-television movie (Miss Lettie and Me, Snow Wonder) while making guest appearances in such popular sitcoms as That 70's Show and Hot in Cleveland. Moore died in 2017, at age 80.