Trivia: Andy Kaufman's performances were like no other. He not only pushed the boundaries of good taste and audience tolerance, he also created a myriad of strange, wonderful, and sometimes horrific characters, switching effortlessly from one to the other, effectively blurring the lines between Kaufman the man and Kaufman the artist. For many years, his fans argued whether or not obnoxious lounge singer Tony Clifton (whom Kaufman once hired to open for his live shows) was for real or whether he was an elaborate persona. Kaufman himself best summed up his art, stating, " I am not a comic, I have never told a joke....The comedian's promise is that he will go out there and make you laugh with him....My only promise is that I will try to entertain you as best I can. I can manipulate people's reactions. There are different kinds of laughter. Gut laughter is where you don't have a choice, you've got to laugh. Gut laughter doesn't come from the intellect. And it's much harder for me to evoke now, because I'm known. They say, 'Oh wow, Andy Kaufman, he's a really funny guy.' But I'm not trying to be funny. I just want to play with their heads."Born and raised in the upper-class Long Island suburb of Great Neck, NY, Kaufman had a lifelong fascination with performing. At age nine, Kaufman was performing at children's parties and in 1963, he unsuccessfully tried out for a spot at Budd Friedman's improvisational comedy club. He discovered the joy of "being" Elvis Presley in 1964 and later in his career became so good at imitating the moves and physical presence of "The King," that Presley himself deemed Kaufman his favorite impersonator. A year after his high school graduation, Kaufman enrolled in the Television and Radio program at Grahm Junior College in Boston. While there, he started performing at local coffee houses and appearing in the campus-sponsored The Soul Time Review. Kaufman went to Spain in 1971 to study Transcendental Meditation and travel. Later that year, he successfully auditioned for Budd Friedman and landed a standup gig at a Long Island club. More club dates followed and television appearances followed. In 1975, Kaufman appeared in the first broadcast of NBC's sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live. Through the decade up to the early '80s, Kaufman would periodically return to host the show. His comedy was typically extreme and sometimes unfathomable. In November 1982, the producers of SNL responded to a viewer telephone poll and asked Kaufman to never again host the show. In 1978, Kaufman took one of his most popular characters, the Foreign Man, an incomprehensible comic from Central Europe, and translated him into the delightful, sometimes poignant foreign auto mechanic Latka Gravas on the popular sitcom Taxi (1978-1983). Kaufman created his famed world Inter-Gender Wrestling matches in 1979. A longtime aficionado of professional wrestling but too small to beat men, he would wrestle with female audience members, offering a large cash prize if they could pin him. 400 tried, but none succeeded. In 1981, Kaufman hosted Fridays, an experimental comedy show in which his intentional line flubbing caused a fight between himself, the cast, and the crew. The following week, Kaufman aired a tearful taped apology that may or may not have been a put-on. More controversy followed when the performer got into an ugly row with professional wrestler Jerry "The King" Lawler that culminated in his throwing hot coffee on Lawler during a taping of the Late Night With David Letterman show in 1982. The fight was precipitated by an earlier wrestling match between Kaufman and Lawler in which the wrestler inflicted a serious head injury to the comic. This violent feud between the two is further detailed in the 1983 documentary chronicle of Kaufman's wrestling career, I'm From Hollywood. Kaufman made his feature-film debut as an actor in Demon (1977) and afterward, only appeared in three more films. Kaufman developed a cough in late 1983 that was diagnosed as a rare form of lung cancer. Though only in his mid-thirties, a teetotaler, lifelong nonsmoker, and a vegetarian, Kaufman was only given a few months to live. He tried a variety of alternative healing therapies, as well as chemotherapy, but nothing worked and Kaufman died in 1984. Ironically, some fans believe the illness was all an elaborate hoax and maintain that Kaufman is still alive, waiting to come back in a couple decades. Though it is extremely doubtful that even Kaufman would be able to pull off such a hoax, the thought that others would think him capable of doing it would have pleased him.

Trivia: A professional actress since age 14, Ohio-born Carol Kane is best known for essaying a staggering variety of characterizations in her career. Most of her early film roles were fleeting but memorable, such as that of the hippie girlfriend of Art Garfunkel in Carnal Knowledge (1971), the "sailor's plaything" in The Last Detail (1973) and the terrified bank teller in Dog Day Afternoon (1973). Kane's first starring appearance was in Hester Street (1975), wherein she was Oscar-nominated for her portrayal of a Jewish newlywed in turn-of-the-century New York. From 1981 through 1983, Kane played Simka, the wife of immigrant mechanic Latka Gavras (Andy Kaufman) on the TV sitcom Taxi. Simka's country of origin was fictitious, but Kane and Kaufman managed between them to "create" a Slavic language peppered with ridiculous, non-sequitur terms of endearment. The actress won an Emmy for her work on Taxi. Other regular TV sitcom assignments for Kane have included 1986's All Is Forgiven and 1990's American Dreamer. Kane has excelled in bizarre character roles, notably the kvetching old peasant wife in The Princess Bride (1986), the abusive "Ghost of Christmas Present" in Scrooged (1988), and the toothless, witchlike Grandmama in the two Addams Family theatrical features. She remained an in-demand character actress appearing in a variety of movies and TV shows including Even Cowgirls Get the blues, Trees Lounge, Office Killer, and appearing as herself in the Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon. She slowed down not a whit in the 21st century playing parts in My First Mister, Love in the Time of Money, The Pacifier, My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, and the 2012 indie Sleepwalk With Me.

Trivia: Had he been in Hollywood in the 1930s or 1940s, Vincent Schiavelli's Halloween-mask countenance, shock of unkempt hair and baleful voice might have permanently consigned him to minor roles in horror or gangster pictures. As it happened, Schiavelli became an actor during the 1960s, a period when, thanks to unpretty stars like Elliott Gould and Dustin Hoffman, homeliness opened more career doors than it closed. After several seasons' worth of stage experience, Schiavelli made his first film appearance in Milos Forman's Taking Off (1971) playing a pot-smoking support group leader by the name of...Schiavelli. He would work with Forman again on several occasions, most memorably as Salieri's(F. Murray Abraham) phlegmatic valet in the opening scenes of Amadeus (1984). In 1972, Schiavelli played his first regular TV-series role, gay set designer Peter Panama in The Corner Bar. Fourteen years later, he could be seen as oddball science teacher Hector Vargas in the weekly sitcom Fast Times, repeating his role from the 1982 theatrical feature Fast Times at Ridgemont High. One of his best-known screen roles was the ill-tempered Subway Ghost, who teaches newly dead Patrick Swayze how to move solid objects with sheer "hate power" in the 1990 blockbuster Ghost. Tim Conway fans are most familiar with Schiavelli through his appearances as Conway's dull-witted assistant in the popular Dorf videocassettes. Previously married to actress Allyce Beasley, the couple would part ways in 1988 and Schiavelli would subsequently wed Carol Mukhalian.

Trivia: America's most recognizable pop psychologist, columnist, author, lecturer, business consultant, and radio personality, Dr. Joyce Brothers has created a fun side-career making cameo appearances in feature films and television shows. Brothers first appeared on television in 1955 on The $64,000 Question, becoming only the second person to win the game show. She used her new celebrity to launch a career, first appearing in guest spots as a commentator before getting her own show, The Dr. Joyce Brothers Show. In addition to hosting her own show, she continued to appear as a guest on both talk shows and game shows, and often appeared on sitcoms as herself, maintaining a presence onscreen for more than five decades. Brothers died in 2013 at the age of 85.