Trivia: Best remembered for his high-profile acting roles on two 1970s television sitcoms -- that of genial news writer Murray Slaughter on CBS's The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977) and that of sweet-natured Captain Merrill Stubing on ABC's The Love Boat (1977-1986), stage-trained actor Gavin MacLeod in fact began his career typecast as a villain. He landed parts in Hollywood features including The Sand Pebbles (1966), Deathwatch (1966), and The Comic (1969), and enjoyed a tenure as Joseph "Happy" Haines on the sitcom McHale's Navy from 1962 through 1964. After The Love Boat permanently laid anchor in the mid-'80s, MacLeod signed on as a spokesperson and pitchman for Princess Cruises and returned to regional theatrical work. He also tackled guest spots on programs including Touched by an Angel and (in a move that surprised everyone) the HBO prison drama Oz. Off-camera, MacLeod is an outspoken born-again Christian. He hosted a popular talk show on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, along with his wife, Patti (whom he divorced in 1982 and remarried three years later), called Back on Course, and personally funded many of the Greatest Adventure Stories from the Bible animated videos for children.

Trivia: Universally recognized as Ship's Doctor Adam Bricker on the blockbuster prime-time sitcom The Love Boat (1977-1986) -- a part he held for the entire nine-season run of the series -- actor Bernie Kopell entered the doors of show business via a most unlikely route. Born in Brooklyn, Kopell attended Erasmus High and then New York University (with a dramatic art major). After a stint at sea aboard the naval vessel USS Iowa, Kopell signed on to drive a taxicab in Southern California -- and achieved his big break on the day that Oregon Trail (1959) film producer Dick Einfeld hitched a ride in the back of his cab. In a span of minutes, Kopell reportedly managed to convince Einfeld that he was not really a cab driver but an actor in serious need of work. The effort paid off, and Kopell snagged his first part -- a two-line part in Oregon as an aide to president James K. Polk. In the early '60s, Kopell joined the Actors' Ring Theatre in Los Angeles, where he developed a knack for characterizations and voices; this led, in turn, to character-type roles on a myriad of television programs including The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Steve Allen Show, and My Favorite Martian (which often, though not always, cast the wiry Kopell as a Hispanic). By the early '70s, Kopell had landed steady assignments on Get Smart, Bewitched, That Girl, and other series. The Love Boat, however, embodied his breakthrough. He followed it up with an emcee assignment on The Travel Channel (hosting its Railway Adventures Across Europe) and a surge in theatrical work, with portrayals in regional productions of such plays as Rumors, A History of Shadows, and Death of a Salesman.

Trivia: Actor Fred Grandy enjoyed two distinct careers -- an initial career as an actor and a proverbial second wind on the political stage. As a thespian, Grandy signed for guest spots on early-'70s series including Maude and Phyllis, but built his reputation via his nine-season portrayal of Yeoman-Purser Burl "Gopher" Smith, right-hand man to Captain Merrill Stubing (Gavin MacLeod), on the popular television sitcom The Love Boat (1977-1986). He proved popular with audiences, but by the mid-'80s reportedly grew tired of acting and gravitated to the political arena because he found it more challenging. Indeed, in 1986 -- the year of Boat's cancelation -- Grandy was elected as a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Iowa.

Trivia: For millions of Americans, the prime-time situation comedy The Love Boat will be forever inseparable from the image of Ted Lange, an actor cast for nine seasons as the genial Isaac the Bartender on the Pacific Princess luxury liner and trademarked by his iconic "two-finger drop" greeting. Yet Lange's portrayal of Isaac scarcely hinted at the actor's dexterity or dramatic range. In truth, this actor received classical dramatic training at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and would go on, after the Princess took its final voyage in September 1986, to establish himself as a revered creative force in regional theater.Lange initially broke into films with many portrayals in Hollywood programmers during the early '70s, including Trick Baby (1972), Blade (1972), and Black Belt Jones (1974), and landed a regular role in the one-season ethnic sitcom That's My Mama (1974), as a streetwise philosopher opposite Clifton Davis (Amen) and Theresa Merritt. The Love Boat, of course, brought Lange his most widespread recognition; nonetheless (as indicated), he hearkened back to his theatrical roots beginning in the late '80s and divided his time between writing, directing, and stage acting roles. His resumé as a scribe sports at least 17 original plays including Lemon Meringue Facade, Behind the Mask -- An Evening with Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Evil Legacy -- The Story of Lucretia Borgia, while he has appeared dramatically in productions including Hair and Taming of the Shrew and has directed plays ranging from Othello to the rock & roll musical Born a Unicorn.

Trivia: On television, supporting actress Roxie Roker may best be remembered for playing outspoken Helen Willis for ten years on the popular television sitcom The Jeffersons. She and TV husband Franklin Cover comprised the first interracial married couple on network television. But in addition to television, Roker had also found success on stage and in the occasional feature film. Miami-born and Brooklyn-raised, Roker graduated from Howard University with a drama degree and then flew to England to study at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-on-Avon. During the 1960s, Roker supported herself with a secretarial job at NBC's New York office while trying to find acting jobs. Roker launched her drama career off-Broadway in productions such as Jean Genet's The Blacks. Between 1967 and '68, Roker hosted a local community television show, but that wasn't close enough to acting, so she quit to practice her craft full time. With the Negro Ensemble Company she appeared in Ododo and Rosalie Pritchet. In 1974, she earned an Obie and a Tony nomination for The River Niger. In 1975, shortly after moving to Los Angeles, Norman Lear cast Roker in The Jeffersons. In addition to this role, Roker occasionally guest-starred on other series and appeared in television movies. Her feature-film appearances were rare. Roker made her debut in Claudine (1974). In the '90s, Roker resumed her stage career, appearing in a theatrical version of The Jeffersons and then touring opposite Mary Martin and Carol Channing in Legends. Roker's son, Lenny Kravitz is a noted rock musician and record producer.

Trivia: Another of Julliard's illustrious alumni, Garrett Morris' first significant professional job was as performer and arranger with the Harry Belafonte singers. Morris went on to appear in such Broadway productions as Porgy and Bess, Hallelujah Baby, and Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death. He also wrote two plays, The Secret Place and Daddy Picou and Marie LeVeau. His first film gig was as a makeup artist on This Property is Condemned (1967); he made his movie acting bow in 1970. After a season's worth of supporting appearances on the 1973-74 sitcom Roll Out, Morris was hired as one of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players on NBC's Saturday Night Live. After his SNL stint, Morris could be seen in film supporting roles, most amusingly as "Famous Amos" takeoff Chocolate Charlie in the otherwise indifferent 1985 horror film The Stuff. He also made a return visit to Broadway, starring in I'm Not Rappaport. Back on TV, Garret Morris was seen regularly as Stan Kemrite on Martin (1992-1994) and on the weekly sitcoms of Ellen Cleghorne and Jamie Foxx.

Trivia: Best known as the Gabor sister with talent, actress Eva Gabor began her career as a cabaret singer and ice skater in her native Hungary. Forced to emigrate to the U.S. at the outbreak of World War II, Gabor was able to secure film work in mystery-woman parts in such films as Forced Landing and Pacific Blackout (both 1941). The actress didn't truly achieve star stature until her Broadway appearance in The Happy Time (1950), though, curiously, she wasn't called upon to appear in the 1952 film version. Gabor's movie career, in fact, remained rooted in supporting roles, such as one of Vincent Price's victims in The Mad Magician (1954) and as Liane d'Exelmans in the Oscar-winning Gigi (1958). Like her sister Zsa Zsa Gabor, Eva has accrued plenty of press coverage thanks to her multiple marriages, but, unlike Zsa Zsa, Gabor has managed to stay off the police blotter -- except for a 1964 incident in which she was nearly killed fighting off a couple of vicious diamond robbers. Gabor's best-loved public appearances were manifested in her five-year run as Lisa Douglas on the popular TV sitcom Green Acres (1965-1970). Contrary to the Gabor Sisters' image of contentiousness, Eva was well liked on the Green Acres set by both co-star Eddie Albert and director Richard Bare, who had nothing but praise for her professionalism and comic timing. Gabor proved she hadn't lost her touch in 1990 when the inevitable Green Acres two-hour revival movie made its way to television. She died in 1995.

Trivia: The son of actor John Wayne, Patrick Wayne made his earliest film appearances at 14, playing bits in The Quiet Man (1953) and The Sun Shines Bright (1953), both directed by "the Duke"'s mentor John Ford. The younger Wayne's first real film role was in Ford's The Long Gray Line (1955); the following year, as Lieutenant Greenhill, Wayne acted opposite his father in The Searchers (1956). After attending Loyola University, he was given an opportunity to co-star in The Young Land, a film which neither starred his dad nor was directed by John Ford. He wasn't bad, but he wasn't ready for stardom just yet, so it was back to supporting parts in The Alamo (1960), Donovan's Reef (1963), McClintock (1963), Cheyenne Autumn (1965), The Green Berets (1968) and Big Jake (1971). On his own, Patrick Wayne played leads in the special effects-laden adventures People That Time Forgot (1977) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), co-starred on the TV series The Rounders (1965) and Shirley (1979), and hosted the syndicated variety weekly The Monte Carlo Show (1980).

Trivia: Canadian actress Mimi Kuzyk is best known for playing Detective Patsy Mayo on the acclaimed 1980s police drama Hill Street Blues. Kuzyk made her feature debut in 1984's He's Hired, She's Fired, but went on to spend the bulk of her career playing supporting roles and occasional leads in television movies such as Family Sins (1987) and The Lifeforce Experiment (1995).

Trivia: Jill Whelan enjoyed an acting career as a child star, with a seven-season (1979-1986) portrayal of Vicki, Captain Merrill Stubing's young daughter, on the prime-time ABC situation comedy The Love Boat. After the series wrapped in 1986, Whelan returned for a number of Love Boat telemovies, acted in regional theater, and played a regular role on the daytime soap opera The Young and the Restless. Astute movie buffs may remember Whelan for a brief but memorable big-screen contribution that happened during her Love Boat tenure: she also portrayed Lisa Davis, the ailing child sent into convulsions when a singing nun knocks out her I.V., in the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker farce Airplane! (1980).

Trivia: Dividing his time more or less equally between big- and small-screen work, actor Ted McGinley enjoyed a considerably successful tenure as a character player, almost always appearing as beefcake heartthrob types. He began his career in the early '80s, with small roles in Garry Marshall's satirical farce Young Doctors in Love (1982) and the lurid Joan Collins telemovie Making of a Male Model (1983), but achieved his first significant break in the sitcom venue, as English teacher-cum-basketball coach Roger Phillips on the final four seasons of Happy Days (1980-1984). Fortuitously, at about the same time that Days folded, the producers of The Love Boat (on the same network, ABC) tapped McGinley to play photographer Ace Evans -- a last-ditch attempt to save the program from sagging ratings. The strategy ultimately failed when Boat ended its lengthy run in 1986, but in the meantime, McGinley landed what became a recurring role as jock Stan in the first three installments of Revenge of the Nerds. Eventually, McGinley also joined the cast of the long-running Married...With Children from 1991 through 1997, playing chauvinistic layabout Jefferson D'Arcy (second husband of the Bundys' neighbor Marcy Rhoades), and essayed roles in theatrical films including Physical Evidence (1989), Wayne's World 2 (1993), and Dick (1999). The late '90s and 2000s found McGinley evincing a heightened presence in television once again, first on Aaron Sorkin's critically worshipped yet short-lived seriocomedy Sports Night (1998-1999), then as Charley Shanowski on the sitcom Hope & Faith (2003-2006). In 2008 he competed in the reality program Dancing With the Stars, and in 2010 he appeared in the lighthearted, family-friendly Christmas with a Capital C. He would reach pop-culture immortality when the website Jumping the Shark named him as one of the signs that a TV show has run out of ideas.

Trivia: Actress Pat Klous began her career in the 1970s as a Manhattan-area model, and graduated to dramatics when tapped by CBS to star opposite fellow neophytes Connie Sellecca and Kathryn Witt in the prime-time adventure drama Flying High (1978-1979). The series told of three young women and their exploits stewardessing for the apocryphal Sunwest Airlines. It failed to take off, however, and folded about four months after it initially debuted. Ironically (or perhaps not so, given the networks' tendencies to emulate one another), the program bore more than a passing resemblance to The Love Boat, which had scored major ratings when it debuted a season prior on ABC -- so it seemed wholly fitting that Boat's producers tapped Klous to star in their thematically similar sitcom Aloha Paradise (1981) and then, a few years later, to replace Love Boat stalwart Lauren Tewes when Tewes was dropped from that program amid a serious cocaine addiction. On The Love Boat, Klous portrayed Cruise Director Judy McCoy. She remained with the program from 1984 until it folded in 1986, then did occasional television work thereafter.

Trivia: Born to a French father and Mexican mother, actress Yvette Mimieux grew up within shouting distance of Hollywood Boulevard. The blonde, well-proportioned Mimieux was a beauty contest winner and model when signed to an MGM contract in 1959. With her second film appearance as ethereal 800th century girl Weena in The Time Machine (1960), Mimieux achieved stardom; with her next film, Where the Boys Are (1960), she proved capable of heavy dramatics via a discreetly handled "gang rape" sequence. An appearance as a terminally ill girl on the 1964 Dr. Kildare episode "Tyger Tyger" drew a great deal of press attention for Mimieux, principally because she spent most of her early scenes in a bikini. The actress's subsequent roles showed promise, but she generally found herself playing second fiddle to the leading man; in Disney's Monkeys Go Home (1966), she was upstaged by a chimpanzee. Tired of adhering to the whims of others, Mimieux took to writing her own screenplays: in the 1974 TV movie Hit Lady, she is undeniably impressive as a scantily clad professional assassin. Since her 1972 marriage to director Stanley Donen Mimieux has curtailed her film appearances to devote her time to her husband, her poetry, her dance and music lessons, and her many lucrative business endeavors.

Trivia: A star of television and feature films, Teri Hatcher also holds the distinction of being the woman whose photographs were most frequently downloaded from the Internet in the late '90s. With her brunette hair, beautiful brown eyes, mischievous smile, and petite but curvaceous figure, it isn't difficult to imagine why. While Hatcher could probably thrive for years as a virtual pinup, there is more to her than drop-dead gorgeous looks. The daughter of a physicist and a computer programmer, she initially studied math and engineering at a San Francisco area community college before the acting bug bit. She later enrolled at the American Conservatory Theatre. At age 20, she was a cheerleader for the San Francisco 49ers. Hatcher made her television debut in 1985, playing Amy, one of the singing/dancing Mermaids on the revived anthology series Love Boat. Shortly thereafter, she became a regular on the action-adventure series MacGyver and more guest-starring roles on other shows followed, but she did not become a bona fide star until 1993, after she was selected to star opposite Dean Cain in the television series Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. Hatcher stuck with the show until it ended its run in 1997, and though she would lay low for a few subsuquent years, Hatcher's career caught a second wind and a half with her starring role on the comedy Desperate Housewives, a phenomenally successful show that made the actress a bigger star than ever.