Trivia: Born November 6, 1946, in Pasadena, CA, actress Sally Field was the daughter of another actress, Margaret Field, who is perhaps best known to film buffs as the leading lady of the sci-fi The Man From Planet X (1951). Field's stepfather was actor/stunt man Jock Mahoney, who, despite a certain degree of alienation between himself and his stepdaughter, was the principal influence in her pursuit of an acting career. Active in high-school dramatics, Field bypassed college to enroll in a summer acting workshop at Columbia studios. Her energy and determination enabled her to win, over hundreds of other aspiring actresses, the coveted starring role on the 1965 TV series Gidget. Gidget lasted only one season, but Field had become popular with teen fans and in 1967 was given a second crack at a sitcom with The Flying Nun; this one lasted three seasons and is still flying around in reruns.Somewhere along the way Field made her film debut in The Way West (1967) but was more or less ignored by moviegoers over the age of 21. Juggling sporadic work on stage and TV with a well-publicized first marriage (she was pregnant during Flying Nun's last season), Field set about shedding her "perky" image in order to get more substantial parts. Good as she was as a reformed junkie in the 1970 TV movie Maybe I'll Come Home in the Spring, by 1972 Field was mired again in sitcom hell with the short-lived weekly The Girl With Something Extra. Freshly divorced and with a new agent, she tried to radically alter her persona with a nude scene in the 1975 film Stay Hungry, resulting in little more than embarrassment for all concerned. Finally, in 1976, Field proved her mettle as an actress in the TV movie Sybil, winning an Emmy for her virtuoso performance as a woman suffering from multiple personalities stemming from childhood abuse. Following this triumph, Field entered into a long romance with Burt Reynolds, working with the actor in numerous films that were short on prestige but long on box-office appeal.By 1979, Field found herself in another career crisis: now she had to jettison the "Burt Reynolds' girlfriend" image. She did so with her powerful portrayal of a small-town union organizer in Norma Rae (1979), for which she earned her first Academy Award. At last taken completely seriously by fans and industry figures, Field spent the next four years in films of fluctuating merit (she also ended her relationship with Reynolds and married again), rounding out 1984 with her second Oscar for Places in the Heart. It was at the 1985 Academy Awards ceremony that Field earned a permanent place in the lexicon of comedy writers, talk show hosts, and impressionists everywhere by reacting to her Oscar with a tearful "You LIKE me! You REALLY LIKE me!" Few liked her in such subsequent missteps as Surrender (1987) and Soapdish (1991), but Field was able to intersperse them with winners such as the 1989 weepie Steel Magnolias and the Robin Williams drag extravaganza Mrs. Doubtfire (1993). Field found further triumph as the doggedly determined mother of Tom Hanks in the 1994 box-office bonanza Forrest Gump, which, in addition to mining box-office gold, also managed to pull in a host of Oscars and various other awards.Following Gump, Field turned her energies to ultimately less successful projects, such as 1995's Eye for an Eye with Kiefer Sutherland and Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco (1996). She also did some TV work, most notably in Tom Hanks' acclaimed From the Earth to the Moon miniseries (1998) and the American Film Institute's 100 Years....100 Movies series. The turn of the century found Field contributing her talents to a pair of down-home comedy-dramas, first with a cameo matriarch role in 2000's Where the Heart Is and later that year as director of the Minnie Driver vehicle Beautiful. Both films met with near-universal derision from critics; only the Steel Magnolias-esque Heart found a modest box-office following.In 2003, Field took a role alongside Reese Witherspoon in the legal comedy Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, & Bllonde, and in 2006 joined the cast of ABC's Brothers & Sisters in the role of matriach Nora Walker. The role earned her an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 2007. The actress was cast in the role of Aunt May for The Amazing Spiderman (2012), and was so revered as Mary Todd Lincoln in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln that she earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Trivia: A gifted leading lady and character actress, Marge Redmond enjoyed a five-decade career that took her from the stage to television to feature films. Born Margery Redmond in Cleveland, Ohio in 1924 (some sources say 1930), Redmond became the first wife of future actor Jack Weston at the start of the 1950s, when both of them were working at the Cleveland Play House. They moved from regional theater to Hollywood, and were lucky enough to arrive in the film mecca just as television production was booming there. Redmond went on to appear in dozens of television shows, from My Three Sons to The Virginian, interspersed with the occasional feature film, of which The Trouble With Angels probably gave the actress her most notable role, as Sister Liquori, the best friend of the Mother Superior played by Rosalind Russell. That part pre-figured what became Redmond's most familiar small-screen portrayal, of Sister Jacqueline on The Flying Nun. The latter series only ran for two seasons, but thanks to the fact that Sally Field was its star, it has been seen in syndicated reruns for close to 50 years. She has since worked in virtually every genre of television show, right into the 1990s and Law And Order, and was still doing voice work for animated productions in the twenty-first century.

Trivia: The daughter of the dean of McGill University's school of dentistry, Madeline Thornton made her first stage appearance at age 4 in a staging of the Passion Play. At 17, Madeline married Robert Sherwood (not the playwright of the same name), who left for parts unknown after their child was born.. Compelled to fend for herself, Madeline Sherwood (as she now billed herself) opted to stay in the theatre, working with the Montreal Repertory and co-starring in the popular wartime CBC radio serial Laura Lrd. And Her Daughter Terry. She moved to New York in 1949, where she studied at Yale and the Actor's Studio while appearing in dozens of live TV dramas. Sherwood made her first Broadway appearance in 1953, playing the troublemaking Abigail in Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Director Elia Kazan, impressed by her ability to convey unvarnished wickedness, wanted to cast her as James Dean's whorish mother in the 1955 film East of Eden. That role went instead to Jo Van Fleet, so Kazan cast Sherwood in the "consolation" role of the vituperative, eternally pregnant Sister Woman in the original 1956 Broadway staging of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Sherwood went on to repeat this role in the 1958 filmization of Streetcar Named Desire, and later played Miss Lucy in another Williams cinemadaptation, Sweet Bird of Youth (1963). Her television credits of the 1960s include stints on several soap operas, and a three-year hitch as the remonstrative Mother Superior on the Sally Field sitcom The Flying Nun (1967-70). As was the case with many "professional villains," Madeline Sherwood was anything but nasty and self-centered in real life. Her activities on behalf of the Civil Rights movement landed her in a Southern jail in 1962, a fact which forever remained a source of pride for her. And after undergoing therapy in the 1960s (playing one villainess after another had finally taken its toll), Madeline Sherwood became so fascinated with psychiatric work that, from 1970 through 1971, she studied at the GROW institute to become a psychotherapist and group counselor.

Trivia: Launching his career in South American films and television programs, Argentinean actor Alejandro Rey spent most of his professional life in Hollywood. At first just another handsome Latin type, Rey emerged into a dynamic character actor, as witness his solid performance as Russian immigrant Robin Williams' attorney/protector in Moscow on the Hudson (1984). Rey's television activities included directing dozens of episodic TV programs. Alejandro Rey is most familiar to 1960s TV addicts for his three-year stint as Puerto Rican nightclub owner Carlos Ramirez in the Sally Field vehicle The Flying Nun.

Trivia: The son of legendary vaudevillian Pat Harrington Sr., comic actor Pat Harrington Jr. rose to prominence via his many appearances on The Steve Allen Show and The Jack Paar Program in the late 1950s. However, few viewers recognized him as Pat Harrington Jr.: instead, he passed himself off as Italian golf pro Guido Panzini, a guise so convincing that he was invited to play in several major tournaments. Once the public at large was apprised that Harrington was neither Italian nor a master duffer, demands for his services as an actor increased immeasurably. In 1959, he was cast on The Danny Thomas Show as Danny's new son-in-law Pat Hannigan (Thomas had planned to spin off Harrington and his TV daughter Penney Parker into their own series, but this was not to be). In 1962, he served as host of Stump the Stars, a revamped version of the old Summer replacement perennial Pantomime Quiz. Seven years later, he was seen as sharkish PR man Tony Lawrence on the short-lived TV adaptation of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. In 1975, Harrington landed his signature role as macho, aphorism-spouting handyman Dwayne Schneider on the TV sitcom One Day at a Time; he remained with the series until its cancellation in 1984, earning an Emmy along the way. In films, Pat Harrington Jr. has been seen in a gallery of diverse portrayals, most amusingly as smoothly villainous telephone company spokesman Arlington Haven in The President's Analyst (1967). Harrington continued to act until 2012; his last acting appearance was a guest-spot on Hot in Cleveland, starring his former One Day at a Time co-star Valerie Harper. He died in 2016, at age 86.

Trivia: Ivor Francis began his entertainment career as a teen appearing on the radio in his native Toronto, Canada. During WW II he served in the RAF and afterward emigrated to New York where he landed a job on a daily serial Me Perkins. This led him to appear in several Broadway shows and from there to feature films such as I Love My Wife. During the '70s he frequently worked as an actor in Disney films, including World's Greatest Athlete. Francis also appeared frequently on television series and in made-for-TV- movies; he was a regular on Room 222. Later in his career he began teaching stagecraft in Los Angeles and New York. His daughter Genie Francis has played "Laura" on the television soap General Hospital for many years.