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: When the decision was made in 1974 to transform Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper) from frumpy kvetcher to desirable bachelorette on the TV series Rhoda, somebody had to inherit all those self-deprecating jokes told by Rhoda on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The decision was made to create a new character: Rhoda's pudgy, insecure younger sister, Brenda. The actress chosen for the role sounded as though she'd been a New Yorker since the womb, but in fact Julie Kavner was born and raised in California. A theatre student at USC-San Francisco, Kavner came to Rhoda with no professional experience, but before the series ran its course, she had won an Emmy for her portrayal. With her performance in the 1986 film Hannah and Her Sisters, Kavner became one of the most prominent members of director Woody Allen's stock company, essaying very un-Brendalike roles in Radio Days (1987), the "Oedipus Wrecks" segment of New York Stories (1989), Alice (1990) and Shadows and Fog (1992). Kavner's regular stint as an ensemble player on the Fox TV network's Tracy Ullman Show led to her long-running assignment as the gravelly voice of Marge Simpson on the weekly animated series The Simpsons. Even as she continued to work on The Simpsons for the nex twenty years, she would make occasional big-screen appearances in projects as diverse as I'll Do Anything, Forget Paris, Judy Berlin, and Click.She also maintained an ongoing working relationship with Woody Allen appearing in Deconstructing Harry and in the 1994 made-for TV adaptation of the famous director's play Don't Drink the Water.

Trivia: In contrast to the insufferably intellectual characters he has played so often and so well, David Ogden Stiers wasn't much of a student while growing up in Eugene, Oregon. Like many another "underachiever," Stiers excelled at the things he was truly interested in, such as music (he played piano and french horn) and acting. After flunking out of the University of Oregon, Stiers stepped up his amateur-theatrical activities, and at age 20 was hired by the California Shakespeare Festival at Santa Clara, where he spent the next seven years performing the Classics. After briefly working with the famous San Francisco improv group The Committee, Stiers attended Juilliard, in hopes of improving his vocal delivery. Evidently his training paid off: in 1974, Stiers co-starred with Zero Mostel in the Broadway production Ulysses in Nighttown, then went on to appear opposite Doug Henning in the long-running musical The Magic Show. Despite his success, Stiers detested New York, and at the first opportunity he "ran screaming" back to the West Coast. He was cast in the short-lived sitcom Doc in 1975, and the following year played an important role in the 90-minute pilot for Charlie's Angels, though he passed when offered a regular assignment in the Angels series proper. Stiers' performance as a stuttering TV executive in a 1976 Mary Tyler Moore Show episode led to his being cast as the overbearing Major Charles Emerson Winchester on the ever-popular M*A*S*H; at first signed to a two-year contract, Stiers remained with the series until its final episode in February of 1983. Before, during and after his tenure on M*A*S*H, Stiers kept busy in made-for-TV films, lending his patented authoritativeness to such real-life characters as Dr. Charles Mayo (in 1977's A Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story), critic and social arbiter Cleveland Amory (1984's Anatomy of an Illness) and President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1987's J. Edgar Hoover). He was also seen as pontificating DA Michael Reston in several of the Perry Mason TV-movies of the late 1980s. Disney animation devotees will remember Stiers for his voiceover work as Cogsworth in Beauty and the Beast (1988) and Lord Ratcliffe in Pocahontas (1995). Stiers continued his work in film, voiceover work and television, appearing in projects like Woody Allen's The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001), voicing Jumba in Lilo & Stitch (2002) and playing the recurring role of Oberoth on Stargate Atlantis in 2007. Parlaying his lifelong love of classical music into a second career, David Ogden Stiers has served as guest conductor for over 70 major U.S. symphony orchestras.