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: The daughter of vaudevillians, 4'11" entertainer Nancy Walker had wanted to establish herself as a serious singer. But when Nancy auditioned for Broadway impresario George Abbott, he burst out laughing at her reading of the line "Is this where the aliens go to register?" and immediately cast her as the hoydenish Blind Date in his 1941 musical production Best Foot Forward. She went on to make her Hollywood debut in the film version of this production, then returned to Broadway, where she skyrocketed to stardom in such productions as On the Town (1944) and Look, Ma, I'm Dancin' (1948). She continued headlining on Broadway throughout the 1950s, occasionally showing up on television variety series, most memorably as the teen-aged president of the Milton Berle fan club. Despite her enormous success as a comedienne, Walker was the archetypal "laughing on the outside, crying on the inside" type in private life, undergoing several years of therapy to purge herself of her insecurities. When theatrical opportunities began drying up in the late 1960s, Nancy relied more and more on television for a living. She was featured as Rosie the waitress in a series of paper-towel commercials ("It's the quicker picker upper"), co-starred as Mildred the maid on MacMillan and Wife (1971-75), and, most memorably, was cast as Ida Morgenstern, the Jewish mama to end all Jewish mamas, on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77) and Rhoda (1974-78). Though nominated for five Emmies, she never won the coveted statuette, a fact that seemed to bother her husband David Craig (a vocal coach whom she'd met when she lost her voice during Look Ma, I'm Dancing) more than Walker. Banking on her renewed celebrity, she attempted several TV starring vehicles of her own, but none lasted beyond the first season. She had better luck as a stage director, helming such theatrical productions of UTBU and A Pushcart Affair. In 1980, Walker made her film directorial debut with the Village People starrer Can't Stop the Music, produced by her then-manager Alan Carr. Nancy Walker's final regular TV-series stint was on the 1990 Fox Network weekly True Colors; two years later she died of lung cancer at the age of 71.