Trivia: Born in the Bronx, NY, to an upper-middle-class Irish family, Carroll O'Connor's father was a well-connected attorney and his mother was a school teacher. The family lived well, in the Forest Hills section of Queens, until O'Connor's father ran afoul of the law and was convicted of fraud. Despite this setback in the family's well-being, O'Connor managed to attend college and considered a career as a sportswriter, but those aspirations were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Rejected by the United States Navy, he enrolled instead in the Merchant Marine Academy, but he later abandoned that pursuit, instead becoming a merchant seaman. After the war, O'Connor considered journalism as a career, but a trip to Dublin in 1950 changed the course of his life, as he discovered the acting profession. While attending college in Dublin, he began appearing in productions of the Gate Theater and also at the Edinburgh Festival, where he played Shakespearean roles. Returning to New York in 1954, he and his wife worked as substitute schoolteachers while he looked for acting work, which he found, after a long dry spell in which he despaired of ever getting a break, in Burgess Meredith's production of James Joyce's Ulysses. O'Connor got a role in which he received favorable notice from the critics, and that, in turn, led to his breakthrough part, as a bullying, greedy studio boss in an off-Broadway production of The Big Knife. O'Connor jumped next to television, at the very tail-end of the era of live TV drama in New York. Beginning in 1960 with his portrayal of the prosecutor in the Armstrong Circle Theater production of The Sacco-Vanzetti Story, he established himself on the small screen as a good, reliable character actor, who was able to melt into any role with which he was presented. Over the next decade, O'Connor worked in everything from Westerns to science fiction. He played taciturn landowners, likable aliens, enemy agents (on The Man From U.N.C.L.E., in "The Green Opal Affair"), and other character roles with equal aplomb. He also appeared in several unsold television pilots during the 1960s, including The Insider with David Janssen, and Luxury Liner starring Rory Calhoun, playing character roles; and he did a pilot of his own, Walk in the Night -- directed and co-written by Robert Altman -- in which he co-starred with Andrew Duggan. O'Connor's movie career followed quickly from his television debut, starting with appearances in three dramatic films (most notably Lonely Are the Brave) in 1961. He was one of many actors who managed to get "lost" in the sprawling 20th Century Fox production of Cleopatra, but he fared better two years later in Otto Preminger's epic-length World War II drama In Harm's Way. O'Connor, playing Commander Burke, was very visible in his handful of scenes with John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, and Preminger thought enough of the actor to mention him by name along with the other stars in the film's trailer. He had major supporting roles, serious and comedic, respectively, in such high-profile movies as Hawaii and What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?, of which the latter proved critical to his subsequent career. O'Connor had been in demand for television roles since the early '60s. In an episode of The Outer Limits, he revealed his flexibility by playing a somewhat befuddled alien investigator from Mars, masquerading as a pawnshop owner in a seedy section of New York, and jumping from a slightly affected, carefully pronounced diction in one line to a working-class dialect and manner in the same shot (for benefit of a human onlooker in the scene). He had also given a very warm, memorable, and touching performance in "Long Live the King," an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and producer Irwin Allen had wanted O'Connor for the role of Dr. Smith on Lost in Space early in the character's conception, when the Smith figure was thoroughly villainous. Although he didn't get the part of Dr. Smith, O'Connor later appeared in "The Lost Patrol" episode of Allen's science fiction series The Time Tunnel. He had also been up for the role of the Skipper in Sherwood Schwartz's series Gilligan's Island, a role that was finally won by Alan Hale Jr. At the end of the 1960s, while O'Connor was busying himself in movies ranging from Westerns to crime films and mysteries, including Warning Shot, Waterhole No. 3, Marlowe, and For Love of Ivy, and distinguishing himself in all of them, CBS began preparing a television series called Those Were the Days. Adapted from a British series, it dealt life from the point-of-view of Archie Bunker, a fed-up, bigoted working-class resident of New York's outer borough of Queens. The network had tried for a big name, approaching Mickey Rooney to play the part, but he turned it down, and then co-producer Bud Yorkin remembered O'Connor's blustery comic performance as General Bolt in What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? O'Connor was offered the role and accepted. He was as busy as ever with movie work, including his portrayal of a memorably boisterous and comical general in Kelly's Heroes, which was shot in Europe in 1970, and the series -- now called All in the Family -- didn't seem a likely or essential prospect for success. Within weeks of All in the Family's premiere in January of 1971, however, O'Connor had become one of the most recognizable and popular leading men on television. O'Connor had never played more than major supporting roles in movies, so there were no feature films to license starring the new pop culture hero; but CBS did pull Walk in the Night, the unsold pilot from three years earlier, starring O'Connor as a detective in a race against time to save a man's life, and aired it with the kind of fanfare normally reserved for major feature films. From 1971 on, O'Connor never looked back: He got star billing the next year in the network television production Of Thee I Sing (1972), and got his first chance to star in a feature film in Law and Disorder, in 1974. O'Connor would play nothing but leads from then on, and command a leading man's salary, a matter that led to a contractual dispute in 1974 that resulted in the actor absenting himself from All in the Family for a series of shows before it was resolved. From then on, entire productions, such as the TV-movie adaptation of The Last Hurrah (1977), would be built around him. He also returned to the theater periodically with far less success, starring in and directing a handful of theatrical productions that seldom got good notices or lingered long on-stage. O'Connor earned four Emmy awards as Archie Bunker, a recognition of the convincing mixture of warmth and anger that he brought to the character, and such was his popularity in the role, that he was able to parlay it into a spin-off series for four seasons called Archie Bunker's Place. It seemed for a time in the 1980s that O'Connor would be forever locked into the role, until 1987 when he got the part of laconic small-town Southern police chief Bill Gillespie in the television series In the Heat of the Night. Taking over a part originated on screen by Rod Steiger, O'Connor rebuilt the character from the ground up, making Gillespie a strong-willed, yet soft-spoken, flawed, sometimes crude, even occasionally bigoted man who was learning to be better. His work in the series earned O'Connor an additional Emmy, and he eventually took over control of the production, transforming In the Heat of the Night from a routine cop show into one of the better dramatic series of its era, with police work only incidental to its content (and hardly a car chase in sight), in a run lasting through 1994.

Trivia: Each and every week from 1971 to 1980, the popular TV sitcom All in the Family was heralded by the glass-shattering offkey singing of Edith Bunker, aka "Dingbat." This tended to obscure the fact that Jean Stapleton, the woman who so brilliantly portrayed Edith not only possessed a lilting, well-modulated singing voice, but also was as far removed as possible from a "dingbat" in real life. While attending Hunter College, Stapleton began her performing career as a member of the Robert Shaw Chorale. She made her professional stage debut in 1941, then went on to fruitful work-study associations with the American Apprentice Theater, the American Actors Company, the American Theater Wing, and director-acting coach Harold Clurman. Her first Broadway appearance was in the 1953 production In the Summer House; the following year, she made her TV bow as a semi-regular on the daytime drama Woman With a Past. She endeared herself to Broadwayites with her wistfully funny characterizations in the SRO musicals Damn Yankees, Bells Are Ringing, and Funny Girl, roles that she would carry over into the film versions of these hits. In 1958, she made her first appearance at the Totem Pole Playhouse in Fayetteville, PA, a summer-stock operation managed by her husband, Bill Putch. Most of Stapleton's onscreen work in the 1960s and 1970s could be found in New York-based movies (Something Wild, Up the Down Staircase, Klute) and TV series (Car 54, Where Are You, The Defenders, The Patty Duke Show). Her earliest association with producer-director Norman Lear occurred in the 1969 theatrical feature Cold Turkey, in which she played a neurotic housewife named Edith. When Lear began assembling the cast for his upcoming TV sitcom All in the Family, he immediately thought of Stapleton for the role of slow-witted, strident, essentially kindhearted Bronx housewife Edith Bunker. Before leaving the series in 1980, Stapleton earned three Emmy Awards for her portrayal of Edith -- not to mention the undying affection of millions. Once free of All in the Family, she sought out roles that she hoped would demonstrate her versatility: She played the distraught mother of a drug-addicted teenager (enacted by her real-life son, John Putch) in the made-for-TV Angel Dusted (1981), and effectively portrayed Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1982 TV biopic Eleanor: First Lady of the World. Stapleton kept her comic skills sharpened by appearing in the made-for-cable productions of Shelley Duvall: She was terrific as a no-nonsense Fairy Godmother ("Trust me. This is important.") in Duvall's Faerie Tale Theater adaptation of Cinderella, and even better as the title characters in Mother Goose Rock 'n' Rhyme and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. In 1990, she briefly returned to weekly television as co-star (with Whoopi Goldberg) of the offbeat sitcom Bagdad Café. Jean Stapleton was then an infrequent but always welcome TV guest-star presence; in 1995, she startled (and delighted) her Edith Bunker fans with her con brio portrayal of Lea Thompson's sex-starved aunt in an episode of Caroline in the City. In 1998 she had a major part in the romantic comedy You've Got Mail, and that same year she voiced a character in Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World. Stapleton retired from acting on screen in 2001. She passed away in 2013 at the age of 90.

Trivia: The daughter of a Portland doctor, Sally Ann Struthers left home at 18, determined to become a star. The 5' 1", frizzy-haired Ms. Struthers attended classes at the Pasadena Playhouse, then worked as a singer, dancer and commercial actress before the breaks began arriving in rapid succession in 1970. By the end of that year, she had been seen on TV as a comedy-ensemble player on The Smothers Brother Comedy Hour and a chorus girl (in fact, the only chorus girl) on The Tim Conway Comedy Hour; she'd played a small but attention-grabbing role in the Jack Nicholson film Five Easy Pieces; and she'd provided the voice for Pebbles Flintstone on the animated Pebbles and Bamm Bamm Show. Oh, before we forget: also in 1970, Struthers was cast as Gloria Bunker Stivic on the groundbreaking TV sitcom All in the Family. During her seven-season stint as Gloria, she shared a 1972 "Best Supporting Actress" Emmy with The Mary Tyler Moore Show's Valerie Harper. She also took time out to deliver an image-busting performance as the sluttish wife of kidnap victim Jack Dodson in Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway (1972), and to star in such made-for-TV films as Aloha Means Goodbye (1974), Hey, I'm Alive (1975) and The Great Houdinis (1976). In 1975, Struthers very nearly walked off All in the Family over a much-publicized salary dispute; she left the series when her contract ended in 1978, returning briefly to appear in an episode titled "California Here We Are"--and winning a second Emmy as a result. Though big things were predicted for Struthers, her post-Family years were rough. Her TV-movie appearances began playing to ever-diminishing ratings, while her highly touted 1981 Broadway debut in Wally's Café was a bust. It was a frightened, insecure Sally Struthers who returned to series television in 1982 as the star of Gloria, an All in the Family spin-off which recast the actress in the role that made her famous. Despite initially good ratings, Gloria tanked after a year. After another foredoomed Broadway appearance in a female version of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple, Sally accepted the role of klutzy divorcee Marsha McMurray Shrimpton in the 1986 syndicated sitcom 9 to 5. Around this same time, Struthers began showing up as the TV spokesperson for a charitable organization serving malnourished Third-World children. While none could doubt the actress' sincerity, her strident, lachrymose fund-raising appeals were treated with merciless derision by the many sketch-comedy TV series of the period. Though her career may never again reach the heights of her All in the Family days, Sally Struthers has kept busy in a variety of show-business ventures, including voiceover assignments on such series as Talespin and Dinosaurs, and a recent touring production of the musical Grease, in which she co-starred with another TV favorite of yore, The Monkees' Davy Jones.

Trivia: As the son of multi-talented comedic genius Carl Reiner (Your Show of Shows), Rob Reiner instantly outgrew his father's legacy to establish himself as an independent force in multiple facets of the entertainment industry. Born in the Bronx in 1945, Reiner moved to Los Angeles with his folks at the age of 12 (not coincidentally, the very same year that the NYC-based Caesar's Hour, with Carl Reiner as a regular contributor, wrapped) and soon began acting in regional theater and improv ensembles. After appearing on various episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents from the age of 16 and studying drama at UCLA, Reiner co-founded the improvisational comedy troupe The Session, then made his onscreen cinematic debut in his father's Enter Laughing (1967) and contributed scripts (in his dad's vein) to CBS's controversial The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. His first massive break arrived when he landed the role of Mike "Meathead" Stivic, the liberal, Polish son-in-law to Carroll O'Connor's racist working stiff Archie Bunker, on Norman Lear's groundbreaking network hit All in the Family. In 1971, Reiner wed Penny Marshall (the sister of another comic demagogue, Garry Marshall); the marrieds frequently appeared together on ABC's The Odd Couple. Reiner earned two Emmys for All in the Family, but ended his role in 1978 (after seven seasons) as the series transitioned into Archie Bunker's Place. A now-forgotten telemovie followed -- the romantic comedy More Than Friends, written by and starring Reiner and Marshall (and directed by future Cheers progenitor James Burrows) -- but by that point, the Reiners' marriage was in disarray; a divorce ensued in 1979, followed by several years of inactivity on Reiner's end.Reiner bounced back as a director, however (and then some) in 1984, with the hysterical mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, ostensibly a spoof of The Song Remains the Same, The Kids Are Alright, The Last Waltz, and other mid-'70s concert films, about a gleefully moronic glam rock band (Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer) whose hits include "Sex Farm," "Smell the Glove," and "Hellhole." The picture became a sensation (a massive cult hit), led to several Reiner-less follow-ups with the principal cast (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind), and -- most importantly -- launched Reiner as a directorial force. He helmed a cute and charming sophomore effort, the teen comedy The Sure Thing (1985), which boasts two superb lead performances by John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga, and demonstrates great taste and sensitivity, but failed to make a splash despite solid reviews (Roger Ebert declared it "a small miracle" and Variety assessed it as "sweetly old fashioned" and "appealing.") The following year, the director struck box-office gold with his third effort, Stand by Me (1986). In this coming-of-age saga, adapted from a Stephen King short story by Ray Gideon and Bruce A. Evans, Reiner successfully blends comedy, drama, and sentiment, and elicits exemplary performances from an ensemble of teenage performers including River Phoenix and Wil Wheaton, in his story of a bunch of adolescent boys who venture out to find a local boy's corpse. For his fourth effort, Reiner helmed the legendary William Goldman's adaptation of his own 1973 fantasy novel, The Princess Bride (which had purportedly floated around Hollywood for 13 years), and scored in the process -- especially with young viewers, who immediately warmed to Cary Elwes' dashing adventurer and Robin Wright's heroine. (The picture's neat comic turns by Billy Crystal, Wallace Shawn, and Andre the Giant stretched its appeal to older viewers, as well.) Reiner followed this up with another four-star blockbuster, and one of the most lucrative (and affable) pictures of 1989, the romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally, written by Nora Ephron. It sports exceptional lead performances by Crystal and Meg Ryan, and -- in one of the most infamous movie bits of the past few decades, a cameo by Reiner's own mother, Estelle, who provides the film's funniest line.Reiner began the 1990s with another Stephen King outing: Misery, a claustrophobic horror picture adapted from a 1987 King novel. In directing the picture, Reiner elicited exceptional performances from James Caan and Kathy Bates. The latter won a Best Actress Academy Award for her portrayal of the psychopathic ex-nurse Annie Wilkes, who confines Caan's author in her home and forces him to write a new manuscript under the duress of torture and threatened homicide. With a trio of A-list actors including Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise, and Demi Moore, the director's late 1992 courtroom thriller A Few Good Men (adapted by Aaron Sorkin from his play) earned a Best Picture Oscar nomination and another Golden Globe nomination for Reiner. Unfortunately, this marked the beginning of a decline, of sorts, for Reiner. He then helmed 1994's god-awful family-friendly comedy North (reviled by just about everybody). The following year's The American President charmed audiences, but 1996's Ghosts of Mississippi struck most viewers as uneven. In 1999, Reiner produced, directed, and co-starred in The Story of Us, a romantic comedy starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Bruce Willis, but it opened up to mediocre reviews. (Ebert gave it one star and moaned, "Watching it is like taking a long trip in a small car with the Bickersons"; Janet Maslin observed that it "offers such an arthritic vision of middle-aged marriage that it feels like the first Jack Lemmon comedy made expressly for the baby-boom generation.") Perhaps riled by these disappointments -- and seeking greater immersion in California politics -- Reiner took several years off as a director, until 2003's Alex & Emma, a romantic comedy about writer's block starring Luke Wilson and Kate Hudson. With one or two exceptions, critics universally panned the picture (giving Reiner his most terrible reviews to date). 2005's Rumor Has It..., yet another romantic comedy starring Jennifer Aniston as a woman who goes off in search of her family's roots, also opened to dismal reviews and lackluster box office, despite the star appeal of Aniston and her male lead, Kevin Costner. In 1987, Reiner co-founded Castle Rock Productions (the company's name refers to a fictional town created by Stephen King). In addition to directing and producing, Reiner has also pursued an acting career on the side, with supporting roles and cameos in such films as Postcards From the Edge (1990), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), Bullets Over Broadway (1994), The First Wives Club (1996), Primary Colors (1998), EDtv (1999), The Muse (1999), The Story of Us (1999), and The Majestic (2001). Later, he delivered a performance as Wirschafter in his own Alex & Emma (2003) and cameo'd as himself in the 2003 David Spade comedy Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star. Between 2004 and 2006, Reiner joined Whoopi Goldberg, Mandy Patinkin, William H. Macy, and others to voice the late Christopher Reeve's CG-animated feature Everybody's Hero, about a boy who attempts to retrieve a talking baseball bat from a crooked security guard. In 2007 he had one of his biggest late-career successes directing Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman in The Bucket List. Three years later he made the little-seen comedy Flipped. Reiner married his second wife, Michele Singer Reiner, in 1989.

Trivia: Though Mike Evans was roundly known to 1970s prime-time devotees as Lionel Jefferson, the scion of dry-cleaning entrepreneur George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley) and his wife, Louise (Isabel Sanford), on producer Norman Lear's The Jeffersons (1975-1985), the bulk of his career actually spanned three hit '70s sitcoms, all created by Lear: All in the Family, The Jeffersons, and Good Times. Evans then parlayed his efforts into prime-time miniseries before fading from the limelight in the '80s and '90s.Born Michael Jonas Evans on November 3, 1949, in Salisbury, NC, Evans moved to southern California with his family during childhood, and studied acting at Los Angeles City College after high school. Not long after Evans graduated from LACC (in 1971), the socially conscious mega-producer Lear cast the young man as Lionel Jefferson, the son of bigoted Archie Bunker's next-door neighbors George and Louise Jefferson, in his groundbreaking CBS series All in the Family. The program, of course, became a massive runaway hit during the summer of 1971, and carried its success until the fall of 1983. By 1975, however, Lear decided to "spin off" George and Louise into a series of their own, by having up-and-coming entrepreneur George strike it rich in the dry-cleaning business. The Jeffersons premiered on January 18, 1975, but Lear used Evans as an element to help viewers transition between the two series -- by keeping Lionel on All in the Family for several months (the character moved temporarily into his parents' old house in Queens, and thus stayed next door to Archie Bunker). Evans remained with the series until the fall of 1975, and departed amicably to pursue other interests -- specifically, an assignment co-creating (with Eric Monte) and scripting one of Lear's other sitcoms, Good Times (1974-1979), itself a spin-off of Lear's Maude, which the producer had spun off of Lear's All in the Family. During his absence from The Jeffersons, Evans also appeared as Arnold Simms in the ten-hour ABC miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man (1976). In the interim, Mike Evans was temporarily replaced by another young black actor, Damon Evans (no relation), on the Jeffersons set. Mike Evans returned to The Jeffersons to play Lionel in the autumn of 1979. Over the remainder of the series run, the character of Lionel married Jenny (Berlinda Tolbert), the daughter of a neighboring biracial couple, and a year after Mike Evans returned to the series in 1979, the onscreen couple had a baby daughter. Over time, Lionel and Jenny separated, then divorced, with Evans permanently departing from the series in 1981.The Jeffersons marked Evans' last major television effort, though he appeared briefly in a 2000 episode of Walker, Texas Ranger. During his later years, Evans invested heavily in southern California real estate. He died of throat cancer, at age 57, on December 14, 2006.

Trivia: Defying her mother's wishes, African-American actress Isabel Sanford secretly worked as a nightclub performer in her teens. Upon winning 3rd prize in an Apollo Theatre amateur contest, Sanford could keep her new career a secret no longer. Married to a house painter who worked only on a seasonal basis, she held down a full-time job as a keypunch operator at the New York City department of Welfare, spending her evenings acting with such groups as Harlem Y and the American Negro Theatre. Seeking out better opportunities, Sanford packed her family into a bus and headed to Hollywood in the early 1960s. Her breakthrough film role was in Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner; she played Tillie the cook, who heartily disapproved of the upcoming interracial marriage between Katharine Houghton and Sidney Poitier (the hardest part of this assignment was not mouthing the "controversial" dialogue but preparing dinner in a key scene; Sanford had never learned to cook!) On the strength of this film, Isabel Sanford was hired for several guest spots on The Carol Burnett Show, which led to her most famous characterization: Louise Jefferson, the acerbic but loving wife of "movin' on up" Sherman Hemsley, on the immensely popular sitcom The Jeffersons (1975-82).

Trivia: Hemsley is a short, aggressive black comic actor. He came to acting late; after working for the Post Office he moved to New York in the late '60s, hoping to find theater work. Soon he won the choice role of Gitlow in the Broadway musical Purlie (1970), and his performance made a strong, lasting impression on TV producer Norman Lear. When Lear's TV sitcom All in the Family became a hit, Lear created the character of George Jefferson, Archie Bunker's black neighbor; after deciding that his first choice for the role was all wrong, in 1973 Lear tracked Hemsley down in San Francisco, where the latter was appearing in the play Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope. Hemsley was signed for the role, and played it from 1973-85; from 1975-85 he was the costar of the spinoff sitcom The Jeffersons, a top-rated show for many years, for which Hemsley at one point earned $60,000 per episode. He later starred in Amen (1986-91). In 1981 he reprised his Broadway role in the cable-TV production of Purlie. He debuted onscreen in Love at First Bite (1979), appearing with Isabel Sanford, his TV wife. His screen appearances have been few.

Trivia: As a teenager, American performer Betty Garrett won a scholarship to New York's Neighborhood Playhouse, and in 1938 she debuted onstage in the Mercury Theater production of Danton's Death. Later she danced with the Martha Graham company, sang in nightclubs and resort hotels, and held down odd jobs between engagements. In 1942 Garrett debuted on Broadway in the revue Let Freedom Ring, leading to other Broadway appearances. For her work in Call Me Mister she won the Donaldson Award in 1946, after which MGM signed her to a movie contract. She went on to make five musicals in the late '40s, impressing critics with her singing, dancing, and bright comic acting; as an energetic and effervescent second lead, she typically played the heroine's best friend. Garrett took two years off to give birth to two children; meanwhile, her husband, actor Larry Parks, admitted to the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had been a Communist. This ruined Garrett's screen career for several years, during which she and Parks appeared in a nightclub act and toured the U.S. with a play. In the mid-'50s she appeared in two more films and had the chance to renew her career; however, her husband was still blacklisted, so she chose to retire from the screen. She and Parks went on to work in stock and occasionally on TV, but they derived their income primarily from real estate. In the mid-'70s Garrett had a recurring role as Archie Bunker's neighbor on the TV sitcom All In the Family, and played landlady Edna Babish on Laverne and Shirley.

Trivia: During the '70s and '80s Vincent Gardenia was one of the most familiar character actors in film, television, and on the Broadway stage. Though viewers may not always have remembered his name, his sad eyes, hawk-nosed Italian-American face, short, stocky build, and distinctive often booming Brooklyn-accented voice and exaggerated gestures made him instantly recognizable. Gardenia was born Vincent Scognamiglio in Naples, Italy, but he was raised in New York from the age of two. Once in the Big Apple, his father founded an Italian-language theater troupe and it is with them that Gardenia learned his craft. When he was 14, Gardenia dropped out of school to become a full-time actor with the company. He was in the army during WWII; after his discharge he returned to work in his father's theater and in other Italian-American productions. Though he had played a bit part in the 1945 film The House on 92nd Street, Gardenia did not launch his real film career until he was in his mid-thirties and played his first major role in The Cop Hater (1958). Though most often cast as Italian-Americans or in simple ethnic roles, Gardenia was a versatile actor who could easily switch from comedic to dramatic roles in films of widely varying quality. Some of his best-known roles include that of a bartender in 1961 in The Hustler, and Dutch Schnell in Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) opposite Robert De Niro. The latter garnered Gardenia his first Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Gardenia's second nomination came in 1987 for his memorable portrayal of Cher's father in Moonstruck. The character actor was 70 when he played his final role in the Joe Pesci vehicle The Super (1991). Gardenia's considerable television work includes the soap opera Edge of Night, a regular role on All in the Family (during the 1973-1974 season), the short-lived series Breaking Away (1980-1981), and a semi-regular role on L.A. Law in 1990. He has also made numerous guest appearances. Gardenia died of heart failure in 1992 at the age of 70.

Trivia: The original leader of the original "Dead End Kids," American actor Billy Halop came from a theatrical family; his mother was a dancer and his sister Florence was a busy radio actress. After several years as a well-paid radio juvenile, Billy was cast as Tommy Gordon in the Broadway production of Sidney Kingsley's Dead End (1935), where thanks to his previous credentials he was accorded star status. Travelling to Hollywood with the rest of the Dead End Kids when Samuel Goldwyn produced a film version of the play in 1937, Billy had no trouble lining up important roles, specializing in tough kids, bullies and reform school inmates in such major pictures as Dust be My Destiny (1939) and Tom Brown's School Days (1940). A long-standing rivalry between Halop and fellow Dead-Ender Leo Gorcey (both actors wanted to be the leader of the gang) led to Billy's breakaway from the Dead End Kids and its offspring groups, the East Side Kids and the Bowery Boys, though Halop briefly starred in Universal's "Little Tough Guys" films. After serving in World War II, Halop found that he'd grown too old to be effective in the roles that had brought him fame; at one point he was reduced to starring in a cheap "East Side Kids" imitation at PRC studios, Gas House Kids (1946). Diminishing film work, marital difficulties and a drinking problem eventually ate away at Halop's show business career. In 1960, he married a multiple sclerosis victim, and the nursing skills he learned while taking care of his wife led him to steady work as a registered nurse at St. John's Hospital in Malibu. For the rest of his life, Billy Halop supplemented his nursing income with small TV and movie roles, gaining a measure of latter-day prominence as Archie Bunker's cab-driving pal Bert Munson on the '70s TV series All in the Family.

Trivia: Character and voice actor Bob Hastings is best known for his television work on series such as McHale's Navy and All in the Family, but he also appeared in some feature films. Born in New York in 1921, he was busy on the radio in his twenties, specializing in male ingenue and comedy roles, including portraying Archie Andrews in an NBC radio adaptations of Archie Comics in 1944. His first credited television appearance was in 1955, in the U.S. Steel Hour production of No Time for Sergeants. Hastings made his feature film debut in 1962 in the Disney production Moon Pilot, starring Tom Tryon, and that same year got his first regular series role as Lt. Elroy Carpenter, the obsequious aide to Joe Flynn's Captain Binghamton on McHale's Navy. He was with the series for four seasons, and it led to his subsequent big-screen work in the features McHale's Navy (1964) and McHale's Navy Joins the Air Force (1965). He also played Bert Ramsey on the daytime drama General Hospital and managed to work in occasional big-screen work, in pictures such as The Flim-Flam Man. In the 1970s, Hastings played the recurring character of Kelsey the tavern-keeper on All in the Family. Hastings' on-screen acting generally saw him cast as nervous, sycophantic mid-level bureaucrats, or, occasionally, as rough-hewn working-class types. But as a voice artist he has had a much wider range of portrayals, including heroes and authority figures, including the voice of Clark Kent in the 1960s Batman/Superman Hour and, in more recent decades, the voice of Commissioner Gordon on the animated Batman from Fox network. Bob Hastings is the older brother of actor Don Hastings, who is perhaps best remembered by viewers of one generation for his portrayal of the Video Ranger in Captain Video; Bob also appeared in the series, in a much less prominent role. He died in 2014, at age 89.

Trivia: Life literally began at 60 for American actor Burt Mustin, who didn't enter show business until that age and didn't make his film debut until Detective Story (1951), at which time he was 68. After a decade of uncredited movie roles as hillbilly patriarchs and Town's Oldest Citizens, Mustin began getting name recognition for numerous TV appearances in the late '50s and early '60s. The actor was a particular favorite of producer/actor Jack Webb, who cast Mustin several times on Dragnet; in one episode Burt was an octogenarian burglar, and in another was a retired detective who solved a murder case - and chewed out a young cop for not knowing the proper way to take fingerprints! Situation comedy producers made good use of Burt Mustin as well, and he was featured in innumerable cameos on such programs as The Dick Van Dyke Show, Get Smart and The Jack Benny Program, usually stealing most of the laughs from the stars. Mustin had regular TV roles as eccentric neighbor Finley on Date with the Angels, Gus the Fireman on Leave It to Beaver, barber shop patron Jud Crowley on The Andy Griffith Show, the amorous senior-citizen husband of Queenie Smith on The Funny Side, and nursing-home refugee Justin Quigley on All in the Family. Mustin got the biggest press coverage of his career when, in character as Arthur Lanson, he married Mother Dexter - played by 82-year-old Judith Lowry - on the December 13, 1976 episode of Phyllis. It was a hilarious and, in retrospect, poignant moment in TV history: Judith Lowry had died a few days before the program was aired, and Burt Mustin, who was too ill to watch the show, passed away six weeks later.

Trivia: American comic character actor Allan Melvin worked on stage, radio, screen, and television, where he is best remembered for playing Sam the Butcher, the love interest of beloved housekeeper Alice on The Brady Bunch. He also appeared as Sergeant Bilko's right-hand man The Phil Silvers Show, and as Archie Bunker's best friend on All in the Family). Melvin also worked in commercials and voiced many animated cartoons. He died of cancer in January 2008 at age 84.

Trivia: Singer-actress, onscreen from the '70s.