Trivia: Born in Missouri, entertainer Dick Van Dyke was raised in Danville, Illinois, where repeated viewings of Laurel & Hardy comedies at his local movie palace inspired him to go into show business. Active in high school and community plays in his teens, Van Dyke briefly put his theatrical aspirations aside upon reaching college age. He toyed with the idea of becoming a Presbyterian minister; then, after serving in the Air Force during World War II, opened up a Danville advertising agency. When this venture failed, it was back to show biz, first as a radio announcer for local station WDAN, and later as half of a record-pantomime act called The Merry Mutes (the other half was a fellow named Philip Erickson). While hosting a TV morning show in New Orleans, Van Dyke was signed to a contract by the CBS network. He spent most of his time subbing for other CBS personalities and emceeing such forgotten endeavors as Cartoon Theatre. After making his acting debut as a hayseed baseball player on The Phil Silvers Show, Van Dyke left CBS to free-lance. He hosted a few TV game shows before his career breakthrough as co-star of the 1959 Broadway review The Girls Against the Boys. The following year, he starred in the musical comedy Bye Bye Birdie, winning a Tony Award for his portrayal of mother-dominated songwriter Albert Peterson (it would be his last Broadway show until the short-lived 1980 revival of The Music Man). In 1961, he was cast as comedy writer Rob Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show, which after a shaky start lasted five seasons and earned its star three Emmies.He made his movie bow in the 1963 filmization of Bye Bye Birdie, then entered into a flexible arrangement with Walt Disney Studios. His best known films from that era include Mary Poppins (1964), Lt. Robin Crusoe, USN and The Comic, in which he played an amalgam of several self-destructive silent movie comedians. His TV specials remained popular in the ratings, and it was this fact that led to the debut of The New Dick Van Dyke Show in 1971. Despite the creative input of the earlier Dick Van Dyke Show's maven Carl Reiner, the later series never caught on, and petered out after three seasons. A chronic "people pleaser," Van Dyke was loath to display anger or frustration around his co-workers or fans, so he began taking solace in liquor; by 1972, he had become a full-fledged alcoholic. Rather than lie to his admirers or himself any longer, he underwent treatment and publicly admitted his alcoholism -- one of the first major TV stars ever to do so. Van Dyke's public confession did little to hurt his "nice guy" public image, and, now fully and permanently sober, he continued to be sought out for guest-star assignments and talk shows. In 1974, he starred in the TV movie The Morning After, playing an ad executive who destroys his reputation, his marriage and his life thanks to booze. After that Van Dyke, further proved his versatility when he began accepting villainous roles, ranging from a cold-blooded wife murderer in a 1975 Columbo episode to the corrupt district attorney in the 1990 film Dick Tracy. He also made several stabs at returning to weekly television, none of which panned out--until 1993, when he starred as Dr. Mark Sloan in the popular mystery series Diagnosis Murder. He made a few more movie appearances after Diagnosis Murder came to an end, most notably as a retired security guard in the hit family film Night at the Museum. As gifted at writing and illustrating as he is at singing, dancing and clowning, Van Dyke has penned two books, Faith, Hope and Hilarity and Those Funny Kids. From 1992 to 1994, he served as chairman of the Nickelodeon cable service, which was then sweeping the ratings by running Dick Van Dyke Show reruns in prime time. Van Dyke is the brother of award-winning TV personality Jerry Van Dyke, and the father of actor Barry Van Dyke.

Trivia: Born in Brooklyn, NY, on December 29, 1936, actress/dancer/rubberfaced comedienne Mary Tyler Moore went on to star in the definitive television comedies of both the 1960s and the 1970s: The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1966) and The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977). For her performances as Laura Petrie and Mary Richards, Moore won five Emmy Awards, in 1965, 1966, 1973, 1974, and 1976.Moore got her start in television commercials, acting as Happy Hotpoint, the Hotpoint Appliance Elf during The Ozzie and Harriet Show in 1955. She then progressed to a stint as the disembodied voice and legs of Sam, the answering service lady, on Richard Diamond, Private Detective (1957-1960). Three unsuccessful shows and a series of TV specials followed her more notable series: Mary (1978), the Mary Tyler Moore Hour (1979), and Mary (1985-1986). Her dramatic career took off in 1981, when she was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of the repressed mother in Ordinary People. Moore had Broadway success with Whose Life Is It Anyway?, appeared in the highly acclaimed Finnegan, Begin Again with Robert Preston on HBO, and won a CableACE Award in 1993 for her performance as an evil orphanage director in Stolen Babies. In 1996, Moore gained the appreciation of a new generation of fans with her hilarious turn as Ben Stiller's neurotic mother in David O. Russell's Flirting With Disaster. She also experienced a sort of renaissance through her mention in other films, notably Douglas Keeve's 1995 frockumentary Unzipped, which featured a beatific Isaac Mizrahi extolling the virtues of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and singing its theme song. In addition to her television and film work, Moore, as a well-known diabetic, has been a longtime representative of the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. And though her film and television roles would become more sporadic moving into the new millennium, Moore could still be seen in the occasional theatrical release (Cheats, Against the Current) or made-for-television movie (Miss Lettie and Me, Snow Wonder) while making guest appearances in such popular sitcoms as That 70's Show and Hot in Cleveland. Moore died in 2017, at age 80.

Trivia: Very early in his stage career, Richard Deacon was advised by Helen Hayes to abandon all hopes of becoming a leading man: instead, she encouraged him to aggressively pursue a career as a character actor. Tall, bald, bespectacled and bass-voiced since high school, Deacon heeded Ms. Hayes' advice, and managed to survive in show business far longer than many of the "perfect" leading men who were his contemporaries. Usually cast as a glaring sourpuss or humorless bureaucrat, Deacon was a valuable and highly regarded supporting-cast commodity in such films as Desiree (1954), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Kiss Them For Me (1957), The Young Philadelphians (1959) and The King's Pirate (1967), among many others. Virtually every major star who worked with Deacon took time out to compliment him on his skills: among his biggest admirers were Lou Costello, Jack Benny and Cary Grant. Even busier on television than in films, Richard Deacon had the distinction of appearing regularly on two concurrently produced sitcoms of the early 1960s: he was pompous suburbanite Fred Rutherford on Leave It to Beaver, and the long-suffering Mel Cooley on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Deacon also co-starred as Kaye Ballard's husband on the weekly TV comedy The Mothers-in-Law (1968), and enjoyed a rare leading role on the 1964 Twilight Zone installment "The Brain Center at Whipples." In his last decade, Richard Deacon hosted a TV program on microwave cookery, and published a companion book on the subject.

Trivia: Carl Reiner knew he wanted to be an actor -- preferably a Shakespearean actor -- from the time he was wearing knee pants. Trained in New York's Works Progress Administration Dramatic Workshop, he spent the war years touring with Maurice Evans' G.I. Hamlet, appearing with another young hopeful, Howard Morris. After the war he accumulated scores of stock company and Broadway credits, then in 1948 made his television debut in the short-lived series Fashion Story. While starring in NBC's 54th Street Revue, he was hired as one of the regulars on Your Show of Shows, appearing on a weekly basis with Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, and old pal Howie Morris. During the scripting sessions for Show of Shows, Reiner became friends with a bombastic staff writer named Mel Brooks, with whom he improvised a number of wild stream-of-consciousness comedy bits which would eventually crystallize as the classic "2000 Year Old Man" routines. An Emmy winner for his work on the various Sid Caesar programs, he entered films as a character actor in 1959. That same year, he wrote, produced, and starred in the pilot episode for a proposed series about a comedy writer named Rob Petrie, titled Head of the Family. The network executives liked the concept, but vetoed Reiner as the star; swallowing his pride, he retooled the property with another leading man, and that's how the Emmy-winning Dick Van Dyke Show was born. During the series' five-year run, Reiner made innumerable cameo appearances on the program, most memorably as Rob Petrie's mercurial TV-comedian boss Alan Brady. In 1967 he made his film directorial debut with Enter Laughing, an adaptation of his own semi-autobiographical 1958 novel (the book had already been transformed into a Broadway play with Alan Arkin as star). Reiner's later directing assignments included The Comic (1967), a bittersweet farce based on the lives of Stan Laurel, Harry Langdon, and Buster Keaton; the black comedy cult favorite Where's Poppa? (1970); the whimsical fantasy Oh, God (1977); and a popular series of Steve Martin vehicles, among them The Jerk (1978) and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982). His film output decreased in number and quality in the l980s and 1990s, though critics enjoyed his offbeat 1989 working-class comedy Bert Rigby, You're a Fool and his 1997 Bette Midler starrer That Old Feeling. In 1995, he earned yet another Emmy award for his revival of the Alan Brady character on a memorable episode of TV's Mad About You. And though Reiner appeared to retire from directing following That Old Feeling, he still maintained a notable presence in film and television with roles in Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven and it's two sequels, House M.D., Hot in Cleveland, and Parks and Rec.Carl Reiner is the father of directors Rob Reiner and Lucas Reiner; his wife Estelle has enjoyed a latter-day career as a night club singer and as a cameo performer in her son Rob's films (she's the lady who says, "I'll have what she's having!" in When Harry Met Sally).

Trivia: American actor Dick Curtis may have started out as an extra, and it's true that he seldom rose above the ranks of western supporting actors, but he still managed to get himself a full-page photo spread as a "typical" villain in the 1957 coffee table book The Movies. In this book, as in most of his movies, Curtis was seen squaring off in a series of bare-knuckle bouts with his perennial opponent, cowboy star Charles Starrett. Most of Curtis' career was centered at Columbia Pictures, where he scowled and skulked his way through bad guy roles in the studio's "B" pictures, westerns, serials, and two-reel comedies. Sometimes he'd get to wear a business suit instead of frontier garb, as in his role of a jury foreman in the Boris Karloff thriller The Man They Could Not Hang (1939), but even here he was unpleasant, unsympathetic, and fully deserving of an untimely end. A more lighthearted (but no less menacing) Dick Curtis can be seen in his many two-reel appearances with Charley Chase, Hugh Herbert and The Three Stooges. As Badlands Blackie in the Stooges' Three Troubledoers (1946), Curtis' acting is gloriously overbaked, and perhaps as a reward for long and faithful service to Columbia he is permitted to deliver outrageous "double takes" which manage to out-Stooge his co-stars.