Trivia: The son of Yugoslav immigrants, Karl Malden labored in the steel mills of Gary, Indiana before enrolling in Arkansas State Teachers College. While not a prime candidate for stardom with his oversized nose and bullhorn voice, Malden attended Chicago's Goodman Dramatic School, then moved to New York, where he made his Broadway bow in 1937. Three years later he made his film debut in a microscopic role in They Knew What They Wanted (1940), which also featured another star-to-be, Tom Ewell. While serving in the Army Air Force during World War II, Malden returned to films in the all-serviceman epic Winged Victory (1944), where he was billed as Corporal Karl Malden. This led to a brief contract with 20th Century-Fox -- but not to Hollywood, since Malden's subsequent film appearances were lensed on the east coast. In 1947, Malden created the role of Mitch, the erstwhile beau of Blanche Dubois, in Tennessee Williams' Broadway play A Streetcar Named Desire; he repeated the role in the 1951 film version, winning an Oscar in the process. For much of his film career, Malden has been assigned roles that called for excesses of ham; even his Oscar-nominated performance in On the Waterfront (1954) was decidedly "Armour Star" in concept and execution. In 1957, he directed the Korean War melodrama Time Limit, the only instance in which the forceful and opinionated Malden was officially credited as director. Malden was best known to TV fans of the 1970s as Lieutenant Mike Stone, the no-nonsense protagonist of the longrunning cop series The Streets of San Francisco. Still wearing his familiar Streets hat and overcoat, Malden supplemented his income with a series of ads for American Express. His commercial catchphrases "What will you do?" and "Don't leave home without it!" soon entered the lexicon of TV trivia -- and provided endless fodder for such comedians as Johnny Carson. From 1989-92, Malden served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Trivia: Major star and producer, and member of one of Hollywood's most prominent families to boot, Michael Douglas was born to movie icon Kirk Douglas and British actress Diana Dill on September 25, 1944, in New Brunswick, NJ. From the age of eight he was raised in Connecticut by his mother and a stepfather, but spent time with his father during vacations from military school. It was while on location with his father that the young Douglas began learning about filmmaking. In 1962, he worked as an assistant director on Lonely Are the Brave, and was so taken with the cinema that he passed up the opportunity to study at Yale for that of studying drama at the University of California at Santa Barbara. At one point he and actor/director/producer Danny De Vito roomed together, and have remained friends ever since. Douglas also studied drama in New York for a while, and made his film debut as an actor playing a pacifist hippie draft evader who decides to fight in Vietnam in Hail Hero! (1969). He appeared in several more dramas, notably Summertree (1971). In 1972, he was cast as volatile rookie police inspector Steve Keller on The Streets of San Francisco. Douglas appeared in the series and occasionally directed episodes of it through 1976. In 1975, Douglas became one of the hottest producers in Tinseltown when he produced Milos Forman's tour de force adaptation of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which starred Jack Nicholson in one of his best roles. Originally, Douglas' father Kirk owned the film rights to the story. Having appeared in the Broadway version, the elder Douglas had wanted to star in a film adaptation for years, but had no luck getting it produced. The younger Douglas persuaded his father to sell him the rights and give up the notion of starring in the film. The result: a box-office smash that earned five Oscars, including Best Picture. After this triumph, Douglas resumed acting and began developing his screen persona. His was a decidedly paradoxical persona: though ruggedly handsome with an honest, emotive face reminiscent of his father's, onscreen Douglas retained an oily quality that was unusual in someone possessing such physical characteristics. He became known for characters that were sensitive yet arrogant and had something of a bad-boy quality. Through the '70s, Douglas appeared in more films, most notably The China Syndrome, which he also produced. In 1984, Douglas teamed with Kathleen Turner to appear in Romancing the Stone, an offbeat romantic adventure in the vein of Indiana Jones. Co-starring old friend Danny De Vito, it was a major box-office hit and revitalized Douglas' acting career, which had started to flag. Turner, Douglas and De Vito re-teamed the following year for an equally entertaining sequel, The Jewel of the Nile. It was in 1987 that Douglas played one of his landmark roles, that of a reprehensible yuppie who pays a terrible price for a moment's weakness with the mentally unbalanced Glenn Close in the runaway hit Fatal Attraction. The performance marked Douglas' entrance into edgier roles, and that same year he played an amoral corporate raider in Oliver Stone's Wall Street, for which he earned his first Oscar as an actor. In 1989, Douglas reunited with Kathleen Turner to appear in Danny De Vito's War of the Roses, one of the darkest ever celluloid glances at marital breakdown. By the end of the decade, Douglas had become one of Hollywood's most in-demand and highly paid stars. Douglas found success exploring the darker realms of his persona in Black Rain (1989) and the notorious Basic Instinct (1992). One of his darkest and most repugnantly intriguing roles came in 1993's Falling Down, in which he played an average Joe driven to cope with his powerlessness through acts of horrible violence. In 1995, Douglas lightened up to play a lonely, widowed president in The American President, and returned to adventure with 1996's box-office bomb The Ghost and the Darkness. In 1997 he appeared in the David Fincher thriller The Game, and followed that with another behind-the-scenes role, this time as executive producer for the John Travolta/Nicholas Cage thriller Face/Off. Returning to acting in 1998, Douglas starred with Gwyneth Paltrow in A Perfect Murder, a remake of Hitchcock's classic Dial M for Murder. As the new millenium rolled in, Douglas remained a force on screen, most memorably in films like the critically acclaimed Wonder Boys, and Steven Soderbergh's drug-war epic Traffic -- a critical and box office smash. Douglas had other life successes as well, such as his marriage to longtime girlfriend Catherine Zeta-Jones in 2000, and the birth of their subsuquent children. Around this time, Douglas formed a new production company, Further Films. which saw its first wide release in 2001 with the ensemble comedy One Night at McCool's. In 2003 he made It Runs in the Family, a comedy concerning three generations of a dysfunctional family attempting to reconcile their longtime differences. Fiction reflected reality in the film due to the involvement of father Kirk and son Cameron portraying, conveniently enough, Michael's father and son respectively. The 2010's would see Douglas playing roles in films like The Sentinel , King of California, You, Me and Dupree, and the long awaited sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. In 2013, he played Liberace in the HBO TV movie Behind the Candelabra, which earned Douglas an Emmy award.

Trivia: Born in California, actor Larry Wilcox was raised and educated in Wyoming. Wilcox's first important TV assignment was the role of ranchhand Dale Mitchell in the 1972-74 episodes of Lassie. He was elevated to teen-idol status when, in 1977 he was cast as Officer Jon Baker on TV's CHiPs; he left the series one year shy of its 1983 cancellation. Later on, Wilcox showed up on Murder She Wrote, playing four different parts on as many episodes. At last report, Larry Wilcox was heading a successful Southern California pharmaceutical corporation.

Trivia: Made his TV debut in an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show titled "The Talented Neighborhood."Played Ernie Douglas on the 1960's sitcom My Three Sons.Performed on Broadway in the comedy play The Skin of Our Teeth in 1975.Released his autobiography, The Importance of Being Ernie, which is filled with anecdotes from throughout his career from My Three Sons to Mad Men and beyond, in 2011.

Trivia: California-born Jeanette Nolan racked up an impressive list of radio and stage credits in the 1930s, including a stint with Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre troupe. She made her film debut in 1948 in Welles' MacBeth; her stylized, Scottish-burred interpretation of Lady MacBeth was almost universally panned by contemporary critics, but her performance holds up superbly when seen today. Afterwards, Ms. Nolan flourished as a character actress, her range extending from society doyennes to waterfront hags. She appeared in countless TV programs, and played the rambunctious title role on the short-lived Western Dirty Sally (1974). Nolan made her final film appearance playing Robert Redford's mother in The Horse Whisperer (1998). From 1937, Jeanette Nolan was married to actor John McIntire, with whom she frequently co-starred; she was also the mother of actor Tim McIntire.

Trivia: Harvard graduate Kent Smith formed a theater company in Massachusetts before making his Broadway debut in 1932's Men Must Fight. Three years later, Smith entered films with a second role in The Garden Murder Case. Smith's colorlessness as a leading man was used to excellent advantage in producer Val Lewton's Cat People movies of the 1940s, wherein Smith played the handsome but clueless husband of feline-possessed Simone Simon (in Cat People) and the unimaginative father of overimaginative moppet Anne Carter (in Curse of the Cat People). Married twice, Smith's second wife was prominent Broadway actress Edith Atwater. In films until the 1960s, Kent Smith was also briefly a regular on TV's Peyton Place; his credits should not be confused with those of film editor Kent Smith.

Trivia: Character actor Ted Gehring first appeared onscreen in the late '60s.