Trivia: Gerald McRaney was 14 when he was possessed with the notion to become an actor. Five years later, McRaney landed a job with a New Orleans rep company, laboring away as an oil-field worker during the off-season. In 1969, he made his film bow in the Southern-fried cheapie The Night of Bloody Horror. Moving to LA in 1971, he took acting lessons with Jeff Corey, struggling to lose his Mississippi accent, and drove a cab between TV jobs. For nearly a decade, McRaney paid the rent by playing murderers, psychos and rapists. The actor was finally "humanized" as down-home, college-educated private eye Rick Simon on the breezy detective series Simon and Simon, which ran from 1981 to 1988. After this, he was briefly considered for the starring role in Coach; instead, he was cast as Marine major J. D. "Mac" McGillis in the long-running (1989-93) family sitcom Major Dad. He made his directorial debut with the 1991 TV movie Love and Curses...And All That Jazz, in which he also starred. In 1995, he was brought in to hypo the flagging CBS drama series Central Park West; when this series tanked, he resurfaced as the star of the "family values" weekly drama Promised Land (1996), a spin-off of his guest appearance on TV's Touched by an Angel. McRaney's second wife was Designing Woman co-star Delta Burke.

Trivia: American actress Wendy Phillips has appeared in a few feature films of the '70s and '80s, but she primarily works on television. She made her film debut in the TV movies One of Our Own and Death Be Not Proud. From 1976 to 1977, she appeared regularly on the television series Executive Suite where she played the daughter. In 1977, Phillips appeared in her first feature film, Fraternity Row. In film, she earned acclaim for playing the wife of Robert De Niro in Midnight Run (1988) and for playing the wife of notorious gangster Bugsy Siegel in Bugsy (1991). As of 1996, Phillips was co-starring on the television series Promised Land.

Trivia: American actress Celeste Holm made her first stage appearance in 1936 with a Pennsylvania stock company. Sophisticated and poised beyond her years, Holm was cast shortly afterward in a touring company of the ultra-chic Clare Boothe Luce comedy The Women, then played New York in such high-profile productions as The Time of Your Life. Rodgers and Hammerstein cast her as soubrette Ado Annie in Oklahoma! in 1943; both the production itself and Annie's show-stopping song "I Cain't Say No" affirmed Holm's future stardom. Following her film debut in Three Little Girls in Blue (1946), she was cast by her studio, 20th Century-Fox, in the role of the love-starved fashion editor in the prestige feature Gentlemen's Agreement (1947), for which she won an Academy Award. The important role of Bette Davis' understanding friend in another Oscar-winner, All About Eve (1950), has immortalized Holm amongst the film cultists. Stage, nightclub and television assignments followed (she starred in the short-lived 1950s sitcom Honestly, Celeste), and from the late 1950s onward, Holm was more at home on stage than in films. Her performance in the touring company of Mame won Holm the Sara Siddons Award -- coincidentally the same award presented to the title character at the beginning of All About Eve. Always choosy about her roles, Holm remained active through the early 2000s whenever a good part struck her fancy; one of her most frequently rebroadcast assignments was as a custody court judge in an early-1980s episode of Archie Bunker's Place and she appeared in several episodes of Touched By an Angel. She died in 2012 at the age of 95.

Trivia: Fresh-faced Austin O'Brien made his mark as a movie child star before settling into the TV series Promised Land in the latter half of the 1990s. Oregon-born O'Brien began acting as a child in TV commercials. By his pre-teens, O'Brien made the jump to films in the virtual reality thriller The Lawnmower Man (1992). O'Brien soon earned the dubious distinction, however, of starring as the boy who gets to join his action idol onscreen in the notorious Arnold Schwarzenegger flop Last Action Hero (1993). Less tarnished by the experience than his muscle-bound co-star, O'Brien soon moved on to fill Macauley Culkin's shoes as Anna Chlumskey's male foil/friend in the sequel My Girl 2 (1994). Despite appearing as the Whiz Kid in Ron Howard's esteemed space blockbuster Apollo 13 (1995), O'Brien was back to roles in young teen fare with The Babysitters' Club (1995). After starring as a young hacker pitted against the evil title character in the sequel Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (1996), O'Brien moved to series television when he was cast as Gerald McRaney's son in the Christian family drama Promised Land. During the series' 1996-1999 run, O'Brien also guest starred several times as his Promised Land character Josh on the hit series Touched By an Angel. After Promised Land ended, O'Brien headed to college to study his other creative passion, music.

Trivia: A performer widely regarded as one of the most distinguished and eloquent actors of his or any generation, Ossie Davis combined an overwhelming amount of dramatic talent and instinct (evident via both stage and film work) with an indomitable fervor for social crusade. A native of Cogdell, GA, and a graduate of Howard University, Davis moved to Harlem at an early stage and trained with the Rose McClendon players. The actor then drew a considerable amount of attention -- alongside wife since 1948 Ruby Dee -- for helping to spearhead the American civil rights movement in the 1940s, over 20 years before it caught fire with the general public and mass media. Their combined efforts culminated in involvement with the triumphant March on Washington of August 1963, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech. In subsequent years, Davis also helped Dr. King raise money for the Freedom Riders and delivered a poignant eulogy at the funeral of Malcolm X. Meanwhile, Davis and Dee both established themselves as forces in theater and on film. Davis himself debuted on Broadway in 1946, and took his film bow with the 1950 No Way Out, but 13 years passed before his sophomore cinematic effort, the 1963 Gone Are the Days -- an adaptation of his own play Purlie Victorious. Unfortunately, the actor spent much of the '60s appearing in programmers that were either underappreciated (Shock Treatment, 1964) or unworthy of his talents (Sam Whiskey, 1969), and didn't fully realize his potential until he scripted and directed the 1970 Cotton Comes to Harlem, a gritty crime comedy (with a predominantly African-American cast including Godfrey Cambridge and Redd Foxx) that almost singlehandedly jump-started the blaxploitation movement and predated Sweet Sweetback and Shaft by a year. Several additional directorial projects followed throughout the 1970s and '80s and found Davis growing deeper and more profound, and setting his sights higher; these included the ambitious -- if not quite successful -- Kongi's Harvest (1971) and the finely-wrought, socially charged coming-of-age drama Black Girl (1972), arguably Davis' best film. Unfortunately, Davis' third and fourth efforts behind the camera, Gordon's War (1973) and Countdown at Kusini (1976), disappointed on many counts, relegating him (for better or worse) back to acting. He appeared in the racially themed, made-for-television dramas Roots (1977), King: The Martin Luther King Story (1978, in which he played Dr. King Sr.), and Roots: The Next Generations (1979), then -- around a decade later -- achieved a career resurgence thanks to the intelligence and bravura of wunderkind Spike Lee, who cast Davis in six major films: School Daze (1988), Do the Right Thing (1989), Jungle Fever (1991), Malcolm X (1992, as an off-camera narrator), Get on the Bus (1996), and She Hate Me (2004). Two of those films also included Dee in the cast. Davis also enjoyed a renewed profile on television during the early '90s when he was tapped to play a regular character on the charming and laid-back Burt Reynolds sitcom Evening Shade (1990-1994); he portrayed Ponder Blue, the series' narrator and the owner of a barbecue restaurant. Davis remained not only active but astonishingly prolific over the following ten years. Subsequent projects included small supporting roles in Grumpy Old Men (1993), The Client (1994), and Doctor Dolittle (1998), and participation in a series of documentaries, among them Christianity: The First Thousand Years (1998) and We Shall Not Be Moved (2001). Davis died in February 2005, in Miami, while shooting the movie Retirement. He was 87. Davis and Dee co-authored a dual autobiography, In This Life Together, in 1998.

Trivia: Blonde leading-lady Sharon Gless owns the distinction of being the last-ever "contract player" at Universal Studios. Signed by Universal in 1969, Gless did yeoman work as a supporting player on such series as the ABC medical drama Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969-76) and films including Airport 1975 (1974). She was a regular on the short-lived detective drama series Faraday and Company (1973-74) before achieving a degree of stardom as Maggie, "girl Friday" to Robert Wagner and Eddie Albert, on the popular crime-caper series Switch (1975-78). Her next series was the weekly House Calls (1979-82), in which she replaced departing regular Lynn Redgrave amid Redgrave's contractual dispute with series producers. It was another replacement assignment that solidified Gless as a bankable (and versatile) name: in 1982, she replaced Meg Foster as NYPD officer Chris Cagney on the detective series Cagney and Lacey, which for many years provided her with the greatest amount of viewer identification in her career. She remained in this role until the series' cancellation in 1988, winning two Emmy awards along the way, then reprised the part (with her co-star Tyne Daly) in a series of well-received TV movies from 1994 to 1996. Then, beginning around 1997, a second wave of popularity arrived for Gless, and she retained her footing as a small-screen mainstay over the following decade or so, with contributions to immensely popular series programs including Promised Land, Queer as Folk, Touched by an Angel, Burn Notice, and Nip/Tuck. In 2001, the Lifetime women's network opted to do one of its Intimate Portrait biographical documentaries on Gless. In the 21st century Gless could be found on numerous episodic television shows including Burn Notice and Nip/Tuck, and she played the title character in the lesbian romantic drama Hannah Free as well producing that film.

Trivia: Was originally a music major at the High School of Performing Arts in New York. First professional acting job was in an off-Broadway production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest after graduating from high school. Is the first cousin of Academy Award winner Louis Gossett Jr. The play for which he won an NAACP Theater Award, Indigo Blues, was written by his wife, Michele. Learned to play drums for the 2009 cable movie Flying By.

Trivia: Began his acting career at age 13. Won a 1998 Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Performance in a Children's Program for his role as Clay Crosby in the drama In His Father's Shoes. Breakthrough starring TV role came as Arnaz Ballard on the series One on One (2001-06). In 2005, he appeared on the silver screen in the basketball drama Coach Carter and the horror film House of Wax. In 2009, he began a recurring role on the TBS series Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns.