Trivia: Born in Des Moines, Iowa, Sada Thompson grew up in New Jersey, where her magazine-editor father had been transferred. Active in high school plays, she was all of 16 when she first appeared at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, playing Nick's Ma in a campus production of The Time of Your Life. Graduating from Carnegie with a BFA in 1949, Thompson launched her professional career, playing mature and sometimes elderly women at a time when she herself was barely old enough to vote. While working at New York's 92nd Street YMHA, a Jewish cultural center, she participated in the first-ever reading of Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, which led to her off-Broadway debut in the 1955 staging of that same piece. She spent the next decade in regional theatre, returning to New York for her first real breakthrough performance in the Lincoln Center's production of Tartuffe. A few years later, Thompson won an Obie Award for her work in Paul Zindel's The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, and in 1971 she copped the Tony award for her interpretation of four different women in the Broadway production Twigs. On the strength of this success, she was signed to play the Bunker Family's free-spirited neighbor Irene Lorenzo on All in the Family. After a single taping session, it was obvious that Thompson and producer Norman Lear would never see eye to eye, and she was replaced by Betty Garrett (one unnamed source close to both sides of the argument later claimed that "Sada had too much genuine class and didn't yell loud enough for a Norman Lear show"). While she continued appearing in television specials like Our Town and The Entertainer and miniseries like Sandburg's Lincoln, Thompson would not consider a weekly program until she was personally asked by executive producer Mike Nichols to play matriarch Kate Lawrence on his seriocomic series Family. She remained with Family from its debut in 1976 until its cancellation in 1980, winning a 1978 Emmy Award in the process. Thompson spent her later years occasionally co-starring in such made-for-TV films as 1985's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the controversial Indictment: The McMartin Trial (for HBO). Her last major assignment was a turn as Jackson Pollock's mother in Ed Harris's Pollock (2000). Thompson died 11 years later, of lung disease. She was 83.

Trivia: Kim Darby's assertive acting style was likened by one film historian to "a 1938 Judy Garland forever waiting to burst into song." The daughter of "The Dancing Zerbies," Kim was a stage performer from childhood, when she was billed as Derby Zerby. Her short stature and cherubic face enabled Kim to play teenagers well into her twenties. After several TV appearances, she began her film career in 1965, reaching a peak with the role of Maddie Ross in True Grit (1968). Forever feisty, Kim earned one of the biggest laughs in 1977's The One and Only when she decked Henry Winkler with a one-two punch. Kim Darby has continued in secondary roles into the 1990s, recently making a guest appearance on that crowded way-station for former celebrities, TV's Murder She Wrote.