Trivia: Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Cleveland, David Birney was the son of an FBI agent, a fact kept from him until he was ten years old. A short, underweight kid, Birney built up his confidence by playing football and participating in school plays. Entering Dartmouth as a literature major, Birney transferred to the U.C.L.A. theater department. Drafted during the Vietnam War, he sang and danced in a special-services troupe. After his tour of duty, Birney made his professional acting debut at Virginia's Barter Theater in 1965. Two years later, he was working with Joe Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival, and shortly thereafter starred in the Broadway production Summertree. His first steady TV work was as a regular on the daytime serial Love Is a Many Splendored Thing. In 1972, Birney broke into prime-time as Jewish cabdriver Bernie Steinberg in the popular sitcom Bridget Loves Bernie. While the series was withdrawn due to protests from religious groups who frowned upon its mixed-marriage premise, Bridget Loves Bernie was hardly a total loss so far as Birney was concerned; in 1974, he married his B Loves B co-star, Meredith Baxter, a union that endured for nearly two decades. Though he preferred stage work (his favorite parts included Hamlet and Henry Higgins), Birney continued making TV and film appearances so that he could afford to accept the occasional high-prestige but low-salaried theatrical role. David Birney's series-TV assignments have included The Adams Chronicles (1976, as John Quincy Adams), Serpico (1977, in the title role), Glitter (1984), St. Elsewhere (1982-1983 season, as Dr. Ben Samuels), and Master of the Game (1987).

Trivia: The daughter of actress Whitney Blake, Meredith Baxter received extensive training in the arts at the Interlochen Summer Camp in Michigan. Meredith worked as an usher, file clerk and cafeteria checker before getting her first film break in Ben (1971). The 5'7" blonde actress entered the "America's sweetheart" category when she was cast as Bridget Fitzgerald Steinberg, the prettier half of a Catholic-Jewish married couple, in the TV sitcom Bridget Loves Bernie (1972). While the series lasted only a year, her "reel" marriage became a "real" one when, in 1974, she wed her B Loves B co-star David Birney. In addition to yielding a new, hyphenated professional name for Meredith, her union with Birney produced three children before the couple divorced in the early 1990s (she also had two children from a previous marriage). In between stage appearances in such productions as Hamlet, Guys and Dolls and Butterflies are Free, Meredith played Nancy Lawrence Maitland on the TV dramedy Family, winning two Emmy nominations during her four-year (1976-80) stint with this series. In 1982, Meredith agreed to star as flower child-turned-suburban mom Elyse Keaton on the weekly TV comedy Family Ties, having been assured that she would be the star of the series in fact as well as in name. As it happened, Family Ties was dominated throughout its seven-year run by co-star Michael J. Fox. A prolific TV-movie actress, she owns the distinction of playing the same real-life character twice, with two entirely different interpretations. When she first played accused murderess Betty Broderick in 1992's A Woman Scorned, Meredith was sympathetic to Broderick's plight, and played the role accordingly (earning an Emmy nomination in the process); but by the time 1993's Her Final Fury rolled around, Meredith, like everyone else involved in the project, was convinced that Betty Broderick deserved what she got--and played the role in the manner of a Gothic Novel villainess. A made-for-TV movie fixture over the course of the next decade, Baxter remained a familiar face on the small screen thanks to appearances in such popular shows as The Closer and Cold Case, later showing her playful side with voice work in such animated series' as Family Guy and Dan Vs. A breast-cancer survivor, she received a public-awareness award from the National Breast Cancer Coalition for starring in and coproducing the 1994 drama My Breast.

Trivia: A third-generation actor, Harold J. Stone made his stage debut at age six with his father, Jacob Hochstein, in the Yiddish-language play White Slaves. Stone had one line--"Mama!"--which he managed to forget on opening night. He didn't act again until after his graduation from New York University. After gleaning valuable experience in radio, he returned to the stage in George Jessel's production of Little Old New York at the 1939 World's Fair. Stone made his Broadway bow shortly afterward in Sidney Kingsley's The World We Make, and thereafter was seldom unemployed. In 1952, he began the first of many TV-series gigs when he replaced Philip Loeb as Jake on The Goldbergs; within a decade, he was averaging 20 TV appearances per year. In films from 1956, the harsh-voiced, authoritative Stone was most often seen as big-city detective (as in Hitchcock's The Wrong Man), generals, and gangsters (he was Frank Nitti in 1967's St. Valentine's Day Massacre). Usually billed at the top of the supporting cast, Stone enjoyed a rare above-the-title starring assignment when he played investigator John Kennedy in the 1959 syndicated TV series Grand Jury. His other weekly-series roles included Hamilton Greeley (a character based on New Yorker maven Harold Ross) in My World and Welcome to It (1969) and Sam Steinberg in Bridget Loves Bernie (1972). In the latter stages of his career, Harold J. Stone unexpectedly found himself a favorite of Jerry Lewis, co-starring in Lewis' The Big Mouth (1967), Which Way to the Front? (1970) and Hardly Working (1980).

Trivia: Although sandy-voiced character actor David Doyle sometimes gave the onscreen impression of being an unprepossessing, slow-on-the-uptake "little man," in truth Doyle stood six feet tall, weighed 200 pounds, and had an I.Q. of 148. Born into a family of lawyers, Doyle was drawn to amateur theatricals at the age of ten. In an effort to please both his parents and his own muse, he attended pre-law classes at the University of Nebraska, all the while taking acting lessons at Virginia's Barter Theatre and New York's Neighborhood Playhouse. His first theatrical break came in 1956, when he replaced Walter Matthau in the Broadway hit Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? He subsequently spent several seasons as an actor/director in a Midwestern traveling stock company, then returned to New York, where he appeared in S.J. Perelman's The Beauty Part and seven other Broadway plays. After a decade's worth of film and TV supporting appearances and commercials, Doyle was cast in the recurring role of Walt Fitzgerald in the 1972 sitcom Bridget Loves Bernie; that same year, he made semi-weekly visits to The New Dick Van Dyke Show in the role of Ted Atwater. From 1976 and 1981, Doyle had the enviable task of playing John Bosley, liaison man between unseen private eye Charlie and the gorgeous female stars of TV's Charlie's Angels. Since that time, David Doyle has been seen as Frank Macklin on the short-lived 1987 series Sweet Surrender, and heard as the voice of Grandpa Pickles on the Nickleodeon cable network's animated series Rugrats (1991- ). Doyle died of heart failure at age 67 on February 27, 1997. One of his last feature film performances was that of the voice of Pepe in The Adventures of Pinocchio (1996).