Trivia: Actor Ted Knight dropped out of high school in order to enlist for World War II service. During the postwar years, Knight studied acting in Hartford, Connecticut. He became proficient with puppets and ventriloquism, which led to steady work as a TV kiddie-show host. Knight spent most of the 1950s and 1960s doing commercial voice-overs and essaying minor TV and movie roles (he was the nonspeaking cop who handed Norman Bates a robe at the end of Hitchcock's Psycho [1960]). Just barely making ends meet with TV guest spots and cartoon voices, Knight was rescued professionally in 1970 when he was cast in the role of vainglorious TV anchorman Ted Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Three years into the series, Knight threatened to quit because of the one-note stupidity of his character. He was assuaged when the MTM producers "humanized" him with an understanding girlfriend (played by Georgia Engel) -- and it didn't hurt that the actor later won two Emmy awards for his portrayal of the clueless Ted Baxter. When MTM left the air in 1977, Knight attempted to headline a sitcom of his own. After a couple of false starts, he struck pay dirt in 1980 with Too Close for Comfort, playing a comic-strip artist with two nubile daughters. Too Close left the network for syndication in 1984, then matriculated into The Ted Knight Show in 1985. Though gravely ill, Ted Knight valiantly taped a years' worth of episodes before succumbing to cancer at the age of 62.

Trivia: Originally planned to be a schoolteacher. Spent two seasons with the New York City Opera Company, performing in such productions as Carmen and The Mikado. Performed as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Made her Broadway debut in 1960 in Do Re Mi. Played Maria in the 1962 Broadway production of The Sound of Music. Was an original cohost of Good Morning America. For five years, she headed the Ray Bolger Endowment for Musical Performances at UCLA. Regularly performs as a cabaret singer.

Trivia: For a time at the tail-end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, Marcia Rodd seemed poised for stardom, either on the big-screen or on television. She was, at the outset of the 1970s, the ideal "gently" liberated woman. Rodd was one of the first actresses who looked good in the briefly fashionable, close-cropped female hairstyle (a sort of attractive version of the "Moe Howard" cut) of the period, conveying intelligence and sensitivity as well as independence. What's more, her first two film appearances included a starring role in Alan Arkin's fashionable black comedy Little Murders (1971) and a major supporting role in Herbert Ross' high-profile adult romance T.R. Baskin, and she was also a recipient of choice roles from television producer Norman Lear. Rodd was born in Lyons, KS, and attended Northwestern University at the end of the 1950s and the start of the 1960s as a drama major, studying under Alvina Krause; her fellow undergraduates included Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Arriving in New York during the early '60s, she made her off-Broadway debut at the Provincetown Playhouse in Oh Say Can You See! in 1962, which got her onto her first cast album as part of a quartet called "the Girls"; she also appeared in the showcase Talent 64. She made her Broadway debut in the replacement cast of Oh! What a Lovely War and later appeared in The Mad Show. In 1968, she managed to appear in two different adaptations of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Love and Let Love, and Your Own Thing (as Olivia), and played Bobbi Mitchell in Last of the Red Hot Lovers, working opposite James Coco. In 1970, she was cast as the doomed Patsy Newquist in Little Murders (1971), Alan Arkin's dark comedy of life in New York City, based on Jules Feiffer's off-Broadway play. Her supporting role in T.R. Baskin followed later in 1971, and then Rodd began her first foray into television, principally through the work of Norman Lear in the second season of All in the Family; she played a harried single mother driven to desperate measures to make a decent life for her young son, and in episode No. 37, which was the pilot for the series Maude, Rodd played Carol, the divorced daughter of the title character. Rodd declined to portray the role when the series was picked up, however, and the part went to the more physically endowed but less professionally adept Adrienne Barbeau. Rodd busied herself in New York theater during the early '70s, including a production of The Merry Wives of Windsor at The New York Shakespeare Festival. She was also very briefly in the cast of the ill-fated musical Mack and Mabel as Mabel Normand (succeeded by Kelly Garrett and then Bernadette Peters). She then moved to Los Angeles, where she continued her stage work and also acted in two successive films by director Jonathan Demme, Citizens Band (1977) and The Last Embrace (1979). By the 1980s, she was no longer in the running for starring roles, but was a busy working actress in television, portraying Jack Weston's wife in the short-lived series The Four Seasons and playing the wife of Dr. Stanley Riverside on Trapper John, M.D. During the 1990s, Rodd returned to doing occasional feature films. She has also done a one-woman play about the life of Diana Vreeland, and guest starred on such series as Home Improvement and Sisters.