Trivia: Actress Valerie Harper's fame largely rests on her colorful portrayal of television's "New Yawk-er" Rhoda Morgenstern. After growing up in Oregon, Michigan and Jersey City, Harper became a chorus dancer in the Big Apple, hoofing with the Radio City Rockettes and performing in such Broadway musicals as Li'l Abner, Take Me Along, Wildcat and Subways Are for Sleeping. Her first film appearance was in the 1959 movie adaptation of Li'l Abner. While spending her nights on stage, she attended Hunter College and the New School for Social Research, supporting herself between dancing gigs as a telephone canvasser and hat-check girl. During the 1960s, she did comedy-improv work with Second City and Paul Sill's Story Theatre (one of her co-workers during her Sills years was her first husband, comic actor Richard Schaal). In the popular mid-1960s comedy record album When You're in Love, the Whole World is Jewish, Harper can be heard offering an embryonic version of Rhoda Morgenstern, a character she based on her childhood friend Penny Almog. So well-grounded was she in Rhoda-like characterizations by 1970 that she was hired for The Mary Tyler Moore Show (her first regular TV-series gig) on the basis of a one-sentence audition. After winning three Emmies for her Mary Tyler Moore work, Harper was spun off into her own series in 1974, titled Rhoda. Though it opened to excellent ratings (thanks largely to the one-hour episode in which Rhoda married her blue-collar fiance Joe [David Groh]), Rhoda was never as big a hit as Mary Tyler Moore, and it left the air in 1978. During this period, Harper made her formal film debut in Freebie and the Bean (1974), earning a Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of a Puerto Rican housewife. After toting up several stage and TV-movie credits, she returned to the weekly-series grind in 1986 with Valerie. She walked out on the show over a salary dispute, whereupon the producers fired her and retooled the series into The Hogan Family, which ran without Harper until 1991. She has starred in two series since leaving Valerie (1990's City and 1995's The Office) but has been unable to latch onto a character with the staying power of Rhoda Morgenstern. Additional appearances in Melrose Place, Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives, and Drop Dead Diva followed, Extremely active in prosocial causes off-camera, Valerie Harper was co-founder of an anti-hunger organization called LIFE (Love Is Feeding Everyone).

Trivia: When the decision was made in 1974 to transform Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper) from frumpy kvetcher to desirable bachelorette on the TV series Rhoda, somebody had to inherit all those self-deprecating jokes told by Rhoda on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The decision was made to create a new character: Rhoda's pudgy, insecure younger sister, Brenda. The actress chosen for the role sounded as though she'd been a New Yorker since the womb, but in fact Julie Kavner was born and raised in California. A theatre student at USC-San Francisco, Kavner came to Rhoda with no professional experience, but before the series ran its course, she had won an Emmy for her portrayal. With her performance in the 1986 film Hannah and Her Sisters, Kavner became one of the most prominent members of director Woody Allen's stock company, essaying very un-Brendalike roles in Radio Days (1987), the "Oedipus Wrecks" segment of New York Stories (1989), Alice (1990) and Shadows and Fog (1992). Kavner's regular stint as an ensemble player on the Fox TV network's Tracy Ullman Show led to her long-running assignment as the gravelly voice of Marge Simpson on the weekly animated series The Simpsons. Even as she continued to work on The Simpsons for the nex twenty years, she would make occasional big-screen appearances in projects as diverse as I'll Do Anything, Forget Paris, Judy Berlin, and Click.She also maintained an ongoing working relationship with Woody Allen appearing in Deconstructing Harry and in the 1994 made-for TV adaptation of the famous director's play Don't Drink the Water.

Trivia: Ron Silver was known for his extraordinary stage presence and high-energy portrayals of a variety of offbeat characters in films and on television. A native New Yorker, Silver studied Chinese at State University of New York at Buffalo and drama at the Herbert Berghof Studio and the Actors Studio. After receiving his bachelor's from S.U.N.Y., Silver earned a master's degree in Chinese history at the College of Chinese Culture in Taiwan and then returned to New York to study at the aforementioned acting studios. 1976 was a big year for Silver who debuted as a comedian in feature films (Tunnelvision), television (The Mac Davis Show), and theater (El Grande de Coca-Cola). He was also a regular cast member between 1976 and 1978 on the sitcom Rhoda, and then appeared in several made-for-television movies before appearing in Semi-Tough (1977). His feature film career picked up in the early '80s, but he did not get his first big break until he starred opposite Anne Bancroft in Sidney Lumet's Garbo Talks (1984). Silver earned critical acclaim in 1989 for starring in Philip Saville's Fellow Traveler as a Hollywood screenwriter forced to flee his family and friends to avoid getting blacklisted during the early '50s. That same year, Silver won a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for starring in David Mamet's Speed-The-Plow and scored a second film coup in Paul Mazursky's adaptation of author Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies, A Love Story. In the years to follow,, the busy Silver, who juggled his time between the three entertainment forms, became a respected mid-range star who could be counted on to deliver consistently strong, fine performances. As the '90s progressed, he moved into more lead roles playing everything from psychopaths (Blue Steel [1990]), senators (Time Cop [1994]), sleazy lawyers (in the TV medical drama Chicago Hope [1994- ]), and scientists (The Arrival [1996]). Silver died of esophageal cancer in 2009 at the age of 62.

Trivia: A general purpose performer with slightly more distinction to his face and voice than most of his ilk, American actor Norman Burton quietly entered films in the 1960s. Many of his early films were more artistic than profitable, as witness the experimental Wild Seed (1965). Burton was spotted in brief character parts in a few box-office hits, notably Planet of the Apes (1968) (he was the simian Hunt Leader) and The Towering Inferno (1974) (as Will Giddings). In the James Bond actioner Diamonds are Forever (1970), Burton succeeded Jack Lord, Rik Van Nutter et. al. in the role of Bond's American CIA contact Felix Leiter. On TV's New Adventures of Wonder Woman series of the late 1970s, Burton had the recurring role of Joe Atkinson, the boss of anti-subversive operative Diana Prince (aka Wonder Woman). Still answering casting calls into the 1990s, Norman Burton was one of many film veterans appearing in the zany 1994 biopic Ed Wood.

Trivia: In 1999, Doris Roberts achieved "overnight" stardom in the role of Marie Barone in the series Everybody Loves Raymond, going from working actress -- which she'd been for more than 40 years -- to being an instantly recognized performer. It was an improbable climb to the top rank of popular culture stardom. Roberts was born in St. Louis, MO, in 1925, to a family that was soon shattered when the father abandoned them. She had a difficult but loving childhood as her mother sought to provide for both of them by herself, and eventually Roberts gravitated toward the idea of an acting career. To do this, she had to work at any jobs that she could find, including clerk typist, to afford the lessons that she needed from teachers that included Lee Strasberg and Sanford Meisner. She made her first television appearance in the early '50s, in a Studio One production of Jane Eyre, and made the usual rounds between theater and television. Her theatrical debut came on the a stage at New York's City Center in 1955, and she was Shirley Booth's understudy in the theatrical version of the comedy Desk Set. She distinguished herself in the role of Mommy in the original production of Edward Albee's The American Dream, and since the early '60s, had carved a niche for herself in maternal and neighborly roles, on both stage and screen. Following her screen debut in Jack Garfein's New York-filmed drama Something Wild (1961), she tended more toward comedy (albeit often black comedy), with performances in Jack Smight's No Way to Treat a Lady, where she played the skeptical onlooker whose questions and low-key intervention save the life of a would-be victim; Leonard Kastle's The Honeymoon Killers (1970), in which she played the roommate of the nurse-turned-murderer played by Shirley Stoler; and Alan Arkin's Little Murders (1971), where she played Elliott Gould's mother. Female comics seemed to perceive Roberts' gifts as an actress especially well, as she got two of her better roles, in A New Leaf (1971) and Rabbit Test (1978), from Elaine May and Joan Rivers, respectively. Although she began appearing in television in the 1950s, with appearances on Ben Casey, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Baretta, All in the Family, The Streets of San Francisco, Rhoda, Soap, and Barney Miller, Roberts didn't start to make a lasting impression in the medium -- which would become her vehicle for stardom -- until the 1970s. She was supposed to have a role in a proposed new series starring Mary Tyler Moore, but when that series failed to sell, she was cast in the role of Donna Pescow's mother in the series Angie (1979), which got Roberts her first real notice by the public or the press. After that, the television appearances grew more frequent, and finally in 1983, she joined the cast of Remington Steele midway through the series' run, as Mildred Krebs, an IRS investigator-turned-secretary-turned-detective, working alongside Pierce Brosnan and Stephanie Zimbalist, and often stealing the show with her low-key comedic work. Roberts' first marriage ended in divorce, and her second, to novelist William Goyen, ended when he died in 1983 -- her son from her first marriage, Michael Cannata, has been her manager since the 1970s. It was a dozen years after Remington Steele, and some notable guest star appearances on shows like St. Elsewhere, that she landed the role of Marie on Everybody Loves Raymond. Since then, she has been a guest on talk shows and an acting celebrity, with a brace of Emmy nominations to her credit.In 2003 Roberts published the book Are You Hungry, Dear?: Life, Laughs and Lasagna, and the following year she was appointed a cultural ambassador by the U.S. Department of State. But back on the small screen Roberts was more recognizable than ever before, with appearances in Grey's Anatomy, Hot in Cleveland, and Desperate Housewives keeping her as active as ever. Roberts continued to work steadily until her death in 2016, at age 90.