As the impresario of her own front-yard theater troupe at the tender age of 12, there wasn't much question as to which direction the later career of actress Carrie Preston was headed. Serving as everything from stage hand to starlet made it clear to all that her dedication to theater ran deep even at such an early age; eventually, Preston would graduate from the sound stage to the bright lights of Broadway ...

Actor, director, and producer. Born on September 15, 1922, in Los Angeles, California. Before there was a Shirley Temple, there was Jackie Cooper, one of Hollywood's first child stars. His career began around the age of three when he started appearing in some short films. Cooper first rose to popularity as a cast member in the “Our Gang” short film series. He joined the long-running comedy series around 192 ...

A small, delicate-looking, perky actress, Thompson studied dance as a child, and was dancing professionally by age 14; she won scholarships to the Pennsylvania Ballet, American Ballet, and the San Francisco Ballet. However, she felt she was too short to become a prima ballerina and gave up dance in favor of acting. After moving to New York she appeared in some 20 Burger King TV commercials, then debuted ons ...

(born June 25, 1924, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.) American motion-picture, television, and stage director noted for his psychological dramas. He was one of the most prolific and important American cinematic directors of the second half of the 20th century. The son of a Jewish actor, Lumet made his acting debut in New York City's Yiddish theatre as a child and was appearing in plays on Broadway by the l ...

An actress best known as Dorothy "Tootie" Ramsey, the lone African American student and consummate gossip at the exclusive Eastland Preparatory School for Women on NBC's sitcom The Facts of Life (1979-1988), Kim Fields actually appeared on several popular series in the 1970s-2000s. The Big Apple native grew up in a single-parent household and began acting in commercials well before she reached her teens, ma ...

Joan Chen has been one of a very few actors to have a viable career both in Hollywood and in Hong Kong. Whether playing a wizened Vietnamese peasant woman or the doomed Empress of China, she lends her characters a natural elegance and a beguiling vulnerability. Chen was born tp a family of doctors on April 26, 1961, in Shanghai, China. She tasted fame early in her life when she made her film debut in Xie Ji ...

Director and occasional scriptwriter Susanne Bier essayed a series of helming assignments in her native Denmark during the late '90s and early 2000s, that clocked in as lucrative and popular enough to kick-start a highly respectable career for the filmmaker. Though Bier's credits officially date back to 1992, she achieved her first significant breakthrough in 1999, when she directed The One and Only -- a we ...

Born in 1981, actress Bethany Joy Galeotti got her start at the age of 15 with roles in the Stephen King adaptation Thinner and a remake of To Kill a Mockingbird, in which she played Scout. A two-year stint on the long-running soap Guiding Light came in 1998, and in 2003 she landed one of the lead roles on the CW's hit Gen-Y drama One Tree Hill. In addition to her acting work, Galeotti is also a singer and ...

Actor, director, writer, producer Kelsey Grammer was born Allen Kelsey Grammer on February 21 (some sources cite Feb. 20), 1955 in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. Following the shooting death of his father when he was a boy, Grammer was raised in New Jersey and Florida. Tragedy continued when his sister was abducted and violently murdered when Grammer was 20. Five years later, he lost two half brothers in ...

Bam Margera was once described by MTV as "a skate guru who's skidded face-first down the vert ramp one too many times." At first a professional skateboarder, Margera then became a popular regular on the Johnny Knoxville MTV series Jackass, in which Margera, co-star Johnny Knoxville and other goofy young men performed outrageous, dangerous and just plain dumb stunts for the camera. The series ran from 2000-2 ...