A gregarious actor with a smile that lights up the screen, Cuba Gooding, Jr. experienced the highs and lows of show business growing up as the son of his famous singer father. As he explained to the Los Angeles Times on January 5, 1997: "We lived in a big house and had chauffeurs, we'd go backstage at the concerts and then in the fifth grade . . . bang! Rock bottom." When his parents divorced, he moved with his mother, brother and sister out of the limelight and began facing financial hardships, which included stretches of being evicted and living in a car, as well as time on the welfare rolls. While the family was staying in a cheap motel in suburban Orange County, Gooding befriended future personal assistant Shawn Suttles and production company partner Derek Broes, and the three perfected their breakdancing moves, christening themselves the Majestic Vision Breakdancers.

I’ll admit: I love reading comments on my stories. I devour them, scour them, argue them, and use them. But very rarely do they throw me for a loop. That’s exactly what happened, though, when I broke the news last year that Greg Kinnear and Lauren Graham were starring together in a movie about Bob Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper. One comment came from a personal acquaintance of Kearns’. Another from a friend of his son’s.