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Born in 1830, Julian Luna came to California from New Orleans in 1849 to make his fortune in gold, settling in the mining country in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains. He met and married Evelyn in 1856, but their happiness was brief; Evelyn died in childbirth that very same year. Although his infant son John survived, Julian's grief was so great that he could not be consoled in this life, even by his friend Archon Raine. But Archon was more than a friend. He had the power to give Julian a new life -- the life outside humanity. Archon brought Julian into the Kindred, into the Ventrue clan, embracing him, allowing him to live a little longer along his human family, until time would age everything Julian knew, everything except Julian himself.

In 1899, the Julian Luna his family knew had to die. Yet, his grave is empty.

Leaving his family for his Kindred life, Julian detached himself from love, hope, and compassion. He became Archon's Enforcer, demanding obedience of Kindred who walked outside the law, executing when necessary, assassinating when asked. Julian took for himself as well, forcibly embracing a young Alexandra Serris, bringing a gold miner's daughter into the dark world of Kindred. Yet, he cared for her; he ensured that she was safe and that she prospered.

He also met Lillie Langtry who is the one woman most like him in all the world. Lillie moves in and out of his life just as easily as she moves in and out of his bedchamber. They are a pair, and when they love one another, they love selfishly; when they hate one another, they do so with like passion.

Alexandra and Lillie stir something within Julian that he had lost for decades: his compassion. He killed in the Prince's name until one night, he'd had enough. He would kill no more. Seeing this metemorphosis within his Julian, Archon finally stepped aside for his successor, continuing on as the new Prince's advisor.

Under Prince Julian, the Kindred of San Francisco Kindred fall under new laws, the peace remains, although fragile and not entirely without its moments of brutality. Still, Prince Julian holds firm to his laws and enforces them without regard for his own personal interests. His devotion to peace among Kindred and his laws costs him Alexandra; he is forced to order a Blood Hunt against her. Equally capable of compassion and savagery, Julian struggles to maintain the peace between the clans...and to ensure the Masquerade is upheld. He is hampered by the internal conflicts and power struggles between and within the clans, as well as by the actions of Frank Kohanek, a curious police detective who dogs him.

To the few humans who know him, Julian Luna is a reclusive industrialist, but to the Kindred, Julian Luna is the law. He knows what it is like to destroy life with calculated ruthlessness. He knows the love of the most beautiful of women. Passion rules the Kindred, and Julian Luna is as subject to it as anyone. He knows passion for his companions, his Sire, and his long ago human family, a family whose descendants he follows in secret as they live out their lives then die while he continues on, never aging.

Lillie Langtry has been called the greatest international beauty of her day. Oscar Wilde even called her "the new Helen." Born in October 13, 1853 as Emilie Charlotte le Breton, she was the only daughter of the seven children of the Dean of Jersey, Channel Islands, starting out life as a girl on a small island with little chance of making a name for herself. As the young girl who liked to be called "Lillie" blossomed, there was no shortage of callers to her home, but it was a 30-year-old widowed Edward Langtry who finally married her after only six weeks. The marriage was a disappointment. Lillie was willful, demanding, and it became easy for Edward to measure his bride against his late wife.

There is little doubt that she was a most remarkable woman. Famous for her affair with the Prince of Wales Edward VIII, Lillie achieved notoriety primarily for her refusal to accept the strictness imposed upon her by Victorian society. With a clear disregard for convention, she entered establishments intended for "men only," enjoyed the company of many brilliant men who treasured her wit and intelligence. She took to the stage as an accomplished actress and eventually achieved the title of "Lady" by her second marriage to Sir Hugo de Bathe.

On February 12, 1929 Lady Lillie le Breton Langtry de Bathe died. Or so everyone would believe.

Lillie Langtry turns up in California where she conquers hearts as she has everywhere she traveled. Men cannot touch her without wanting her, and one of those men is Julian Luna. Their affair is tumultous. spanning decades. She lives in his house. He has need of her for companionship and advice. There is a bond between them that even moments of aversion and jealousy cannot break. Lillie is the Toreador Primogen. She owns "The Haven," a neutral-ground club where the clans gather, where she can exercise her intelligence and wit to charm all who enter.

Eighteen-year-old Sasha Luna is the last direct descendant of Julian Luna's human family, being his great-great-grandaughter. She is also a rebelious one, defying convention, riding motorcycles, running against family tradition, and her one family relationship was with her grandfather, Julian Luna's grandson. When her grandfather finally dies, she believes she is most alone in the world. But that is not quite so.

Although somewhat amused with Sasha's tough-talking claim of independence, Julian recognizes a lost soul. Acting as a distant uncle, he seeks to form a family bond with her. Initially, Sasha will have nothing of it, until Uncle Julian bails her out of jail and gives her a safe place to live in his house with Lillie. Even then, she claims the arrangement to be temporary until Cash, a Gangrel, moves onto the compound to become Julian's bodyguard; Sasha then finds a reason to stay for a while.

But Julian has to protect Sasha from more than herself and her passionate nature. He must insulate her from his kind, from Kindred. Eventually, Julian cannot keep her from meeting Kindred and forming friendships. As she meets Lillie, Cash, Archon, and others, Sasha senses that there is something different about them. She senses that Julian is important in some way in some society that she can't define.

It is with the violence of a single moment that shatters her innocence of Kindred, plunging her deep into their world. Against the wishes of her uncle, Sasha had taken Cash as her lover, and they met in secret, but one of Julian's enemies knew where, and in an act against the Prince, the Brujah forcibly embraced Sasha, driving a blood wedge between her and her uncle, between her and her lover. It was then that she knew who and what her uncle was, learning of his power and his place in this hidden society.

Her first act was to rebel. If Sasha was fiery and combative when she was human, she became even more so as Kindred. She loves Cash, yet her blood hates him. She loves her uncle yet is angry for his deceit and his unwillingness to bring her into his world. Her one connection to her emotions and the turmoil is Lillie.

Sasha is ripe for chaos.

Cash is the Gangrel Primogen, a role his clan gave him after the Brujah slaughtered the previous Primogen, Stevie Ray. The Gangrels lunge right toward the precipice of crisis with the death of their Primogen. Not only had Stevie Ray been their leader, he had also sired many of the Gangrels in the city. Their anger has the potential to throw San Francisco into another clan war. Nevertheless, they wait. They wait to see what action the Prince will take, for Stevie Ray had been the Prince's bodyguard.

Cash eventually assumes another of his sire's responsibilities -- the Prince's bodyguard -- and moves onto the Prince's compound. The Prince wants Cash because he is loyal, trustworthy, and prepared to fiercely defend the Prince with his life, even as Stevie Ray had. Within a short time, Cash grows to appreciate the tenuous peace that Julian Luna has over the city. He begins to understand that the Prince cares about all the clans, about all Kindred, but will sacrifice any of them to maintain that peace and preserve the law. Cash becomes a part of it, but there is one temptation in the Prince's home: Sasha.

Despite knowing that Julian will disapprove or worse, Cash lets himself fall for the Prince's human descendant. Over time, Julian recognizes that Sasha and Cash cannot be parted, so he grants permission for Cash to embrace Sasha with the promise that Cash protect her and keep her safe. But the Brujah find her and forcibly embrace her.

Cash now must fight centuries of Gangrel hatred for the Brujah if he is to remain in love with the beautiful Sasha. He also must endure her Brujah hatred of Gangrels. They are Romeo and Juliet.

Archon Raine is the Ventrue Primogen and former Prince of San Francisco.

As a wealthy businessman in the wine country, Archon had befriended Julian Luna, and when Julian thought he could no longer live after the death of his wife in 1856, Archon embraced him, bringing him into his Ventrue clan. Archon then began his move to the Princehood of San Francisco. With Julian as his Enforcer, Archon ruled the city with a strong hand during the Clan War, holding his place and establishing a forced peace among the clans during that bloody and violent period. He has now turned over the role of Prince to his protégé, Julian Luna, to whom he continues to act as advisor and mentor.

Educated and erudite, Daedalus is the Nosferatu Primogen and the Prince's Enforcer. When the Prince seeks advice, he seeks Daedalus, for he holds Daedalus as his truest friend. When he has a task to be executed quickly and discreetly, he calls on Daedalus, a creature who can flash vicious and violent in an instant. Daedalus can kill. He can execute, and when the tempation to feed on blood is strong, he will give in. It is in his clan nature.

Daedalus' clan is extremely old, and Daedalus himself may be as well. He is perceptive and compassionate beyond measure. He carries a great burden for humans, especially those who are alone and helpless. It is Daedalus who lurks in the shadows to protect and love such humans, but his compassion carries him into his own personal isolation and pain, the kind that he seeks to alleviate within others. He protects a child from a predatory Kindred. He touches the heart of a singer whose pain haunts her voice. He takes Alexandra to the water where she can go to her final death on her own, saving her from the violence of the Blood Hunt.

His compassion for humans is also an abberation among his kind. Nosferatu care little for the business and squabbles of the other clans. In fact, they care little for the other clans entirely. Most of all, however, they care little for humans. As the clan possessing the least human physical characteristics, the Nosferatu prefer to live away from humans, isolated and in secret. Daedalus compromises, living in secret, underground on the Prince's compound where he expresses himself in his art, dabbles in alchemy, and appreciates a fine wine now and then.

Alexandra Serris is the tragic lover of Julian Luna and of Frank Kohanek, the police detective who seeks to connect Julian to crime in the city.

She was born in a mine in 1876. Her father had come to California for the Gold Rush. As a young woman, she longed to be lost in love, to be consumed by it. She ached for a man who needed her. Then she met Julian Luna. With him, she thought she'd found the love she desired. She thought she'd found the man who needed her. Eventually, she learned his true nature, learned that he was not a man. She learned what he was when he forcibly took her innocence, forciby embraced her, bringing her into his dark world of the Kindred. For years, Julian cared for Alexandra, but he drifted away from her now and then, often going to Lillie.

Eventually, Alexandra leaves Julian, only to meet Frank Kohanek. Although she knows Kohanek has asked her out to ferret out information on Julian Luna, she senses that she has finally found the man she needs, someone to make her feel like a woman, but her confession to Frank that she is Kindred condemns her to death at the hands of Kindred under Julian's law.

Caitlin Byrne is an investigative reporter for the San Francisco Times and determined to discover the real Julian Luna. Thirty-years-old and driven, she seeks to reveal some truth about the wealthy reclusive industrialist and his financial holdings. Instead, she falls victim to Julian's charm.

Caitlin, however, has charm herself, one that Julian finds he can't resist. He buys her newspaper to keep her close, to follow her reporting, to make her the editor, but he feels drawn to her instead. Soon, his position as Prince is in danger of being weakened by his emotional desire for her. Lillie warns Julian, so does Archon, sensing that Caitlin is a threat to them all, that Julian is taking a risk.

Julian is also a threat to Caitlin. He is tearing away her protective cover, layer by layer, threatening the security of her insulated, emotion-free life. She masks an old wound from her past, one that keeps her focused, hard-working, and restrained in her emotional ventures. Julian brings another threat to her -- a Kindred threat. He has enemies; she could become their target.

Sonny Toussaint is a master of the Masquerade. He is a Ventrue, sired by Julian Luna, and he works among humans daily as the partner to Detective Frank Kohanek. His job is to keep Frank in check, to keep him from getting too close to the truth about Julian. His most difficult task, however, is to protect Frank from Kindred. As the series unfolds, Sonny surreptitiously provides Frank with the information and tools he needs to protect himself, all the while steering Frank away from anything that would confirm his partner's rantings about what he calls vampires.

Frank Kohanek is an experienced, tough, and smart detective. He is also obsessed. With ferocious determination, he works to uncover the mob connections of Julian Luna. What he uncovers instead is a dark society that moves undetected all around humanity.

Fully intending to learn more about Julian by romancing Alexandra Serris, Julian's former girfriend, Frank discovers this burning love for her, something he has not known since his wife committed suicide some years earlier, leaving him in a dark and numbing loneliness. Instead of learning more about Julian Luna, Frank learns more than he had ever imagined possible. So deep is his attraction for Alexandra that when she reveals her Kindred nature to him, he begs her to make him like her. Alexandra, however, knows it cannot be. She knows she has condemned both of them to death by her revelation, and the only way she can ensure Frank's safety is to have Julian swear to protect him. Thus, the man who has sworn to protect Frank is the single man Frank wants dead more than anyone in the world. Frank's life is safe only as long as Julian remains alive. And unbeknownst to Frank, his own partner, Sonny Toussaint, is a Ventrue.

Frank's impulse to expose the Kindred, to destroy them, especially Julian, eventually fades as he accepts that Kindred have a right to exist, a right to their own laws, and he has the right to make use of them as much as Julian makes use of him.

Humans know Eddie Fiori as the man who runs the unions and workers around the San Francisco docks. Kindred know him as the Brujah Primogen and he wants to be prince. Embraced by Cyrus, the Prince of Los Angeles, Eddie yearns to be prince himself, so he plots ways to discredit Julian Luna and bring the other clans against him. He also acts directly against the Prince, personally killing the Prince's bodyguard and sending out one of his own to forcibly embrace the Prince's neice Sasha. But when he hired the Assamite assassin to kill Julian Luna, even those Kindred who occasionally plotted with him turned away from him.

Born on 13 June 1962 and raised in London, England, Mark Frankel came from a family accomplished in a variety of the fine arts, including his grandmother, a concert pianist and his grandfather, a prominent violinist and conductor. He started acting in the theater when he was 10 years old and acted until he was 16. He then discontinued his acting and became more involved in his studies at school until age 20, when he returned to acting. He studied amateur dramatics, took numerous classes, and studied with Jack Walzer from the Actors Studio in New York. At that point, he decided to attend drama school for classical training. He was awarded a full three-year scholarship to one of the top drama schools in England, London's prestigious Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Arts.

It was during a performance in a play that he was spotted by a British casting agent and cast in the TNT mini-series A Season of Giants, winning the lead role of Michelangelo over more than 80 actors screen-testing for the part. The mini-series took Frankel on location to Italy, where he spent five months filming and working with F. Murray Abraham, John Glover, Ian Holm, and Steven Berkoff. Mark describes his first big break: "After graduation, while doing four plays in London, I auditioned for a film called A Season of Giants which was a TNT film about the life of Michelangelo. That same evening the director came to my play and asked me to star in his film. That was my first big break. It was very exciting because I had been out of drama school for only a month."

Frankel also appeared in Maigret opposite Michael Gambon; the episode was shot in Budapest, Hungary for Granada Television. In Leningrad, Russia, he filmed TNT's Young Catherine playing the role of Count Orlov and starring opposite acting legends Vanessa Redgrave, Christopher Plummer, Franco Nero, and Maximillan Schell. Catherine was played by Julie Ormond, also a graduate (1988) of the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Frankel's feature film credits include the title role in Leon the Pig Farmer which was released in Europe in 1993 and won the Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival and the Charlie Chaplin Award at the Edinburgh Film Festival that same year. The movie is a delightful and hilarious comedy of a young man's search for his true identity and eventual acceptance of his past. It was after Leon the Pig Farmer that he felt it was time to visit Hollywood, as he had never been there before. He had been in Hollywood for about ten days, and his manager had set up some meetings for him, one of them being with the casting director of Sisters. He was offered the role of "Simon Bolt." It was a role that he initially declined because he did not want the commitment of a regular TV series; he wanted the freedom to pursue other opportunities. However, the producers continued to pursue him, and he eventually accepted. In the end, he was glad, and the timing was perfect for his career.

Other feature film credits include For Roseanna with Jean Reno and Mercedes Ruehl, and Solitaire for Two with Amanda Pays. Other television credits include Fortune Hunter and Kindred: the Embraced, both for Fox television.

Frankel also appeared in the London stage productions of "A Streetcar Named Desire" in the role of Stanley Kowalski, "Days of Cavafy" and "Agamemnon" in the title role. Additionally, he played the lead roles in "Little Hands," "Sentimental," and "A Private Death."

Frankel was a world-class championship tennis player on the international circuit, having won the "Monte Carlo Open." In addition, the actor, who was an avid reader, enjoyed building and customizing vintage motorcycles.

During his filming of Young Catherine, tragedy struck his family. His older brother was killed in an aircraft accident, a mid-air collision between two small planes. The pilots and passengers of both planes were killed. An experienced acrobatics pilot, Joe Frankel flew his plane as far from populated areas as he could, but he did not survive the eventual impact. Mark, just three years younger than his brother, lost his only sibling. Together, they had been risk-takers, performing aerial stunts and skydiving. Their father had been a pilot in the Royal Air Force.

Mark himself was an avid motorcyclist and was especially proud of his yellow Harley Davidson, one of only six in the world. It was on that bike that Mark Frankel fell victim to the accident that took his life on 24 September 1996.

He had married French advertising account executive Caroline Besson in 1991, and together they had two children, the second being born after his death.

Stacy Haiduk was born Apr 24, 1968 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to two school teachers. Growing up in Grand Rapids, she took to dancing, starting her studies at age 4. So accomplished as a dancer, she toured nationally for a year with a Broadway and Vaudeville orientated Michigan dance company when she was only 14. Eventually, she returned to her home town and finished up high school, where her classmates voted her as the student with the prettiest eyes and best figure. But Grand Rpaids couldn't hold her.

At age 17, fresh out of high school, Ms. Haiduk moved to New York where she studied with the Joffrey Ballet and attended acting classes at the Warren Robertson Studio. To support herself, she occasionally worked as a bartender and restaurant hostess. She also danced in the music videos of such artists as Sawyer Brown, Herb Alpert, and Laura Branigan. She even appeared in commercials and on the NBC daytime drama "Another World."

It was after a few small movie parts that she finally landed a major role -- that of Lana Lang on the "Superboy" television series that ran from 1988 to 1991. She was only 19. During that time, she lived in Orlando, FL, where the series was filmed. In 1991, seeking to continue her acting career, she moved to Los Angeles. She made a guest appearance on "Parker Lewis Can't Lose." She starred in the Showtime movie "Sketch Artist." Then she took on the role of FBI agent-in-training Rhea McPherson on NBC's "The Round Table." She continued working in television and film, starring as Lt. Katie Hitchcock on "Seaquest DSV" with Roy Scheider and as Lillie Langtry on "Kindred: the Embraced." She continues her work in film and television.

Ms. Haiduk makes her home in California, where she lives with her husband, actor Bradford Tatum. She enjoys writing, reading poetry, painting, decorating her home, and of course...dancing.

Born August 3, 1972, Brigid Walsh is a native of San Francisco, California, and comes from a large Irish family -- eight brothers and sisters. And she has nearly as many credit names. She is sometimes credited as Brigid Walsh, less often as Brigid Conley Walsh, and most often as Brigid Brannagh.

Her acting career began while in her teens. At 14, she commuted between her home in San Francisco and Los Angeles where she worked in film and television. When she was 17, she landed the role of Katie Davis on the FOX television series "True Colors." FOX also saw her as Sasha in "Kindred: the Embraced." Most recently, she earned many new fans when she played Wesley's girlfriend Virginia Bryce on the WB's "Angel." Ms. Brannagh continues to work extensively in television, making numerous guest appearances on regular series programs, including "Ally McBeal," C.S.I," "West Wing," and many others.

She enjoys writing, reading, and exercising. She also makes personal efforts to further various charites including The Special Olympics, AIDS Project Los Angeles, and Children's International.

Channon Roe was born October 27, 1972 in Pasadena, California and raised in Corona del Mar. As a young surfer from Orange County, he began acting in local theater productions, but after receving encouragement to pursue an acting career, he moved to Los Angeles where he began auditioning for television series and feature films. After training as an actor at the Joanne Baron DW Brown Studio of Santa Monica and at the British Academy of Dramatic Arts at Stanford, his acting career prompty took off. The year was 1994. He immediately landed a guest star lead role in the television series "My So Called Life," as well as supporting roles in two movies. Then followed more guest roles, more movies, and finally a role in a television series -- Cash on "Kindred: the Embraced."

Although his name is not widely recognized, Mr. Roe has become one of Hollywood's busiest young actors. Besides racking up the guest star credits on numerous television shows, he has completed a significant list of film roles.

Currently making his home in Los Angeles, Mr. Roe still enjoys surfing. When not working, he makes time for music, road trips with his friends, and traveling with his family.

Patrick Bauchau (pronounced "beau-show") was born in Brussels, Belgium on December 6, 1938 to a Belgian writer who served in the Belgian underground during WWII, and a Russian expatriate. Mr. Bauchau and his two brothers grew up in Belgium, Switzerland and England, and it was at an early age that he began to develop the charm and manner that would later be described as urbane, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan. Mr. Bauchau earned a degree in Modern Languages at Oxford University on an academic scholarship and speaks French, English, Spanish, Italian, German, plus a little Russian and Flemish.

His career in the film industry began in the 1960s in the French New Wave cinema when he worked as a runner then moved into acting roles. Except for a brief period in the 1970s when he took a break from acting, his acting career continues to the present, and he divides his time between the U.S. and elsewhere, appearing in a wide variety of movies and television roles, with the best known being Sydney in the series "The Pretender."

Mr. Bauchau enjoyes carpentry, collecting oriental art, and yoga. Yet, his great passion is gardening. He devotes many hours and much energy to the flowers, plants, and trees in the private garden at his home in Los Angeles. His wife is French actress Mijanou Bardot, sister to Brigitte Bardot, and they have one adult daughter, Camille.

Jeff Kober seems to have a pragmatic way to characterize his career history. "I was a pretty good rancher (in Montana), a fairly decent corn-dog salesman in a carnival, a very marginal guitar player and a thoroughly lousy waiter." So he took up acting out of sheer necessity.

Born and raised in Billings, Montana, Jeff Kober worked hard at raising Black Angus cattle and sugar beets, but after his English teacher introduced him to literature -- especially Shakespeare, he knew Montana was going to be left behind. After working at the ranch, he would sit down at night and talk with the dogs like the other cowboys; he would drink wine like the other cowboys, but no one but Kober would read Nietzsche.

Following a girlfriend who had moved to Los Angeles, Kober tried out acting classes, studying with Maria Gobetti of the Gobetti Acting Studio. There, he made a discovery: Acting helped him learn to be in touch with his feelings. It helped him feel alive, and he has been acting steadily ever since, starting out with guest appearances, a small regular role on "Falcon Crest" to what many see as his signature role: Dodger of "China Beach." Dodger was to have made a single appearance in the series pilot, but Kober played the sensitive battle-weary Marine with such compassion and pain that Dodger was written into the series.

His next memorable role is that of the Nosferatu Primogen Daedalus in "Kindred: the Embraced." Like Dodger, Daedalus was a soldier -- the Prince's Enforcer. He was also keen to the plight of humans, especially those in pain and sorrow. That anguish was made manifest in the paintings that Daedalus created in his home underneath the Prince's mansion. In fact, it was Jeff Kober himself who painted the artwork of Daedalus.

Jeff Kober is a busy actor these days, with three movies for 2002. He is currently married to Kelley Cutrone and has a son with his first wife Rhonda Talbot.

Kelly Rutherford was born in the small bluegrass town of Elizabethtown in Kentucky on November 6, 1968. Eventually, she made her way to California where, in the late 1980s, she began appearing in various soap operas and making guest appearances on a few TV series. She became a regular on "Homefront" and "The Adventures of Brisco County Jr," then Aaron Spelling discovered her and she made her way into a number of his shows, including "Melrose Place" and "Kindred: the Embraced."

Although her beauty is stunning and she is still a big hit in Turkey for her role in the show "Generations," the big movie roles have eluded Ms. Rutherford.

On June 30, 2001, she married Carlos Tarajano following a whirlwind romance after he spied her across the room at a restaurant just eight months earlier. But shortly after their wedding, the 31-year-old Carlos suffered a cardiac arrest. Kelly never left his hospital bed as he recovered, but when he returned home, he depended on her completely, and the new wife grew ever distant, until she finally left him and filed for divorce the following January, just a week before an "Instyle" Special on Celebrity weddings included footage of her wedding to Carlos.

Kate Vernon has been acting in television and film since her teens, starting with an appearance on "The Love Boat." She was born in 1961 in Hollywood, California, to Canadian actor John Vernon and is sister to singer/performer Nan Vernon.

Born in 1962 in Ellensburg, Washington to two school teachers, Brian Thompson grew up in Longview, Washington on the Columbia River, the second of six children. As a young child, he was sickly, suffering a kidney-related ailment, and it wasn't until surgery corrected his condition that he began building the body that has come to demand the attention of his fans and Hollywood. He started acting in high school in 1977, winning the Mark Morris High School best supporting actor award. He continued the endeavor in college, while majoring in business management and minoring in construction. During the summers, he built docks and bridges and piers for a Portland construction company that had a job waiting for him when he graduated. But graduation day came in 1981 and the job offer went unanswered.

Thompson decided to pursue acting. The University of California/Irvine awarded him a scholarship to its three-year masters of fine arts program, so he departed the northwest for California. While in school at UCI, he landed a job at Universal Studios where he played the villain in a live show of "Conan the Barbarian." He then secured an agent, and by the time he graduated earning a Masters of Fine Arts in Acting, he had already secured guest appearances in a few TV series and his first film job: a punk in "Terminator."

Brian Thompson is known in Hollywood as one of the most versatile and diversified actors in the industry, and he knows what it takes to develop a quality production and what is good for his career. Originally, he had been approached to play the role of Daedalus in "Kindred: the Embraced," but he had little interest in playing yet another role in which he had to wear prostheses glued to his face. He declined unless the producers could come up with more money; they did, and then they offered him the role of Eddie Fiori. As for "Kindred: the Embraced," he jokes that his character Eddie Fiori was a "nice guy who did bad things," but he is serious about his disappointment and aggravation with the show's writing and general lack of creativity. He asked to be written out.

His career spans all genres. He has taken on roles in musical comedies to serious dramas, and often surprises those who actually meet him, for besides having those distinctive muscles and chisled features, he has an incredible facility for language. It is apparent that acting is his passion and a vocation for which he is well suited. He understands acting; he can communicate what it is and what it means, and he teaches his craft at his alumni UCI where he was named UCI's Distinguished Alumni for the year 2000. In addition to pursuing his acting career and teaching at UCI, Thompson also runs an Actor's School in Oregon held on various campuses each year.

Very much a family man, Thompson makes his home in Los Angeles with his wife Isabelle and their two children Jordan and Daphne. He plays piano, cares for a menagerie of pets with his kids, hones his skills in martial arts, and kite-surfs to stay in shape. He claims that he hasn't had to visit a gym since taking up the sport.

C. Thomas Howell was born Christopher Thomas Howell on December 7, 1966 in Van Nuys, California. Two brothers and two sisters followed.

His father is Chris Howell, a stunt coordinator who got a very young C. Thomas started in the industry in 1977 with a first appearance in Brian Keith’s "The Little People" and "It Happened One Christmas" with Marlo Thomas. As a child, however, young Howell traveled extensively with the rodeo, was named the California Junior Rodeo Association’s All Around Junior Boy’s Champion for 1980 and 1981, and had a greater interest in pursuing the rodeo circuit than an acting career. Despite that interest, the acting career pursued him.

In 1981, CT was hired as a stunt player for Steven Spielberg’s "E.T. The Extra Terrestrial" because of his skill on the bicycle. This assignment led to a role in the movie, playing Tyler, one of Elliot’s brother’s friends. Shortly thereafter, he found himself playing Ponyboy Curtis in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Outsiders," a role that thrust him to fame. A TV series and more movies followed. The string of roles has not abated. Going through the teen heartthrob stage to mature adult performances, he continues to pick up guest appearances on TV, he stars in numerous movies -- four of them in 2002 alone, and he has had lead roles in network and syndicated TV series.

C. Thomas Howell was married briefly to Rae Down Chong. He now lives with his second wife Sylvie and three children in Los Angeles, California. He enjoys spending his free time golfing, playing on his computer, watching sports, and at his family’s horse ranch.

Howell has participated in various charity functions including celebrity golfing tournaments, rodeo events, benefits for the Los Angeles Society for the Prevention and Cruelty to Animals. Having a friend stricken with Multiple Sclerosis, CT has also taken an active role in the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, joining in the MS walk.

Erik King has been acting in film and television since 1983, including four TV series and numerous mini-series.