Jason Alexander

American actor on the top-rated TV series "Seinfeld." Somehow, Alexander managed to make his character on the show, George Costanza, a national folk hero, even a sex symbol. This, despite the fact that Costanza was short, pudgy, balding, crabby, and neurotic. An entire personality facet of his character on the show included lying to impress women, the same way in which he met and first dated his wife in real life. Alexander met Daena Title, his future bride, while working as a bottom-of-the-barrel assistant at a New York casting agency. He pretended to be a casting director and put his future wife through a bogus audition before working up the courage to ask her out. The scam worked and they eventually married; their son, Gabriel, was born in May 1992.

In 1997, Alexander, as well as the rest of the cast of Seinfeld, asked $1 million per episode for the next season of the show. The request resulted in a battle with NBC that ultimately ended in him and the other members of the cast settling for $600,000 an episode. An actor with a resume prior to "Seinfeld," Alexander did slapstick and Broadway in the 80s, winning a Tony for "Jerome Robbins' Broadway" in 1989.

He was troubled by allergies such as asthma and balded from his late teens. Always heavy-set, Alexander said he "was always scared as a kid of getting picked on or humiliated or actually beaten up by bigger kids." To shield himself from persecution, he turned to comedy as a defense. By the time that he was 13 years old, he was extremely serious about theater, even going so far as travel six towns away to take tap-dancing classes. One year later Alexander had an agent and a manager, three years later he appeared on a PBS pilot.

In 2001, he appeared as lead on his own series, "Bob Patterson," which ran for a half-dozen episodes before biting the dust.