The tough part of this answer is knowing where to begin. Don Cheadle has been one of the most sought-after actors of the past 15 years, so you might know him from all sorts of places.

After all the accolades that followed his performance in the big-screen 2004 drama "Hotel Rwanda," people have become surprised to know that Cheadle got his start on TV.

He had some notable big-screen roles before "The Golden Palace" premiered in 1992, but the show's high profile (as the spinoff that grew out of the classic sitcom "The Golden Girls") meant that it was the thing that really brought him to the public's attention.

Bigger and bigger roles followed, culminating in an early-2000s run of prestige films that made him the highly respected Hollywood actor he is today. It started with the 2000 drug war drama "Traffic" and was followed by "Hotel Rwanda" and "Crash" (2004). He was also one of the 11 criminals in the "Ocean's Eleven" reboot-turned-franchise that launched in 2001.

He returned to TV in recent years with his critically acclaimed Showtime drama "House of Lies," which ended in 2016. However, he'll be back on Showtime next year in a new Wall Street comedy called "Black Monday."

He's continued his film career as well, most visibly as James Rhodes, alias War Machine, in the recent Avengers superhero movies.

That's his new stuff, though. If you recognized Don Cheadle when "The Golden Palace" first aired in the early '90s, it was because of two gritty, realistic dramas he did in the late '80s: the Vietnam War picture "Hamburger Hill" (1987) and the cops-and-gangs drama "Colors" (1988).

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