Ah, Michael Richards. The tall, crazy haired, powerfully physical comedian who has been immortalized in our minds as the one and only, Cosmo Kramer on the greatest sitcom of all time, Seinfeld. Michael originally comes our way out of Southern California and found his love of theater and comedy while training as a medic in the US Army during the Vietnam War. He worked in the Army's V-Corp Training Roadshow in his younger years but actually got discovered years later by none other than Billy Crystal, who helped launch his career. In 1980, when NBC had Saturday Night Live drawing millions of viewers and turning it's starts into mega-stars, ABC decided to do a similar show called Fridays. Michael made it onto the copycat and short lived series as a regular cast member, but the show didn't take off and was quickly cancelled despite the improv talent they brought in. One of those talented people that Fridays brought to light was a young Larry David, who remembered Michael when casting his new sitcom as co-creator with Jerry Seinfeld, and they cast Michael as Cosmo Kramer, the rest is history. Since then Richards is now a household name and has been in plenty of movies and TV shows since his rise to mega-stardom on Seinfeld. He took home 3 Emmys for his work as Kramer and has been launched into the lexicon of Americana with things like "Anti-Dentite", "Man-Hands", and "Giddyup!", so despite any more recent news around Michael, he's not going anywhere in the world of cultural relevance, not as long as Seinfeld is still on the air somewhere in the world!
