The small-market Bucks (who had not even been featured on NBC that year prior to the second round of the Playoffs) did not have any "big-time" stars, with the exception of Ray Allen (who, despite being popular, was not in the upper-echelon of NBA players in terms of endorsements).

Third baseman Eric Chavez is going to be a big-time star in another year or two, and he will be a dangerous presence in the series because of his talent and laid-back demeanor.

His brother has been a big-time star.

"These people are honoring me for what I was before I became a big-time star," he said.

It is the first major skyscraper designed by Charles Gwathmey and Robert Siegel, architects whose elaborately detailed, lavishly executed modernist houses and offices have made them big-time architectural stars of the last two decades.

Still, Mr. Mortensen's ambivalence about being a big-time star means that his career has not followed the usual trajectory.

Of course, magazines that cannot get interviews with certain big-time stars often write about them anyway, cobbling together cover stories with stock photo footage and quotations from clips.

And talk about big-time stars doing cameos: Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Orson Welles and Edgar Bergen among them - Sunday at 5 p.m., Thursday at 9 p.m. and Friday at 2 p.m. on Odyseey.

This actress, whose performance as an angst-ridden preschooler in "Charlie Brown" netted a clutch of theater awards last spring, became the personification of a cherished Broadway fairy tale, in which the determined kid from corn country is transformed overnight into a big-time star.