Most people would go on to become a doctor after getting a double degree in microbiology and biochemistry, but as you’ll soon discover, Kaplan is not like most people. Instead, the University of Toronto graduate decided to turn his talents as a caricaturist into a career and hit the Yellow Brick Road in pursuit of pursuing the celebrities he grew up celebrating. His affinity for the famous began at adolescence, when a young Kaplan would sit in front of a bunny-eared television set and draw portraits of his favourite stars from Hollywood Squares, The Brady Bunch and The Lucy Show. “I think sometimes things are innate, I mean who tells a seven-year-old to start sketching Charlie Chaplin or Lucille Ball?” says Kaplan, who began studying and corresponding with legendary caricaturist to the stars, Al Hirschfeld. “I thought, ‘I want to be like him, I want to do what he does.’ That’s when I started to draw caricatures a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, like all the time!”

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Kaplan began pitching his cartoons to local newspapers and was almost immediately syndicated in Canada. As his success snowballed, he proceeded to push his “Where are they Now” column to nearly 60 newspapers in the U.S. that picked it up. His idea to send cartoons directly to celebrities was probably one of his greatest. “You never know what’s going to happen, so if you don’t try anything, nothing will happen,” says Kaplan, who had to resort to phone books and mail in a pre-dot-com era. When he started getting positive feedback and thank-you letters from people like George Michael, John Travolta and Quentin Tarantino, Kaplan became captivated. One instance of gratitude particularly rings a bell: “I answered the phone and someone said, ‘Please hold for Bono.’ I was like, ‘what!?’”

Eventually it got to a point where Kaplan wanted the people he sketched on paper to come to life. He wanted to meet them face-to-face. He started pitching TV concepts to production companies and eventually, Totally Tracked Down got picked up in 2010. “I was pitching it as a producer and they said, ‘Well, why don’t you host it?’” So the offbeat, spikey haired, self-proclaimed “nut bar” from Woodbridge set out to Los Angeles to track down stars like Seinfeld’s Estelle Harris and The Brady Bunch’s Christopher Knight. Sometimes he’d have to jump through hoops and harass family and friends, while other times he’d just happen to be at the right place at the right time. “You have to think positive and you attract positivity. Here I am, I have this affinity towards celebrities, and I bump into them,” says Kaplan, which was the case when he spotted Lindsay Lohan outside the Beverley Hills Hotel on one of his days off. “I saw her walk in and followed her … the whole time we were talking she held my hand, she never let go of my hand once and she always looked me right in the eyes, sweet as can be.” Totally Tracked Down was cancelled when a new production company came in, but Kaplan was consoled when his show was posthumously nominated for a Gemini award.

When Kaplan looks back on his career, he’s proud of the decisions he’s made. His cartoons are still published between 400 – 500 times a year in various North American newspapers, and his mind permeates with new show concepts he hopes to create. As for his time spent studying sciences in university? He would never erase those years; it’s there that he fell in love with his wife of 21 years, Frances. The couple has three children. “Follow your heart, that’s the first thing. Do whatever you want in life because if you do what you want you’ll be successful because you’re happy.”

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Travolta met Preston when he was a Hollywood star on his way down and she was a young actress on the way up. Both were in relationships when they met and worked together for the first time on a film called The Experts in 1987. They had a lot in common – they were both Scientologists – but Preston was married to actor Kevin Gage at the time. After divorcing Gage in 1987, Preston began a relationship with actor Charlie Sheen. Sheen proposed to Preston in 1989 but a year later Preston ended the relationship after Sheen accidentally shot her in the arm after an argument. It was then that Travolta and Preston began seeing each other and just over a year later, on Sept. 5, 1991, they were married in Paris (although they would need to be married a second time a week later in Florida because the original marriage was a Scientology ceremony, which is not recognized as legal in the United States).

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The couple’s first child, Jett, was born a year later; their daughter, Ella Bleu, was born in 2000. While Travolta and Preston continued to work, Preston chose to scale back the volume of her acting roles so she could be a full-time mother to Jett and Ella Bleu. “Even during those early years of our marriage and family life, when my career was supposedly at a standstill, I was still working all the time; the movies I was making then just weren’t as high profile as the ones I was making 10 years earlier,” she said. But things would shortly take a huge leap forward for Travolta when he took the role of Vincent Vega in the movie that became a cultural phenomenon – Pulp Fiction. This was followed by Get Shorty and the Golden Globe win, and then an unabated series of starring roles in high-profile films that earned Travolta enormous wealth, which allowed him and his family to have homes in Florida, Los Angeles and an estate in the Bahamas. It also allowed him to fly the airplanes that this aviation nut (and commercially licensed pilot who has actually flown jets for Qantas) loves.

“The secret to a good and successful marriage is to not look for secret formulas” — John Travolta

The freedom that success brought them made Preston think of getting back to work but only in a way that would not affect her family life. “When I decided to get back into acting I was trying to get back in as ‘Mrs. John Travolta,’ which meant I had to start proving myself all over again,” she said. “One of the most wonderful things about Kelly is her commitment to being a mother. Even when she went back to work, she would work only when I was not doing a film – she didn’t want both of us working at the same time,” said Travolta.

On Jan. 2, 2009, a tragedy of unspeakable depth struck Travolta and Preston when their son, Jett, died while the family was on vacation at their estate in the Bahamas. Jett had a seizure (he suffered from Kawasaki disease and was afflicted by autism) and hit his head on the bathtub. Any parent will tell you that losing a child is an unthinkable horror. Because of the family’s celebrity, the public nature of their pain just added to the weight of it. Their sorrow was intensified tenfold when Travolta and Preston were the victims of an extortion plot involving three Bahamians (including a member of the Bahamian parliament, an emergency medical technician, and a former senator). These people tried to extort millions from Travolta in exchange for documents they claimed they had regarding Jett’s death that they would make public if they were not paid. All three were arrested and charged with abetment and conspiracy to extort. Even though Travolta was still deep in mourning, he testified at the trial.

In the year since, both Travolta and Preston have returned to work, as a kind of therapeutic way of trying to slowly reckon with the loss of their son. Preston has made films starring Kevin Spacey (Casino Jack) and with Miley Cyrus (The Last Song). Travolta has been less active professionally, having appeared only in From Paris With Love (in which Preston also appeared). He was in the news during the Haitian earthquake tragedy when he volunteered his own Boeing 707 jet to be used to fly supplies and personnel in and out of the disaster zone.

The 20-year marriage of  Travolta and Preston has been successful for another reason as well: marriage counselling. The couple have made a habit of seeing a marriage counsellor as a regular part of their lives, not just during a crisis or tension but as a way of continuing to focus on what is important in their marriage.

For Travolta and Preston, the last few years have been, to quote Charles Dickens, the best of times and the worst of times. But now, with the news that Travolta, 56, and Preston, 47, are getting ready to welcome the newest addition to their family, is definitely a positive indication that they are back to better times.