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Gladys Cooper was the daughter of journalist William Frederick Cooper and his wife Mabel Barnett. As a child she was very striking and was used as a photographic model beginning at six years old. She wanted to become an actress and started on that road in 1905 after being discovered by Seymour Hicks to tour with his company in "Bluebell in Fairyland". She came to the London stage in 1906 in "The Belle of Mayfair", and in 1907 took a departure from the legitimate stage to become a member of Frank Curzon's famous Gaiety Girls chorus entertainments at The Gaiety theater. Her more concerted stage work began in 1911 in a production of Oscar Wilde's comedy "The Importance of Being Earnest" which was followed quickly with other roles. From the craze for post cards with photos of actors - that ensued between about 1890 and 1914 - Cooper became a popular subject of maidenly beauty with scenes as Juliet and many others. During World War I her popularity grew into something of pin-up fad for the British military.

In the meantime she sampled the early British silent film industry starting in 1913 with The Eleventh Commandment (1913). She had roles in a few other movies in 1916 and 1917. But in the latter year she joined Frank Curzon to co-manage the Playhouse Theatre. This was a decidedly new direction for a woman of the period. She took sole control from 1927 until other stage commitments in 1933. She was also doing plays, some producing of her own, and a few more films in the early 1920s. It was actually about this time that she achieved major stage actress success. She appeared in W. Somerset Maugham's "Home and Beauty" in London in 1919 and triumphed in her 1922 appearance in Arthur Wing Pinero's "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray". It was ironic that writer Aldous Huxley criticized her performance in "Home and Beauty" as "too impassive, too statuesque, playing all the time as if she were Galatea, newly unpetrified and still unused to the ways of the living world." On the other hand, Maugham himself applauded her for "turning herself from an indifferent actress (at the start of her career) to an extremely competent one". She also debuted the role of Leslie Crosbie (the Bette Davis role in the 1940 film) in Maugham's "The Letter" in 1927.

In 1934 Cooper made her first sound picture in the UK and came to Broadway with "The Shining Hour" which she had been doing in London. She and it were a success, and she followed it with several plays through 1938, including "Macbeth". About this time Hollywood scouts caught wind of her, and she began her 30 odd years in American film. That first film was also Alfred Hitchcock's first Hollywood directorial effort, Rebecca (1940). Hers was a small and light role as Laurence Olivier's gregarious sister, but she stood out all the same. Two years later she bit into the much more substantial role as Bette Davis' domineering and repressive mother in the classic Now, Voyager (1942) for which she received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress - the first of three. Though aristocratic elderly ladies were roles she revisited in various guises, Cooper was busy through 1940s Hollywood.

She returned to London stage work from 1947 and stayed for some early episodic British TV into 1950 before once again returning to the US, but was busy on both sides of the Atlantic until her death. Through the 1950s and into the 1960s Cooper did a few films but was an especially familiar face on American TV in teleplays, a wide range of prime-time episodic shows, and popular weird/sci-fi series: several Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Twilight Zone, and Outer Limits. When Enid Bagnold's "The Chalk Garden" opened in London in 1955, Cooper debuted as Mrs. St. Maugham and brought it to Broadway in October of that year where it ran through March of 1956. Her last major film was My Fair Lady (1964) as Henry Higgins' mother. The year before she had played the part on TV. In the film, the portrait prop of a fine lady over Higgins' fireplace is that of Cooper painted in 1922. She wrote an autobiography (1931) followed by two biographies (1953 and 1979). In 1967 she was honored as a Dame Commander of the Order of British Empire (DBE) for her great accomplishments in furthering acting.

With poofy, curly red hair, a top hat and a horn, the lovable mute was the favorite of the Marx Brothers. Though chasing women was a favorite routine of his in the movies, Harpo was a devoted father and husband. He adopted the mute routine in vaudeville and carried it over to the films. Harpo was an accomplished self-taught harpist whose musical numbers would many times bring tears to the eyes of the audience of an otherwise hilarious movie.

Genteel Cathleen Nesbitt was a grand dame of the theatre on both sides of the Atlantic in a career spanning seven decades. Among almost 300 roles on stage, she excelled at comic portrayals of sophisticated socialites and elegant mothers. Hollywood used her, whenever a gentler, sweeter version of Gladys Cooper was needed, yet someone still possessed of a subtly sarcastic wit and turn of phrase. She attended Queen's University in Belfast and the Sorbonne in Paris.

Encouraged by a friend of her father - none other than the legendary Sarah Bernhardt - to enter the acting profession, she was taken on by Victorian actress and drama teacher Rosina Filippi (1866-1930). Cathleen's first appearance on stage was in 1910 at the Royalty Theatre in London. This was followed in November 1911 by her Broadway debut with the touring Abbey Theatre Players in 'The Well of the Saints'. From here on, and for the rest of her long life, she was never out of a job, demonstrating her range and versatility by playing everything from villainesses to being a much acclaimed Kate in Shakespeare's 'The Taming of the Shrew', Perdita in Shakespeare's 'The Winter's Tale', the great-aunt and tutor in the art of courtesanship of the title character in 'Gigi', the Dowager Empress in 'Anastasia', and the gossipy 'humorously animated' Julia Shuttlethwaite of T.S. Eliot's 'The Cocktail Party'. Her Mrs. Higgins in 'My Fair Lady', Brooks Atkinson described as played with 'grace and elegance', which also pretty much sums up Cathleen's career in films.

Her first motion picture role was a lead in the drama The Faithful Heart (1922), adapted from an Irish play. She then absented herself from the screen for the next decade, resurfacing in supporting roles in British films, though rarely cast in worthy parts, possible exceptions being Man of Evil (1944) and Jassy (1947). Her strengths were rather better showcased during her sojourn in Hollywood, which began in 1952. In addition to prolific appearances in anthology television, she also appeared in several big budget films, most memorably as Cary Grant's perspicacious grandmother in An Affair to Remember (1957) and as gossipy Lady Matheson (alongside Gladys Cooper ) in Separate Tables (1958). One of her last roles of note was as the elderly wealthy Julia Rainbird, who instigates the plot in Alfred Hitchcock's final film, Family Plot (1976).

At the instigation of her friend, Anita Loos, author of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes", Nesbitt wrote her memoir, 'A Little Love and Good Company', in 1977. For her extraordinarily long career in the acting profession, she was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Honours List the following year. She retired just two years prior to her death in 1983 at the age of 94.

One of Hollywood's finest character actors and most accomplished scene stealers, Barry Fitzgerald was born William Joseph Shields in 1888 in Dublin, Ireland. Educated to enter the banking business, the diminutive Irishman with the irresistible brogue was bitten by the acting bug in the 1920s and joined Dublin's world-famous Abbey Players. He subsequently starred in the Abbey Theatre production of Sean O'Casey's Juno And The Paycock, a role that he recreated in his film debut for director Alfred Hitchcock in 1930. He was coaxed to the U.S. in 1935 by John Ford to appear in Ford's film adaptation of another O'Casey masterpiece, The Plough and the Stars (1936). Fitzgerald took up residence in Hollywood and went on to give outstanding performances in such films as The Long Voyage Home (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), None But the Lonely Heart (1944), And Then There Were None (1945), Two Years Before the Mast (1946) and what is probably the role for which he is most fondly remembered, The Quiet Man (1952). He won the Academy Award For Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of gruff, aging Father Fitzgibbon in Going My Way (1944). He was also nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for the same role and was the only actor to ever be so honored. Barry Fitzgerald died in his beloved Dublin in 1961.

F.W. Murnau was a German film director. He was greatly influenced by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Shakespeare and Ibsen plays he had seen at the age of 12, and became a friend of director Max Reinhardt. During World War I he served as a company commander at the eastern front and was in the German air force, surviving several crashes without any severe injuries.

One of Murnau's acclaimed works is the 1922 film Nosferatu, an adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Although not a commercial success due to copyright issues with Stoker's novel, the film is considered a masterpiece of Expressionist film.

He later emigrated to Hollywood in 1926, where he joined the Fox Studio and made three films: Sunrise (1927), 4 Devils (1928) and City Girl (1930). The first of these three is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made.

In 1931 Murnau travelled to Bora Bora to make the film Tabu (1931) with documentary film pioneer Robert J. Flaherty, who left after artistic disputes with Murnau, who had to finish the movie on his own. A week prior to the opening of the film Tabu, Murnau died in a Santa Barbara hospital from injuries he had received in an automobile accident that occurred along the Pacific Coast Highway near Rincon Beach, southeast of Santa Barbara. Only 11 people attended his funeral. Among them were Robert J. Flaherty, Emil Jannings, Greta Garbo and Fritz Lang, who delivered the eulogy.

Of the 21 films Murnau directed, eight are considered to be completely lost.

In July 2015 Murnau's grave was broken into, the remains disturbed and the skull removed by persons unknown. Wax residue was reportedly found at the site, leading some to speculate that candles had been lit, perhaps with an occult or ceremonial significance. As this disturbance was not an isolated incident, the cemetery managers are considering sealing the grave.

Lowell Sherman was one of the early cinema's first major stars who successfully made the transition from actor to director. Born in either 1885 or 1888, his parents were John Wm. Sherman, a theatrical producer (1855-1924), and Julia Gray Sherman, an actress and daughter of actress Kate Gray.

In 1905 Lowell embarked on his first real stage work in New York and his first film work took place in 1914. From the start, he proved to be a respected actor who played the roles of the playboy and villain very well. He directed early films for Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn, married three times and attended the 1921 party at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco that scandalously ended the career of Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle. Sherman died of pneumonia in December 1934.

Hank Patterson was born in Springville, Alabama to Green and Mary Newton Patterson. Hank's great-grandfather, James Pearson, was an original settler of St. Clair County, AL as was his mother's great-grandfather, Thomas Newton. Between 1894 & 1897, the family left AL to live in Taylor, Texas, where Hank attempted to work as a serious musician, only to settle for playing piano in traveling vaudeville shows. He worked his way out to California in the 1920s and here began his film career followed by long runs on two television series Gunsmoke (1955) and Green Acres (1965).

Maurice Chevalier's first working job was as an acrobat, until a serious accident ended that career. He turned his talents to singing and acting, and made several short films in France. During World War I he enlisted in the French army. He was wounded in battle, captured and placed in a POW camp by the Germans. During his captivity he learned English from fellow prisoners. After the war he returned to the film business, and when "talkies" came into existence, Chevalier traveled to the US to break into Hollywood. In 1929 he was paired with operatic singer/actress Jeanette MacDonald to make The Love Parade (1929). Although Chevalier was attracted to the beautiful MacDonald and made several passes at her, she rejected him firmly, as she had designs on actor Gene Raymond, who she eventually married. He did not take rejection lightly, being a somewhat vain man who considered himself quite a catch, and derided MacDonald as a "prude". She, in turn, called him "the quickest derrière pincher in Hollywood". They made three more pictures together, the most successful being Love Me Tonight (1932). In the late 1930s he returned to Europe, making several films in France and England. World War II interrupted his career and he was dogged by accusations of collaboration with the Nazi authorities occupying France, but he was later vindicated. In the 1950s he returned to Hollywood, older and gray-headed. He made Gigi (1958), from which he took his signature songs, "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" and "I Remember it Well". He also received a special Oscar that year. In the 1960s he made a few more films, and in 1970 he sang the title song for Walt Disney's The Aristocats (1970). This marked his last contribution to the film industry.

Elisabeth Risdon was born on 26 April 1888 in London, England, UK. She was an actress, known for Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), High Sierra (1941) and Mexican Spitfire (1939). She was married to Brandon Evans and George Loane Tucker. She died on 20 December 1958 in Santa Monica, California, USA.

Harry Tyler was born on 13 June 1888 in New York City, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Naked Street (1955) and Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955). He was married to Gladys Crolius. He died on 15 September 1961 in Hollywood, California, USA.

Large and hearty Monty Woolley was born to privilege on August 17, 1888, the son of a hotel proprietor who owned the Marie Antoinette Hotel on Broadway. A part of Manhattan's elite social circle at a young age, he studied at both Yale (Master's degree) and Harvard and returned to Yale as an English instructor and coach of graduate dramatics. Among his students were Thornton Wilder and Stephen Vincent Benet.

Directly involved in the theater arts via his close association with intimate Yale friend and confidante Cole Porter, Monty directed several Broadway musicals and reviews, many in collaboration with Porter, including "Fifty Million Frenchmen" (1929) (an early success for Porter), "The New Yorkers" and "Jubilee" (1935). In 1936, at age 47, the witty, erudite gent had a career renaissance and gave up his Ivy League professorship once and for all in order to pursue the stage professionally. He took his first Broadway bow in the hit musical "On Your Toes" alongside Ray Bolger. Hollywood soon took notice and he began receiving supporting credit as assorted judges and doctors for such MGM fare as Live, Love and Learn (1937), Everybody Sing (1938), the Margaret Sullavan tearjerker Three Comrades (1938), Lord Jeff (1938), the Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy musical The Girl of the Golden West (1938) and Young Dr. Kildare (1938).

Typically playing cunning character leads and support roles, he was affectionately nicknamed "The Beard" by friend Cole Porter for his distinguished, impeccably-trimmed white whiskers. It was Monty who introduced Porter into the famed New York theater circle. Known for his sartorial elegance, ribald sense of humor and snob appeal, he and Porter were highly prominent carousers in the New York gay social underground.

Monty came into his own in 40s films, earning a best actor Oscar nomination for his role in the WWII drama The Pied Piper (1942), a supporting actor nod in another war classic, Since You Went Away (1944), and portrayed himself in the absurdly fictionalized (and sanitized) "biography" of Cole Porter entitled Night and Day (1946) starring a woefully miscast but admittedly flattering Cary Grant in the lead. A flashy delight in other movie roles, Monty received top billing in Irish Eyes Are Smiling (1944) with June Haver and Dick Haymes, playing a twinkle-eyed con man; appeared opposite Brit comedienne Grace Field in the English-humored Molly and Me (1945) and Holy Matrimony (1943); again with Cary Grant along with Loretta Young and David Niven as a professor in the perennial Christmas classic The Bishop's Wife (1947); plots against his own retirement in the mild comedy As Young as You Feel (1951) opposite another scene-stealing favorite, Thelma Ritter; and ended his film career with the role of Omar Khayyam in the glossy MGM operetta Kismet (1955).

Above all, however, Monty will be forever and indelibly cherished as the irascible (and definitive) radio personality Sheridan Whiteside in the stage and film versions of Kaufman and Hart's screwball classic The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941). Playing the razor-tongued, wheelchair-bound celebrity who wreaks havoc for everyone within knife-throwing distance, this would be the hallmark of his never-too-late-to-try career. He played another uppity and bombastic celebrity, this time a washed-up classical actor, in the more sentimental Life Begins at Eight-Thirty (1942), another role dripping with crusty sarcasm.

Monty appeared sporadically on radio and TV before and after his last filming in 1955. He died of kidney/heart problems in 1963 at the age of 74.

On the British stage from his teens, he first appeared as a half-breed boy in "The Squaw Man." His screen debut was in 1923 in the film "Chu Chin Chow." Dissatisfied with the British film industry, he moved to Hollywood and played a number of minor roles up to the time of his death. On the English stage he appeared with such greats as Anna May Wong, Alice Joyce and Gilda Grey.

An American novelist, writer of crime fiction featuring the private detective Philip Marlowe, Raymond (Thornton) Chandler was born in Chicago of an American father and an Anglo-Irish mother. He moved to England when his parents divorced. He attended Dulwich College and studied languages in France and Germany before returning to England in 1907 and becoming a naturalized British subject. He took a civil service job in the Admiralty, which he left in 1912 to return to America, settling in California. After the US entered World War I he enlisted in the Canadian Army, then transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. After the armistice he returned to California and got a series of bookkeeping jobs, finally becoming a vice-president with the Dabney Oil syndicate.

All along, however, he had been submitting stories, poems, sketches and essays to a number of periodicals, but when the Depression hit and the bottom fell out of the oil business, he lost his job and turned to writing full-time. He found a niche with stories of the "hard-boiled" school popularized by Dashiell Hammett, and had many of his early stories accepted by Black Mask, the same mystery magazine that had first published Hammett. His first four novels--"The Big Sleep" (1939, filmed 1946 [The Big Sleep (1946)] and 1978 [The Big Sleep (1978)]); "Farewell My Lovely" (1940, filmed 1944 [Murder, My Sweet (1944)] and 1975 [Farewell, My Lovely (1975)]); "The High Window" (1942, filmed 1947 [The Brasher Doubloon (1947)]); and "The Lady in the Lake (1943, filmed 1946 [Lady in the Lake (1946)])--which reworked plots from some of his short stories, were his most successful.

He spent some time in Hollywood as a screenwriter, contributing to Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), the film noir classic The Blue Dahlia (1946) and Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951). He wrote realistically, in stark contrast to the English style of drawing-room puzzle mysteries where an amateur detective always knows more than the police and clues turn up at just the right moment. Chandler dismissed these plots as "having God sit in your lap."

Austrian composer Max Steiner achieved legendary status as the creator of hundreds of classic American film scores. He was born Maximilian Raoul Walter Steiner in Vienna, Austria, the son of Marie Mizzi (Hasiba) and Gabor Steiner, an impresario, and the grandson of actor and theater director and manager Maximilian Steiner. His family was Jewish. As a child, he was astonishingly musically gifted, composing complex works as a teenager and completing the course of study at Vienna's Hochschule fuer Musik und Darstellende Kunst in only one year, at the age of sixteen. He studied under Gustav Mahler and, before the age of twenty, made his living as a conductor and as composer of works for the theater, the concert hall, and vaudeville. After a brief sojourn in Britian, Steiner moved to the USA and quickly became a sought-after orchestrator and conductor on Broadway, bringing the Western classical tradition in which he had been raised to mainstream audiences.

He was soon snatched up by the film studios with the advent of sound and helped the fledgling talkies become musically sophisticated within a brief few years. He was one of the first to fully integrate the musical score with the images on-screen and to score individual scenes for their content and create leitmotifs for individual characters, as opposed to simply providing vaguely appropriate mood music, as evidenced in King Kong (1933), which set the standard for American film music for years to come.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, he was one of the most respected, innovative, and brilliant composers of American film music, creating a truly staggering number of exceptional scores for films of all types. He was nominated for Academy Awards for his scores eighteen times and won three times. Years after his death in 1971, he remains one of the giants of motion picture history, and his music still thrives.

For over two decades, Porter Hall made a career out of playing villains and pompous, unpleasant people. His movie career was not a mirror of his real life, however. Mr. Hall was well known as a generous and outgoing person who was well-liked by almost everybody he knew. It is ironic that the role he is most often seen in today is that of an atheist in Going My Way (1944) - ironic because Hall was a deacon in his church. Hall, who didn't make his first movie until he was 43, remained active until his death in 1953.

The American character actress, Florence Rabe, was the daughter of an antique store owner. She gained a degree in Mathematics from the University of Texas in 1906 and went on to a career in teaching and social work. She changed course after being persuaded by a friend to study law, and, passing her bar exam in 1914, practised for four years in San Antonio. When her parents died, she took over the business and travelled abroad extensively to acquire stock, all the while adding to her knowledge of foreign languages (she was, for instance, a fluent Spanish speaker). After the Wall Street crash of 1929, Florence sold the antique store and married Texan oilman William F. Jacoby. Jacoby eventually went bankrupt and the couple moved to California in the late 1930's, briefly becoming proprietors of a bakery.

At this time, Florence, a heavy-set woman of matronly appearance and well into her middle age, developed an interest in acting and auditioned for the part of Miss Bates in the Pasadena Playhouse production of Jane Austen's 'Emma'. This proved to be a momentous career choice. Her popularity became such, that she went on to leading roles with the same company, changing her name to Florence Bates as a nod to her perceived good fortune. In 1939, she screen tested for Alfred Hitchcock, who was sufficiently impressed to cast her as the demanding, imperious dowager Mrs. Edythe Van Hopper in Rebecca (1940). Her excellent performance was the first in a gallery of memorable characters: wealthy socialites, irritable, henpecking wives, hotel managers (The Moon and Sixpence (1942)), theatre owners (Tonight and Every Night (1945)) and unctuous, gossipy landladies (Portrait of Jennie (1948)). She was equally adept at comedy, appearing to great effect in Heaven Can Wait (1943) and Lullaby of Broadway (1951), with frequent co-star S.Z. Sakall, aka 'Cuddles'. She was enjoyably larger-than-life as Danny Kaye's prospective mother-in-law in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) and as Vera-Ellen's inebriated Russian dance teacher, Madame Dilyovska, in On the Town (1949). Bates even essayed a murderess in The Brasher Doubloon (1947). Destined never to win any awards, Florence Bates continued in films until her death in 1954. She was pre-deceased by her sister, her only daughter and her husband.

An American character actor of prodigious output who also directed and wrote silent films, Paul Hurst spent much of his early work in low-budget westerns. A native of Traver, California (in the San Joaquin Valley), Hurst had first-hand knowledge of western lore, growing up surrounded by the multimillion-acre Lux & Miller ranches that ran cattle throughout the state. Visiting San Francisco as a young man, he became involved in amateur theatricals and thereafter traveled to Los Angeles to join the emerging film industry there. He began appearing in films as early as 1912, most of them westerns. By 1916 Hurst was directing them as well (some sources report that he served in World War I as a member of the French Foreign Legion, but the dates of his film projects make this story highly suspect).

In the early 1920s Hurst wrote several scenarios for films he directed and in which he appeared. He proved adept at working as a director for some of the cheapest producers along Gower Gulch, where movies were normally shot on location in a week or less and where stuntmen were often the highest-paid folks on the set. Within a few years he focused all of his energies into acting, however, notably becoming one of the few successes to emerge from "Poverty Row".

Hurst quickly became one of the more prolific and familiar characters in American movies. With his stocky build and squinty demeanor, and with a raspy voice that enhanced his memorability once sound pictures came in, Hurst played villains, cops and comedy sidekicks in more than 250 films. His most famous role was that of the deserter shot dead on the stairway of Tara by Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind (1939). Hurst was the sidekick to Monte Hale in a number of B westerns. Former Gower Gulch veteran John Wayne hired Hurst for Big Jim McLain (1952) knowing that Hurst was ill with terminal cancer. In 1953, at age 64, owing to his health problems, Paul Hurst committed suicide.

Actor, playwright and screenwriter Miles Malleson's list of credits reads like a history of British cinema in the first half of the 20th century. Born in Croydon in Surrey, he was educated at Brighton College in Sussex and Emmanuel College Cambridge. He had intended to become a schoolmaster but he opted instead for the stage and went into repertory theatre in Liverpool and then onto the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London.

He wrote his first play in 1913 and, in contrast to the characters he often portrayed on screen, held socially progressive views which were often reflected in his work. His output included two plays about the First World War, "D Company" and "Black Eill", and one about the Tolpuddle Martyrs. He also worked as a screenwriter on two documentaries for Paul Rotha, Land of Promise (1946) and World of Plenty (1943).

Following the outbreak of The Great War in July 1914 Malleson enlisted in the British Army as a Private (No. 2227) in the 1/1st (City of London) Battalion (Royal Fusiliers). He served from 5th September 1914 until receiving a medical discharge in 1915, which included a period spent in Egypt. Malleson made no secret of his objection to the war as both a member of the Independent Labour Party and a supporter of the No-Conscription Fellowship.

His most prolific period as a screenwriter was in the 1930s and 1940s, initially on historical subjects like Nell Gwyn (1934), Rhodes (1936), and Victoria the Great (1937). In many of these films he also began appearing in supporting roles, and from the mid-'30s onward he found himself in increasing demand as an actor as well as a writer. Over the next 30 years he appeared in nearly 100 films, featuring in everything from Alfred Hitchcock thrillers and Ealing comedies to Hammer horrors.

Usually cast as a befuddled judge or a doddering old doctor, academic or other local eccentric, he first caught audiences' imagination as the hearse driver in the Ealing chiller compendium Dead of Night (1945), after which he began to get bigger and better parts. He was particularly memorable as the philosophical hangman in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Canon Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), Dr. McAdam in Folly to Be Wise (1952), the barrister Grimes in Brothers in Law (1957) and as Windrush Sr. in Private's Progress (1956) and I'm All Right Jack (1959).

Towards the end of his career he continued to appear in cameo roles in comedy films, and made several appearances in Hammer horror films including Horror of Dracula (1958) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), before failing eyesight forced him into retirement in his late 70s.

Cambridge-educated Paul Cavanagh appeared in pictures as the epitome of the debonair, well-dressed Englishman. The former barrister and Royal Canadian Mountie turned to acting in 1924 and had a starring role on Broadway in 'Scotland Yard' (1929). His film career began in 1928 and lasted just over three decades. During that time, he portrayed charming grifters (The Notorious Sophie Lang (1934), stalwart leading men (Mae West's love interest in Goin' to Town (1935), as well as the occasional murder victim or dastardly swine (as Martin Arlington in Tarzan and His Mate (1934). He was at his best however, as the urbane older husband of Joan Crawford in the brilliant Humoresque (1946), tolerating the antics of his neurotic wife - and Oscar Levant's wisecrack ("Does your husband interfere with your marriage?") with nothing but bemused languor.

Edith Evans was the greatest actress on the English stage in the 20th century, treading the boards for over half-a-century. She made her professional stage debut in 1912 and excelled in both classic and modern roles in the West End of London and on Broadway, as well as the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon and the Old Vic. She was made a Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (the equivalent of a knighthood) in 1946.

Laurence Olivier has written in his memoirs that Evans's power on stage began to falter in the early 1960s, as her memory dimmed with age. It was about this time that she made a transition to the screen, after generally ignoring the medium for the first two decades of talking films. (After making her movie debut in 1915, Evans appeared in no films at all between 1916 and 1949, when she came back to the screen in support of a young Richard Burton in Emlyn Williams's Woman of Dolwyn (1949).) In the 1950s, she had made memorable appearances in film in The Queen of Spades (1949), The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), Fred Zinnemann's The Nun's Story (1959) (1959), and in Tony Richardson's film version of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1959), but it was her performance as Miss Western in Richardson's Oscar-winning Best Picture Tom Jones (1963) that established her as a major film presence. She won her first Oscar nomination for "Tom Jones", and her second the following year for The Chalk Garden (1964). She won a Golden Globe and the New York Film Critics Circle Award as Best Actress for her performance as the frightened old lady in Bryan Forbes's The Whisperers (1967). The role also brought her a 1967 Oscar nomination for Best Actress, though she lost the trophy to Katharine Hepburn, who had recently lost her long-time lover Spencer Tracy and rode a wave of Hollywood sentiment to victory.

Dame Edith Evans continued to act in films until her death, though the material generally was beneath her great talent. She died on October 14, 1976, at the age of 88.

Esther Minciotti was born on 20 May 1888 in Provincia di Torino, Piemonte, Italy. She was an actress, known for Marty (1955), The Wrong Man (1956) and Playhouse 90 (1956). She was married to Silvio Minciotti. She died on 15 April 1962 in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York City, New York, USA.

Staunch, granite-jawed American leading man of silent and early talkie films, much associated with Westerns. A native of New York City, Holt often claimed to have been born in Winchester, Virginia, where he grew up. The son of an Episcopal minister, he attended Trinity School in Manhattan, then the Virginia Military Institute, from which he was expelled for bad behavior. Giving up his vague hopes of becoming a lawyer, he went on the road, engaging in numerous occupations. He mined gold in Alaska, worked as both a railroad and a civil engineer, delivered mail, rode herd on cattle, and played parts in traveling stage productions. While looking for work as a surveyor in San Francisco in 1914, he volunteered to ride a horse over a cliff in a stunt for a film crew shooting in San Rafael. In gratitude, the director gave him a part in the film. Holt followed the movie people to Hollywood and began getting bits and stunt jobs in the many Westerns and serials being made there. He impressed a number of co-workers at Universal Pictures, among them Francis Ford and his brother John Ford, and Grace Cunard. Holt soon became a frequent supporting player in their films, and then a star in serials.

A move to Paramount studios in 1917 cemented his leading man status, and he became one of the studio's great stars, particularly in a very successful series of Westerns based on the novels of Zane Grey. Talkies proved no problem for Holt, and his career thrived, although mostly in run-of-the-mill adventure films. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Holt entered the U.S. Army at the age of 54, serving at the request of General George C. Marshall as a horse buyer for the cavalry. Upon his return to pictures following the war, he alternated between character roles in major films such as John Ford's They Were Expendable (1945) and leading roles in minor Westerns. He made a cameo appearance in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) which starred his son Tim Holt. That same year father and son played father and son in a B-Western, The Arizona Ranger (1948). Less than three years later, on January 18, 1951, Holt died of a heart attack at the Los Angeles Veterans Hospital in Sawtelle, a couple of blocks west of the Los Angeles National Cemetery where he is now buried.

Sicilian-born character actor who appeared in scores of American films, usually as an exuberant and demonstrative Italian. As a teenager in 1902, Armetta stowed away on a boat bound for New York. There he did menial jobs until landing a position as a valet and presser at the Lambs Club, the New York actors' club. One of the members took a liking Armetta and arranged a small role for him in a Broadway show. Armetta followed this with many stage roles both in New York and in stock. In the early Twenties, he moved to California in search of work in movies, of which he'd had a taste while in New York. In Hollywood, Armetta slowly gained a name for himself as a character actor, and by the end of the decade, he had carved a niche for himself as a portrayer of humorous and sympathetic Italian immigrants, a position he maintained into the 1940s. He died of heart failure at 57.

William B. Davidson was born on 16 June 1888 in Dobbs Ferry, New York, USA. He was an actor, known for The Most Dangerous Game (1932), I'm No Angel (1933) and Lillian Russell (1940). He was married to Helen Bolton and Mary Hellen Dorsey. He died on 28 September 1947 in Santa Monica, California, USA.

This versatile artist, who had spent his 20's in New Zealand farming sheep, became novelist, playwright and film exhibitor on his return to Britain in 1918. Eventually he would observe success with The First Born (1928), which he directed and acted in and which was based on his own novel and play. He is better remembered, however, for his character portrayals of oily types, many of them upper-crust cads - such as Cardinal Richelieu in The Three Musketeers (1939). (In his Hollywood debut, he had portrayed King Louis XIII in the 1935 version of that same Dumas classic.)