Oliver Hardy was an American comic actor famous as one half of Laurel and Hardy, the classic double act that began in the era of silent films and lasted over 31 years, from 1926 to 1957.

Oliver Hardy was born Norvell Hardy in Harlem, Georgia. His father, Oliver, was a Confederate veteran wounded at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862. After his demobilization as a recruiting officer for Company K, 16th Georgia Regiment, the elder Oliver Hardy assisted his father in running the vestiges of the family cotton plantation, bought a share in a retail business and was elected full-time Tax Collector for Columbia County. His mother, Emily Norvell, the daughter of Thomas Benjamin Norvell and Mary Freeman, was descended from Captain Hugh Norvell of Williamsburg, Virginia. Her family arrived in Virginia before 1635. Their marriage took place on March 12, 1890; it was the second marriage for the widow Emily, and the third for Oliver.

The family moved to Madison in 1891, before Norvell?s birth. Norvell?s mother owned a house in Harlem, which was either empty or tenanted by her mother. It is probable that Norvell was born in Harlem, though some sources say it was in his mother?s home town, Covington. His father died less than a year after his birth. Hardy was the youngest of five. As a child, Hardy was sometimes difficult. He was sent to a Milledgeville military academy as a youngster. In the 1905/1906 school year, fall semester, when he was 13, Hardy was sent to Young Harris College in north Georgia. However, he was in the junior high component of that institution, not the two-year college which exists today.

He had little interest in education, although he acquired an early interest in music and theater, possibly from his mother?s tenants. He joined a theatrical group, and later ran away from a boarding school near Atlanta to sing with the group. His mother recognized his talent for singing, and sent him to Atlanta to study music and voice with singing teacher Adolf Dahm-Petersen, but Hardy skipped some of his lessons to sing in the Alcazar Theater, a cinema, for US$3.50 a week. He subsequently decided to go back to Milledgeville.

William Oliver Stone is an American film director and screenwriter. Stone came to prominence in the late 1980s and the early 1990s for directing a series of films about the Vietnam War, in which he had himself participated as an American infantry soldier. His work has earned him three Academy Awards, and continues to focus frequently on contemporary political and cultural issues, often controversially. His first Academy Award was for Best Adapted Screenplay for Midnight Express. He subsequently won Academy Awards for Directing Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, both of which were centered on the Vietnam War. He has been described, by the British newspaper The Guardian as “one of the few committed men of the left working in mainstream American cinema.

A notable feature of Stone’s directing style is the use of many different cameras and film formats, from VHS to 8 mm film to 70 mm film. He sometimes uses several formats in a single scene, as in Natural Born Killers and JFK. Stone was born in New York City, the son of Jacqueline and Louis Stone, a stockbroker. He grew up affluently and lived in townhouses in Manhattan and Stamford, Connecticut. His father was Jewish and his mother a Roman Catholic of French birth, and Stone was raised an Episcopalian as a compromise. Stone attended Trinity School before his parents sent him away to attend The Hill School, a college-preparatory school in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. His mother was often absent and his father made a big impact on his life; father-son relationships were to feature heavily in Stone’s films. His parents divorced when he was 15, due to his father’s extramarital affairs with the wives of several family friends. Stone’s father was also influential in obtaining jobs for his son, including work on a financial exchange in France, where Stone often spent his summer vacation with his maternal grandparents – a job that proved inspirational to Stone for his movie Wall Street. Stone graduated from The Hill School in 1964.

Stone was then admitted into Yale University, but left after one year. Stone had become inspired by Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim as well as by Zorba the Greek and George Harrison’s music to teach English at the Free Pacific Institute in South Vietnam. Stone taught in Vietnam for six months after which he worked as a wiper on a United States Merchant Marine ship, travelling to Oregon and Mexico, before returning to Yale, where he dropped out a second time. In September 1967 he enlisted in the United States Army, requesting combat duty in Vietnam. He fought with the 25th Infantry Division, then with the First Cavalry, earning a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart with an Oak Leaf Cluster before his discharge in 1968 after 15 months. While at Yale, Stone and friend Lloyd Kaufman worked on an early Troma Entertainment comedy The Battle of Love’s Return. Both also acted in the movie, Stone in a cameo role. Stone graduated from film school at New York University in 1971. Stone was the recipient of the Extraordinary Contribution to Filmmaking Award at the 2007 Austin Film Festival.

Olivia Mary de Havilland is a British American film and stage actress. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1946 and in 1949. She is the elder sister of actress Joan Fontaine. Along with her sister, de Havilland is one of the last surviving female stars from 1930s Hollywood. She is also the last living lead cast member from Gone with the Wind.

Olivia de Havilland was born in Tokyo, Japan to English parents. Her mother, Lilian Augusta Ruse, was an actress known professionally as Lillian Fontaine, and her father, Walter Augustus de Havilland, was a patent attorney with a practice in Japan. Her parents married in 1914 and divorced in 1919. She was raised Roman Catholic. Her younger sister is actress Joan Fontaine, from whom she has been estranged for many decades, not speaking at all since 1975.

The de Havilland family moved from Tokyo when she was two years old, settling in Saratoga, California, due to her sister’s poor health, which improved after the family emigrated. Both sisters attended Los Gatos High School and Olivia also attended the Notre Dame High School, Belmont. An acting award at Los Gatos is named after her. Her paternal cousin is Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, designer of the de Havilland Mosquito aeroplane.

De Havilland appeared as Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, her first stage production, at the Hollywood Bowl. The stage production was later turned into a 1935 movie, her film debut. Although the stage cast was largely replaced with Warner Bros. contract players, she was hired to reprise her role as Hermia. After appearing with Joe E. Brown in Alibi Ike and James Cagney in The Irish in Us, she played opposite Errol Flynn in such highly popular films as Captain Blood, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and as Maid Marian to Flynn’s Robin Hood in The Adventures of Robin Hood. Overall, she starred opposite Flynn in eight films.

Edith Norma Shearer was a Canadian-American actress. Shearer was one of the most popular actresses in the world from the mid-1920s until her retirement in 1942. Her early films cast her as the girl-next-door but after her 1930 film The Divorcee, she played sexually liberated women in sophisticated contemporary comedies and dramas, as well as several historical and period films.

Unlike many of her MGM contemporaries, Shearer's celebrity declined steeply after retirement. By the time of her death in 1983, she was largely remembered at best for her "noble" roles in the regularly-revived The Women, Marie Antoinette, and Romeo and Juliet and, at worst, as a forgotten star.

Shearer's legacy began to be re-evaluated in the 1990s with the publication of two biographies and the TCM and VHS release of her films, many of them unseen since the implementation of the Production Code some sixty years before. Focus shifted to her pre-Code "divorcee" persona, and Shearer was rediscovered as "the exemplar of sophisticated woman-hood. exploring love and sex with an honesty that would be considered frank by modern standards".

Simultaneously, Shearer's ten-year collaboration with portrait photographer George Hurrell and her lasting contribution to fashion through the designs of Adrian were also recognized.

Norma Talmadge was an American actress and film producer of the silent era. A major box office draw for more than a decade, her career reached a peak in the early 1920s, when she ranked among the most popular idols of the American screen.

Her most famous film was Smilin? Through, but she also scored artistic triumphs teamed with director Frank Borzage in Secrets and The Lady. Her younger sisters Constance Talmadge and Natalie Talmadge were also movie stars. Talmadge married millionaire and film producer Joseph Schenck and they successfully created their own production company. After reaching fame in the film studios on the East Coast, she moved to Hollywood in 1922.

A specialist in melodrama, Talmadge was one of the most elegant and glamorous film stars of the roaring twenties. By the end of the silent film period her popularity with audiences had waned. After her two talkies proved disappointing at the box office, she retired a very wealthy woman. Of all the silent stars whose reputation collapsed with the coming of sound, Norma Talmadge was the most important. She is little remembered, since her films are seldom revived today, yet in her day she was hugely popular and the epitome of stardom.

Talmadge was born on May 26, 1893 in Jersey City, New Jersey, although it has been widely believed she was born in Niagara Falls, New York. After achieving stardom, she admitted that she and her mother provided the more scenic setting of Niagara Falls to fan magazines to be more romantic. Talmadge was the eldest daughter of Fred Talmadge, a chronic unemployed alcoholic, and Margaret “Peg” Talmadge, a witty and indomitable woman. Talmadge’s childhood was marked by poverty. One Christmas morning Fred Talmadge left the house to buy food and never came back, leaving his wife to raise their three little daughters. Peg took in laundry, sold cosmetics, taught painting classes, and rented out rooms, raising her daughters in Brooklyn, New York.

Norman Frederick Jewison, CC, O.Ont is a Canadian film director, producer, actor and founder of the Canadian Film Centre. Among his works as a director, one finds In the Heat of the Night, The Thomas Crown Affair, Fiddler on the Roof, Jesus Christ Superstar, Moonstruck, The Hurricane, and The Statement. Norman Jewison has addressed important social and political issues throughout his directing and producing career, often making controversial or complicated subjects accessible to mainstream audiences.

Jewison, who in spite of his surname is not Jewish, was born in Toronto, the son of Dorothy Irene and Percy Joseph Jewison, who managed a general store and post office. He attended Kew Beach School, and while growing up in the 1930s displayed an aptitude for performing and theatre. He served in the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II, and after being discharged traveled in the American South, where he encountered segregation, an experience that would influence his later work.

Jewison attended Victoria College in the University of Toronto, graduating with a B.A. in 1949. As a student he was involved in writing, directing, and acting in various theatrical productions, including the All-Varsity Revue in 1949. Following graduation, he moved to London, where he worked sporadically as a script writer for a children’s show and bit part actor for the British Broadcasting Corporation, while supporting himself with odd jobs. Out of work in Britain in late 1951, he came back to Canada to become a production trainee at CBLT in Toronto, which was preparing for the launch of CBC Television.

When CBC Television went on the air in the fall of 1952, Jewison was an assistant director. During the next seven years he wrote, directed, and produced a wide variety of musicals, comedy-variety shows, dramas, and specials, including the The Big Revue, Showtime and The Barris Beat. In 1953 he married Margaret Ann “Dixie” Dixon, a former model. They would have three children – Michael, Kevin, and Jennifer – who would all pursue careers in the entertainment world.