Thomas Leo McCarey was an American film director, screenwriter and producer. During his lifetime he was involved in nearly 200 movies, especially comedies. French director Jean Renoir once said that “Leo McCarey understood people better than any other Hollywood director.”

Born in Los Angeles, California, he graduated from the University of Southern California law school and began in the movie business as an assistant director to Tod Browning in 1920, but honed his skills at the Hal Roach Studios for the rest of that decade. Hired by Hal Roach in 1923, McCarey initially wrote gags for the Our Gang series and other studio stars, then produced and directed shorts, including two-reelers with Charley Chase. While at Roach, McCarey cast Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy together and guided development of their onscreen characters, thus creating one of the most enduring comedy teams of all time. He only officially appeared as director of the duo shorts We Faw Down, Liberty and Wrong Again, but wrote many of the screenplays. By 1929, he was vice-president of production for the entire studio.

In the sound era McCarey ventured into feature-film direction, working with many of the biggest stars of the era, including Gloria Swanson, Eddie Cantor, the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Mae West, and Harold Lloyd. In 1937, McCarey won his first Academy Award for Directing for The Awful Truth, with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, a screwball comedy that launched Cary Grant’s unique screen persona, largely concocted by McCarey. As writer/director Peter Bogdanovich notes, “After The Awful Truth, when it came to light comedy, there was Cary Grant and then everyone else was an also-ran.”

McCarey was a devout Roman Catholic and deeply concerned with social issues. During the 1940s, his work became more serious and his politics more conservative. In 1944 he directed Going My Way, a story about an enterprising priest, the youthful Father Chuck O’Malley, played by Bing Crosby, for which he won his second Best Director Oscar. His share in the profits of this smash hit gave McCarey the highest reported income in the U.S. for the year 1944, and its follow-up, The Bells of St. Mary’s, which was made by McCarey’s own production company, was similarly successful.

Leonard H. Goldenson was President of the U.S. television and radio broadcaster ABC.

Goldenson was born in Pennsylvania in 1905 and grew up in the town of Scottdale, Pennsylvania and graduated from Scottdale High School. He is arguably the most influential person from Scottdale. He was educated at Harvard, and entered the entertainment industry in 1933 as an attorney for Paramount Pictures after graduating from Harvard Business School. Goldenson was hired to help reorganize United Paramount Theatres, Paramount’s theater chain, which at the time was nearing bankruptcy. So skillful was his work at this assignment that Paramount’s chief executive officer, Barney Balaban, hired Goldenson to manage the entire chain.

Goldenson orchestrated the merger of United Paramount Theatres with ABC in 1953. ABC was originally formed in 1943 in the wake of an earlier Supreme Court decree effectively ordering the spinoff of the largely secondary-status Blue Network from its then-parent, NBC; its buyer, industrialist Edward J. Noble, tried valiantly to build ABC into an innovative and competitive broadcaster, but by 1951 was rumored to be on the verge of selling the nearly bankrupt operation to CBS, who apparently wanted ABC’s critically important owned-and-operated television stations.

Goldenson rescued ABC with a $25 million cash infusion, becoming the founding chairman of the merged company which was named American Broadcasting-Paramount Theatres. The modern ABC dates its history from the effective date of the Goldenson transaction, and not the Blue Network spinoff.

In memory of Hollywood legendary actor and Walk of Famer Leonard Nimoy, flowers were placed today on his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Friday, February 27, 2015 at 10:30 a.m PST. The star in the category of Motion Pictures is located at 6651 Hollywood Boulevard. “We are all so glad that you ‘lived long & prospered.’ You will be missed!” Leron Gubler, President & CEO of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce signed the card on behalf of the Hollywood Historic Trust and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.Leonard Simon Nimoy is an American actor, film director, poet, musician, and photographer. Nimoy's fame rests on his playing the role of Spock in 1966-1969, as well as reprising the role in multiple film, television and video game sequels.

Nimoy began his career in his early twenties, teaching acting classes in Hollywood and making minor film and television appearances through the 1950s, as well as playing the title role to Kid Monk Baroni. In 1953, he served in the United States Army. In 1965, he made his first appearance in the rejected Star Trek pilot, "The Cage", and would go on to play the character until 1969, followed by seven further films and a number of guest slots in various sequels. His character of Spock generated a significant cultural impact and three Emmy Award nominations; TV Guide named Spock one of the 50 greatest TV characters. Nimoy also had a recurring role in and a narrating role in Civilization IV, as well as several well-received stage appearances.

He is now officially retired from acting.

Nimoy's fame as Spock is to such an extent that both his autobiographies, I Am Not Spock and I Am Spock detail his existence as being shared between the character and himself.

Lee Strasberg was an American actor, director and acting teacher. He cofounded, with directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, the Group Theatre in 1931, which was hailed as “America’s first true theatrical collective”. In 1951, he became director of the non-profit Actors Studio, in New York City, considered “the nation’s most prestigious acting school”. In 1969, Strasberg founded the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York City and in Hollywood to teach the work he pioneered.

He is considered the “father of method acting in America,” according to author Mel Gussow, and from the 1920s until his death in 1982 “he revolutionized the art of acting by having a profound influence on performance in American theater and movies”. From his base in New York, he trained several generations of theatre and film’s most illustrious talents, including Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and director Elia Kazan.

Former student Elia Kazan directed James Dean in East of Eden, for which Kazan and Dean were nominated for Academy Awards. As a student, Dean wrote that Actors Studio was “the greatest school of the theater the best thing that can happen to an actor”. Playwright Tennessee Williams, writer of A Streetcar Named Desire, said of Strasberg’s actors, “They act from the inside out. They communicate emotions they really feel. They give you a sense of life.” Directors like Sidney Lumet, a former student, have intentionally used actors skilled in Strasberg’s “Method”.

Kazan, in his autobiography, wrote, “He carried with him the aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch doctor, a psychoanalyst, and a feared father of a Jewish home. e was the force that held the thirty-odd members of the theatre together, and made them ‘permanent.'” Today, Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino, and Harvey Keitel lead this nonprofit studio dedicated to the development of actors, playwrights, and directors.

William Lee Tracy was an American actor. Tracy was born in Atlanta, Georgia. He studied electrical engineering at Union College, and then he served as a 2nd lieutenant in World War I. In the early 1920s he decided to work as an actor. He became a Broadway star by way of his starring role in the original 1924 production of George Kelly’s play The Show-Off.

He arrived in Hollywood in 1929, where he played the role of newspapermen in quite a number of pictures. He played reporter Hildy Johnson in the original 1928 stage production of The Front Page and a Walter Winchell-type gossip columnist in 1932’s Blessed Event. Tracy starred as the columnist in Advice to the Lovelorn, very loosely based on the novel Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West.

He played The Buzzard, the criminal who leads Liliom into a fatal robbery, in the 1930 film version of Liliom. He also played Lupe Velez’s frenetic manager in Gregory LaCava’s

The Half-Naked Truth in 1932, and the following year portrayed John Barrymore’s agent in Dinner at Eight, directed by George Cukor.

Leeza Kim Gibbons is an American talk show host. Gibbons is the host of her own radio show, Hollywood Confidential, part of the United Stations radio syndication company.

Gibbons was born in Hartsville, South Carolina, and grew up in Irmo, South Carolina, a suburb of Columbia. She graduated from Irmo High School. She is daughter of Jean and Carlos Gibbons, who was a former state superintendent of education as well as antique shop owner. She has a brother, Carlos, Jr., and a sister, Cammy. Gibbons graduated from the University of South Carolina’s school of journalism and mass communication. She is a member of the Delta Delta Delta sorority.

Her past television credits include co-hosting local segments of PM Magazine for WFAA-TV Channel 8 in Dallas-Fort Worth during the early 1980s, hosting Entertainment Tonight and Extra, as well as hosting Leeza, her own NBC/syndicated talk show, which ran from January 1994 to September 2000. In the 1990s, she was the co-host of John and Leeza, a talk show with former co-host of Entertainment Tonight, John Tesh. After one season, Tesh was dropped from the show, and Gibbons hosted solo for the remainder of the series. She has also guest starred on several shows, including The Geena Davis Show, The Simple Life, The Simpsons, Home Improvement, and Just Shoot Me. She played a television reporter in the Robocop films and had a small role as a reporter in Soapdish. She also hosted a series that explores true stories of survival in Lifetime’s What Should You Do?

In 1988, she was also the host of the Telethon show on New Zealand’s TVNZ network, which she hosted alongside Christopher Quinten, whom she later married. In addition to her television and radio career, Gibbons has received the Congressional Horizon Award for her work on children’s issues.