Holly Paige Hunter is an American actress. Her films include Raising Arizona, Broadcast News, Always, and The Piano for which she won several acting awards, including an Academy Award for Best Actress. She also starred in the cable television series Saving Grace.

Holly Hunter was born in Conyers, Georgia, the daughter of Opal Marguerite, a housewife, and Charles Edwin Hunter, a farmer and sporting-goods manufacturer's representative. Hunter earned a degree in drama from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, after which she moved to New York City and roomed with fellow actress Frances McDormand. Hunter in 2008 described living in The Bronx "at the end of the D train, just off 205th Street, on Bainbridge Avenue and Hull Avenue. It was very Irish, and then you could go just a few blocks away and hit major Italian". A chance encounter with playwright Beth Henley, when the two were trapped alone in an elevator, led to Hunter's being cast in Henley's plays Crimes of the Heart, and Off-Broadway's The Miss Firecracker Contest. "It was like the beginning of 1982. It was on 49th Street between Broadway and Eighth on the south side of the street", Hunter recalled in an interview. " 10 minutes; not long. We actually had a nice conversation. It was just the two of us".

When she moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1982, Hunter shared a house with a group of people that included McDormand and director Sam Raimi, as well as future collaborators Joel and Ethan Coen.

Hunter made her screen debut in the 1981 horror movie The Burning. After moving to Los Angeles, California in 1982, Hunter appeared in TV movies before being cast in a supporting role in 1984's Swing Shift. That year, she had her first collaboration with the writing-directing-producing team of brothers Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, in Blood Simple, making an uncredited appearance as a voice on an answering-machine recording. More film and television work followed until 1987, when thanks to a starring role in the Coens' Raising Arizona and her Academy Award-nominated turn in Broadcast News, Hunter became a critically acclaimed star. She went on to the screen adaptation of Henley's Miss Firecracker; Steven Spielberg's Always, a romantic drama with Richard Dreyfuss; and the made-for-TV 1989 docudrama about the Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade.

Hoot Gibson was an American rodeo champion and a pioneer cowboy film actor, director and producer.

Born Edmund Richard Gibson in Tekamah, Nebraska, he learned to ride a horse while still a very young boy. His family moved to California when he was seven years old. As a teenager he worked with horses on a ranch, which led to competition on bucking broncos at area rodeos. Given the nickname “Hoot Owl” by co-workers, the name evolved to just “Hoot”.

In 1910, film director Francis Boggs was looking for experienced cowboys to appear in his silent film short, Pride of the Range. Gibson and another future star of Western films, Tom Mix, were hired. Gibson made a second film for Boggs in 1911. After the director was killed by a deranged employee, Gibson was hired by director Jack Conway to appear in his 1912 Western, His Only Son.

Acting for Gibson was then a minor sideline and he continued competing in rodeos to make a living. In 1912 he won the all-around championship at the famous Pendleton Round-Up in Pendleton, Oregon and the steer roping World Championship at the Calgary Stampede.

Robert House Peters, Sr. was a British-born American silent film actor, known to moviegoers of the era as “The Star of a Thousand Emotions.”

Born in Bristol, England, Peters began his career on a high note, playing the handsome leading man in The Bishop’s Carriage, co-starring Mary Pickford. While The Bishop’s Carriage was filmed in an East Coast studio, Peters was in Los Angeles by 1914, becoming one of the first screen stars to permanently settle there. Although he stated publicly that he preferred playing villains, Peters, curly haired and pleasantly dimpled, was from the outset typecast as the romantic hero.

After enjoying his greatest success as the good-bad hero of The Girl of the Golden West, Peters found his career at the peak of the early 1920s. He signed with Universal Studios for six pictures in 1924, hoping for a comeback. The results, however, were mostly mediocre and he was soon demoted to supporting roles. Retired after 1928’s Rose Marie, Peters returned for a guest appearance in The Old West, a 1952 Gene Autry film that also featured his son, House Peters, Jr.

Herbert "Herb" Jeffries is an American jazz singer and actor. Born Herbert Jeffrey Ball, he is the son of Howard C. Jeffrey (Ball), a musician of mixed African-American descent and his wife, Mildred, who was of Irish descent, by way of French Canada.  The family lived in a rented home on 224 Watson Street in Detroit's third ward.

Jeffries was awarded a Star on the Walk of Fame in 2004 for his prominence as a recording artist. A deep baritone, he sang with Duke Ellington in the early 1940s. His most famous song, "Flamingo", sold over 50 million copies .

As a producer and actor, Jeffries played the lead in the first all-black American western films He starred as a singing cowboy in Harlem on the Prairie, The Bronze Buckaroo, Harlem Rides the Range and Two-Gun Man from Harlem. in which he sang his own western compositions.

Jeffries obtained financing for the movies and hired Spencer Williams to appear with him. In addition to starring  and singing in the films, Jeffries performed his own stunts as the cowboy character, "Bob Blake."