Frances Drake was an American actress, is best-known for playing Eponine in Les Misérables. Born in New York City, she was educated in Canada and Britain, and was appearing as a nightclub dancer in London when she made her first film appearances under her birth name of Frances Dean, including Meet My Sister and The Jewel. Returning to America in 1934, she began coaching with opera singer and actress Marguerite Namara.

On February 12, 1939, she married the Hon. Cecil Howard, second son of Henry Howard, 19th Earl of Suffolk, and shortly after retired from the screen. After Howard’s death in 1985, she remarried to David Brown in 1992; he died in 2000.

Franchot Tone was an American stage, film, and television actor, star of Mutiny on the Bounty and many other films through the 1960s. In the early 1960s Tone appeared in character roles on popular TV dramas like Bonanza, Wagon Train, The Twilight Zone, and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

He was born as Stanislaus Pascal Franchot Tone in Niagara Falls, New York, the youngest son of Dr. Frank Jerome Tone, the wealthy president of the Carborundum Company, and his socially-prominent wife, Gertrude Van Vrancken Franchot. Tone was a distant relative of Wolfe Tone: his great-great-great-great-grandfather John was a first cousin of Peter Tone, whose eldest son was Theobald Wolfe Tone. Tone was of French Canadian, Irish, English and Basque ancestry.

Tone attended Cornell University, where he was President of the drama club and was elected to the Sphinx Head Society. He also joined Alpha Delta Phi fraternity. After graduation, he received an honorary membership to Phi Kappa Psi, and through that organization, the Irving Literary Society. He gave up the family business to pursue an acting career in the theatre. After graduating, he moved to Greenwich Village, New York, and got his first major Broadway role in the 1929 Katharine Cornell production of The Age of Innocence.

The following year, he joined the Theatre Guild and played Curly in their production of Green Grow the Lilacs. He later became a founding member of the famed Group Theatre, together with Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Clifford Odets, and others, many of whom had worked with the Theatre Guild. Strasberg had been a castmate of Tone's in Green Grow the Lilacs. These were intense and productive years for him: among the productions of the Group he acted in were 1931 and Success Story .

Francis Lederer was an American film and stage actor.

Lederer fell in love with acting when he was young, and was trained at the Academy of Music and Academy of Dramatic Art in Prague. After service in the First World War, he made his stage debut as an apprentice with the New German Theater, a walk-on in the play Burning Heart. He toured Moravia and central Europe, making a name for himself as a matinee idol in theaters in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria and Germany. Notable among his performances was a turn as “Romeo” in Max Reinhardt’s staging of Romeo and Juliet.

In the late 1920s, Lederer was lured into films by the German actress Henny Porten and her producer husband. Because of his good looks, it took some time for the critics to take him seriously, but his association with directors such as G. W. Pabst, for whom he did Pandora’s Box with Louise Brooks and Atlantic , helped him overcome that problem. He was also notable in The Wonderful Lies of Nina Petrovna in the same year. Lederer, who was billed as “Franz” at this time, easily made the transition from silent films to talkies, and was on his way to becoming one of Europe’s top male film stars.

In 1931, Lederer was in London to perform on stage in Volpone and the next year in Autumn Crocus by Dodie Smith, which he then performed on Broadway ? using the name “Francis” ? where it played for 210 performances in 1932 and 1933. He also performed the play in Los Angeles. His performances attracted attention and film offers from Hollywood. With the deteriorating political situation in Europe, Lederer decided to stay in the United States. He became a U.S. citizen in 1939.

Francis Xavier Bushman was an American actor, film director, and screenwriter. His matinee idol career started in 1911 in the silent film His Friend’s Wife, but it did not survive the silent screen era.

Bushman, like many of his contemporaries, broke into the film business via the stage. He was performing at Broncho Billy Anderson’s Essanay Studios in Chicago, Illinois, where he was first noticed for his muscular, sculpted frame. He appeared in nearly 200 feature film roles—more than 175 films before 1920, and 17 in his screen debut year of 1911 alone. He also worked for the Vitagraph studio before signing with Metro in 1915.

Bushman was born in Baltimore, Maryland. As a young man Bushman joined the Maryland Athletic Club and began a body building regiman that developed his muscular physique. He cited Sandow as one of his body building influences. In New York, he worked as a sculptor’s model often posing in the nude in sessions.

In 1902, Bushman married seamstress Josephine Fladune. By the launch of his film career, the couple had five children. In 1918, Bushman was the subject of a national scandal as his affair with longtime costar Beverly Bayne became public. Three days after his divorce with Josephine was final, Bushman and Bayne were married; they would eventually have a son. Bushman and his studios had kept his marriage secret for fear of losing popularity. He was married four times.

Frank Albertson was an American character actor who made his debut in a minor part in Hollywood at age 13.

Albertson made well over one hundred appearances in movies and television. He is probably best remembered for his role as Sam Wainwright, the businessman fond of saying “Hee-Haw” in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. He played the wealthy rancher, Tom Cassidy, at the start of Psycho, who provides the cash that Janet Leigh’s character later steals.

Albertson portrayed future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt in the 1956 episode “Rough Rider” of CBS’s My Friend Flicka television series, starring Johnny Washbrook, Gene Evans, Anita Louise, and Frank Ferguson.

Frank Borzage was an American film director and actor.

Frank Borzage’s father, Luigi Borzaga, was born in Roncone, Austria-Hungary in 1859. As a stone mason, he sometimes worked in Switzerland; he met his future wife, Maria Ruegg, where she worked in a silk factory. Borzaga emigrated to Hazleton, Pennsylvania in the early 1880s where he worked as a coal miner. He brought his fiancee to the United States and they married in Hazleton in 1883.

Their first child, Henry, was born in 1885. The Borzaga family moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, where Frank Borzage was born, and the family remained based until 1919. The couple had fourteen children, eight of whom survived childhood: Henry, Mary, Bill, Frank, Daniel, Lew, Dolly and Sue. Luigi Borzaga died in Los Angeles in a car accident in 1934; his wife Maria died of cancer in 1947.

In 1912 Frank Borzage found employment as an actor in Hollywood, and remained in the profession until 1917. His directorial debut came in 1915 with his film, The Pitch o’ Chance.

Ford Sterling was an American comedian and actor best known for his work with Keystone Studios. One of the 'Big 4' he was the original chief of the Keystone Cops.

Born George Franklin Stich in La Crosse, Wisconsin, he began his career in silent films in 1911 with Biograph Studios. When director Mack Sennett left to set up Keystone Studios, Sterling followed him. There, he performed what is probably his most remembered role as 'Chief Teeheezel' in the Keystone Cops series of slapstick comedies in a successful career that spanned twenty-five years.

Making a smooth transition to talking films, Ford Sterling made the last of his more than two hundred and seventy film appearances in 1936. He died in 1939 of a heart attack in Los Angeles, California and is interred in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.