Walter Davis Pidgeon was a Canadian actor who lived most of his adult life in the United States. He starred in many motion pictures, including Mrs. Miniver, The Bad and the Beautiful, Forbidden Planet, Advise and Consent and Funny Girl.

Born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Pidgeon attended local schools, followed by the University of New Brunswick, where he studied law and drama. His university education was interrupted by World War I, and he enlisted in the 65th Battery, Royal Canadian Field Artillery. Pidgeon never saw combat, however, as he was severely injured in an accident. He was crushed between two gun carriages and spent 17 months in a military hospital. Following the war, he moved to Boston, where he worked as a bank runner, at the same time studying voice at the New England Conservatory of Music. He was a classically trained baritone.

Discontented with banking, Pidgeon moved to New York City, where he walked into the office of E. E. Clive, announced that he could act and sing, and said was ready to prove it. After acting on stage for several years, he made his Broadway debut in 1925.

Pidgeon made a number of silent movies in the 1920s. However, he became a huge star with the arrival of talkies, thanks to his singing voice. He starred in extravagant early Technicolor musicals, including The Bride of the Regiment, Sweet Kitty Bellairs, Viennese Nights and Kiss Me Again. He became associated with musicals; however, when the public grew weary of them, his career began to falter. He was relegated to playing secondary roles in films like Saratoga and The Girl of the Golden West. One of his better known roles was in The Dark Command, where he portrayed the villain opposite John Wayne, Claire Trevor, and a young Roy Rogers.

Walter Brennan was an American actor. Brennan won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor three times and is tied with Jack Nicholson for the most Academy Award wins for a male actor.

Born in Lynn, Massachusetts less than two miles from his family’s home in Swampscott, to Irish immigrants, he was christened Walter Andrew Brennan. His father was an engineer and inventor. Walter Brennan studied engineering at Rindge Technical High School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

While in school, Brennan became interested in acting, and began to perform in vaudeville. While working as a bank clerk, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served as a private with the 101st Field Artillery Regiment in France during World War I. Following the war, he moved to Guatemala and raised pineapples, before settling in Los Angeles. During the 1920s, he became involved in the real estate market, where he made a fortune. Unfortunately, he lost most of his money when the market took a sudden downturn.

Finding himself broke, he began taking extra parts in 1929 and then bit parts in as many films as he could, including The Invisible Man and The Bride of Frankenstein, and also worked as a stunt man. In the 1930s, he began appearing in higher-quality films and received more substantial roles as his talent was recognized. This culminated with his receiving the very first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Swan Bostrom in the period film Come and Get It. Two years later he portrayed town drunk and accused murderer Muff Potter in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Walter Huston was a Canadian-born American actor. He was the father of actor and director John Huston and the grandfather of actress Anjelica Huston and actor Danny Huston.

Born Walter Houghston in Toronto, Ontario to an Ulster-Scottish father and a Scottish Canadian mother, he began his Broadway career in 1924. Once talkies began in Hollywood, he achieved fame in character roles. His first major role was in 1929's The Virginian with Gary Cooper. He appeared in the Broadway theatrical adaptation of Sinclair Lewis' novel Dodsworth in 1934 and the play's film version two years later.

Huston stayed busy throughout the 1930s and 1940s, both on stage and screen ; he performed "September Song" in the original Broadway production of Knickerbocker Holiday in 1938. Among his films are Rain, The Devil and Daniel Webster and Mission to Moscow, a pro-Soviet World War II propaganda film as Ambassador Joseph E. Davies. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1948 for his role in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was directed by his son, John Huston. His last film was The Furies in 1950 with Barbara Stanwyck.

Along with Anthony Veiller, he narrated the Why We Fight series of World War II documentaries directed by Frank Capra.

Wallace Fitzgerald Beery was an American actor. He is best known for his portrayal of Bill in Min and Bill opposite Marie Dressler, his titular role in a series of films featuring the character Sweedie, and his titular role in The Champ, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Beery appeared in some 250 movies over a 36-year span.

Beery was born in Kansas City, Missouri to Noah W. and Marguerite Beery. He was a younger brother of actor/film executive William Beery and actor Noah Beery, who also had long careers in the motion picture industry. He was an uncle of actor Noah Beery, Jr. According to U.S. Census records, all three Beery brothers were born to the same parents, making them full brothers and not half-brothers as many biographies have claimed.

Wallace Beery ran away from home and joined the Ringling Brothers Circus at age sixteen as an assistant elephant trainer. He left two years later, after being clawed by a leopard. Beery found work in New York City in comic opera as a baritone and began to appear on Broadway. In 1913, Essanay Studios, cast as “Sweedie, The Swedish Maid,” a masculine character in drag. Later, he worked for the Essanay Studios location in Niles, California.

In 1915, Beery starred with his wife Gloria Swanson in Sweedie Goes to College. This marriage did not survive his drinking and abuse. Beery began playing villains, and in 1917 portrayed Pancho Villa in Patria at a time when Villa was still active in Mexico. Beery reprised the role seventeen years later in one of MGM’s biggest hits.

Vivien Leigh, Lady Olivier was an English actress. She won two Best Actress Academy Awards for playing "southern belles": Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, a role she had also played on stage in London's West End.

She was a prolific stage performer, frequently in collaboration with her then-husband, Laurence Olivier, who directed her in several of her roles. During her 30-year stage career, she played roles ranging from the heroines of Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw comedies to classic Shakespearean characters such as Ophelia, Cleopatra, Juliet and Lady Macbeth.

Lauded for her beauty, Leigh felt that it sometimes prevented her from being taken seriously as an actress. However, ill health proved to be her greatest obstacle. For much of her adult life Leigh dealt with bipolar disorder. She earned a reputation for being difficult to work with, and her career suffered periods of inactivity. She also suffered recurrent bouts of chronic tuberculosis, first diagnosed in the mid-1940s. Leigh and Olivier divorced in 1960, and she worked sporadically in film and theatre until her death from tuberculosis in 1967.

Leigh was born Vivian Mary Hartley in Darjeeling, Bengal Presidency, British India, to Ernest Hartley, a British Officer in the Indian Cavalry, and Gertrude Robinson Yackje. Leigh's parents were married in Kensington, London, in 1912. In 1917, Ernest Hartley was transferred to Bangalore, while Gertrude and Vivian stayed in Ootacamund. Vivian Hartley made her first stage appearance at the age of three, reciting "Little Bo Peep" for her mother's amateur theatre group. Gertrude Hartley tried to instill in her daughter an appreciation of literature and introduced her to the works of Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, and Rudyard Kipling, as well as stories of Greek mythology and Indian folklore. An only child, Vivian Hartley was sent to the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton, England, in 1920 at the age of six-and-a-half. One of her friends at the convent school was the future actress Maureen O'Sullivan, to whom she expressed her desire to become "a great actress".