Mary Louise Cecilia “Texas” Guinan was a saloon keeper, actress, and entrepreneur.

Guinan was born in Waco, Texas to Irish-Canadian immigrants Michael and Bessie Duffy Guinan. At 16, her family moved to Denver, Colorado where she was in amateur stage productions and played the organ in church. Guinan married John Moynahan, a cartoonist for the Rocky Mountain News, on December 2, 1904. No children were born from this union.

Moynahan’s career took them to Chicago, Illinois, where Guinan studied music before divorcing him and starting her career as a professional singer. She toured regional vaudeville with some success, but became known less for her singing than for her entertaining “wild west”-related patter.

In 1906 she moved to New York City, where she found work as a chorus girl before making a career for herself in national Vaudeville and in New York theater productions.

Tony Curtis is an American film actor. He has played a variety of roles, from light comedy, such as the musician on the run from gangsters in Some Like It Hot, to serious dramatic roles, such as an escaped convict in The Defiant Ones, which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Since 1949, he has appeared in more than 100 films and has made frequent television appearances.

Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx, New York, the son of Emanuel Schwartz and his wife Helen Klein. His parents were Hungarian immigrants of Jewish descent from Mátészalka, Hungary; Hungarian was Curtis’ only language until he was five or six, postponing his schooling. His father was a tailor and the family lived in the back of the shop—the parents in one corner and Curtis and his brothers Julius and Robert in another. His mother had once made an appearance as a participant on the television show You Bet Your Life, hosted by Groucho Marx. Curtis has said, “When I was a child Mom beat me up and was very aggressive and antagonistic.” His mother was later diagnosed with schizophrenia, a mental illness which also affected his brother Robert and led to his institutionalization. When Curtis was eight, he and his younger brother Julius were placed in an orphanage for a month because their parents could not afford to feed them. Four years later, Julius was struck and killed by a truck.

During World War II, Curtis joined the United States Navy due to watching Cary Grant in Destination Tokyo and Tyrone Power in Crash Dive. He served aboard USS Proteus, a submarine tender, and on September 2, 1945, he witnessed the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay from about a mile away. Following his discharge, Curtis studied acting at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York with the influential German stage director Erwin Piscator, along with Elaine Stritch, Walter Matthau, and Rod Steiger. He was discovered by a talent agent and casting director Joyce Selznick. Curtis claims it was because he “was the handsomest of the boys.” Arriving in Hollywood in 1948 at age 23, he was placed under contract at Universal Pictures and changed his name to Tony Curtis, taking his first name from the novel Anthony Adverse and his last name from “Kurtz”, a surname from his mother’s family. Although the studio taught him fencing and riding, Curtis admits he was at first only interested in girls and money.

Curtis’s uncredited screen debut came in Criss Cross playing a rumba dancer. Later, he cemented his reputation with breakthrough performances such as in the role of the scheming press agent Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success with Burt Lancaster and an Oscar-nominated performance as a bigoted escaped convict chained to Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones. He did both screen comedy and drama together and became the most sought after star in Hollywood: Curtis’ comedies include Some Like It Hot and Sex and the Single Girl, and his dramas include The Outsider, the true story of WW II veteran Ira Hayes, and The Boston Strangler, in which he played the self-confessed murderer of the film’s title, Albert DeSalvo. The latter film was praised for Curtis’ performance.

Tyrone Edmund Power, Jr., usually credited as Tyrone Power and known sometimes as Ty Power, was an American film and stage actor who appeared in dozens of films from the 1930s to the 1950s, often in swashbuckler roles or romantic leads such as in The Mark of Zorro, Blood and Sand, The Black Swan, Prince of Foxes, The Black Rose, and Captain from Castile.

Though renowned for his dark, classically handsome looks that made him a matinee idol from his first film appearance, Power played a wide range of roles, from film noir to light romantic comedy. In the 1950s, he began placing limits on the number of movies he would make in order to have time for the stage. He received his biggest accolades as a stage actor in John Brown’s Body and Mister Roberts. Power died from a heart attack at the age of 44.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1914, the only son of the English-born American stage and screen actor Tyrone Power, Sr., and Helen Emma “Patia” Reaume, Power was descended from a long theatrical line going back to his great-grandfather, the Irish-born actor and comedian Tyrone Power. He had French blood from both his parents, being descended from Catholic French Canadians through his mother’s Reaume family, and from Protestant Huguenots through his paternal grandmother’s Lavenu and Blossett ancestors. Through his paternal great grandmother, Anne Gilbert, Power was related to the actor Lord Laurence Olivier; through his paternal grandmother, Ethel Lavenu, he was related by marriage to author Evelyn Waugh and through his father’s first cousin, Norah Emily Gorman Power, he was related to the theatrical director Sir Tyrone Guthrie, founder of the Stratford Theatre in Canada and the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

During the first year of Power’s life, he lived in Cincinnati. His father was absent for long periods due to his stage commitments in New York. Young Power was a sickly child, and his doctor advised his family that the climate in California might be better for his health. The family moved there in 1915, and Power’s sister Anne was born there on August 26, 1915. The parents appeared together on stage and, in 1917, their movie, The Planter, was released. Tyrone Power, Sr., as he later became known, found himself away from home more frequently, as his stage career took him to New York. The Powers drifted apart, and they divorced around 1920.