Sir Cedric Webster Hardwicke was a noted English actor.

Hardwicke was born in Lye, West Midlands, the son of Dr. Edwin Webster Hardwicke by his spouse Jessie. He attended Bridgnorth Grammar School in Shropshire and then trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He made his first appearance on stage at London's Lyceum Theatre in 1912 during the run of Frederick Melville's melodrama The Monk and the Woman, when he took up the part of Brother John. During that year he was at Her Majesty's Theatre understudying, and subsequently appeared at the Garrick Theatre in Charles Klein's play Find the Woman, and Trust the People. In 1913 he joined Benson's Company and toured in the provinces, South Africa, and Rhodesia. During 1914 he toured with Miss Darragh in Laurence Irving's play The Unwritten Law, and he appeared at the Old Vic in 1914 as Malcolm in Macbeth, Tranio in The Taming of the Shrew, gravedigger in Hamlet, etc.

From 1914 to 1921 he served with the British Army in France. In January 1922 he joined the Birmingham Repertory Company. He played many classical roles on stage, appearing at London's top theatres, making his name on the stage performing works by George Bernard Shaw, who said that Hardwicke was his fifth favourite actor after the four Marx Brothers. As one of the leading Shavian actors of his generation, Hardwicke starred in such Shavian works as Caesar and Cleopatra, Pygmalion, The Apple Cart, Candida, Too True to Be Good, and Don Juan in Hell, making such an impression that at age 41 he became one of the youngest actors to be knighted. Other stage successes included The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, Antigone and A Majority of One, winning a Tony Award nomination for his performance as a Japanese diplomat. In 1928 he married English actress Helena Pickard.

His first appearance in an English film was in 1931. In December 1935, Cedric Hardwicke was elected Rede Lecturer to Cambridge University for 1936. In 1939 Hardwicke was in Hollywood for film work there. He played Dr. David Livingstone opposite Spencer Tracy's Henry Morton Stanley in the 1939 film Stanley and Livingstone and was also memorable that year as Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with Charles Laughton as Quasimodo. He also starred in The Ghost of Frankenstein. He continued his stage career touring and in New York.

Celeste Holm is an American stage, film, and television actress, known for her Academy Award-winning performance in Gentleman’s Agreement, as well as for her Oscar-nominated performances in Come to the Stable and All About Eve. Born and raised in New York City, Holm grew up as an only child. She attended Friends Seminary. Her mother, Jean Parke, was an American portrait artist and author; her father, Theodor Holm, was a Norwegian insurance adjuster for Lloyd’s of London. Holm studied acting at the University of Chicago before becoming a stage actress in the late 1930s following a brief first marriage, which produced her first child, son Ted Nelson.

Holm’s first professional theatrical role was in a production of Hamlet starring Leslie Howard. Holm’s first major Broadway part was as Mary L. in William Saroyan’s 1940 revival of The Time of Your Life co-starring fellow newcomer Gene Kelly. The role that got her the most recognition from critics and audiences was as Ado Annie in the flagship production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! in 1943.

After she starred in the Broadway production of Bloomer Girl, 20th Century Fox signed Holm to a movie contract in 1946, and in 1947 she won an Oscar and Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress in Gentleman’s Agreement. After her performance in All About Eve, however, Holm realized she preferred live theater to movie work, and took on few film roles over the following decade. The most successful of these were the comedy The Tender Trap and the musical High Society, both co-starring Holm with Frank Sinatra. Holm starred as a professor-turned-reporter in New York City in the CBS television series Honestly, Celeste! and was thereafter a panelist on Who Pays?. She starred as a reporter in an unsold television pilot called The Celeste Holm Show in 1958, based on the book No Facilities for Women. Holm also starred in the musical The Utter Glory of Morrissey Hall.

Cesar Julio Romero, Jr. was a Cuban American film and television actor, who played The Joker in the 1960s television series Batman. In 1966, the show was transferred to movie theaters, and Romero became the first actor to portray the Joker in a motion picture.

Romero was born in New York to prosperous Cuban parents. That lifestyle, however, changed dramatically when his parents lost their sugar import business and suffered losses in the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Fortunately, Romero’s Hollywood earnings allowed him to support his large family, all of whom followed him to the West Coast, years later. Romero lived on and off with various family members, especially his sister, for the rest of his life.

In October 1942, he voluntarily enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard and served in the Pacific Theater. He reported aboard the Coast Guard-manned assault transport USS Cavalier in November, 1943. According to a press release from the period he saw action during the invasions of Tinian and Saipan. The same article mentioned that he preferred to be a regular part of the crew and was eventually promoted to the rank of chief Boatswain’s Mate.

Romero played “Latin lovers” in films from the 1930s until the 1950s, usually in supporting roles. He starred as The Cisco Kid in six westerns made between 1939 and 1941. Romero danced and performed comedy in the 20th Century Fox films he starred in opposite Carmen Miranda and Betty Grable, such as Week-End in Havana and Springtime in the Rockies, in the 1940s.

John Carroll O'Connor best known as Carroll O'Connor, was an American actor, producer and director whose television career spanned four decades. Known at first for playing the role of Major General Colt in the 1970 cult movie, Kelly's Heroes, he later found fame as the bigoted workingman Archie Bunker, the main character in the 1970s CBS television sitcoms All in the Family and Archie Bunker's Place. O'Connor later starred in the NBC television crime drama In the Heat of the Night

from 1988 to 1995, where he played the role of Police Chief William Gillespie from 1988 to 1994, and Sheriff Gillespie in 1995. At the end of his career in the late 1990s, he played the father of Jamie Stemple Buchman on Mad About You.

O'Connor, an Irish Catholic American, was the eldest of three sons born in Manhattan, New York to Elise Patricia and Edward Joseph O'Connor, who was a New York City lawyer. Both of his brothers were doctors; Hugh, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1961, and Robert, a psychiatrist in New York City. O'Connor spent much of his youth in Elmhurst and Forest Hills, Queens, in the same borough in which his character Archie Bunker would later live. In 1941 O'Connor enrolled at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, but dropped out when the United States entered World War II. During World War II he was rejected by the United States Navy and instead enrolled in the United States Merchant Marine Academy for a short time. However, he left that institution and became a merchant seaman.

O'Connor attended the University of Montana-Missoula, where he met Nancy Fields, who would later become his wife. At the U of M, O'Connor joined Sigma Phi Epsilon Fraternity. At that time, however, O'Connor did not take any drama courses as an undergraduate. O'Connor later left U of M to help his younger brother Hugh get into medical school in Ireland, where he completed his studies at the University College Dublin. It was there that he began acting in Theatre.