Ann-Margret Olsson is a Swedish-American actress, singer and dancer whose professional name is Ann-Margret. She became famous for her starring roles in Bye, Bye Birdie, Viva Las Vegas, The Cincinnati Kid, Carnal Knowledge, and Tommy. Her later career includes character roles in Grumpy Old Men, Any Given Sunday, The Santa Clause 3, and The Break-Up. She has won five Golden Globe Awards and been nominated for two Academy Awards, two Grammy Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and six Emmy Awards. On August 21, 2010, she won her first Emmy Award for her guest appearance on Law & Order: SVU.

Ann-Margret was born in Stockholm, the daughter of Anna and Gustav Olsson, a native of Örnsköldsvik. While young she moved with her parents to Valsjöbyn, Jämtlands län, which she later described as a small town “of lumberjacks and farmers high up near the Arctic Circle”. Her father worked in the United States during his youth and moved there again in 1942, working with the Johnson Electrical Company, while his wife and daughter stayed behind.

Ann-Margret and her mother moved to the United States in November 1946, and her father took her to Radio City Music Hall on the day they arrived. They settled just outside of Chicago in Wilmette, Illinois. She became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1949 and took her first dance lessons at the Marjorie Young School of Dance, showing natural ability from the start, easily mimicking all the steps. Her parents were supportive and her mother handmade all her costumes. Ann-Margret’s mother was a funeral parlor receptionist after her husband suffered a severe injury on his job. While a teenager, Ann-Margret appeared on the Morris B. Sachs Amateur Hour, Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club and Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour.

Through high school, where she graduated from New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, she continued to star in theatricals and she attended Northwestern University, where she was a member of the sorority Kappa Alpha Theta but did not graduate. As part of a group known as the “Suttletones,” they performed at the Mist, a Chicago nightclub, and went to Las Vegas for a promised club date which fell through after they arrived. They plugged ahead to Los Angeles and, through agent Georgia Lund, secured club dates in Newport Beach and Reno, where Ann-Margret had a chance encounter with Marilyn Monroe, who was on location for The Misfits. Monroe noticed the striking girl in a crowd of onlookers, then chatted privately with her, offering her encouragement.

Anna Magnani was an Italian stage and film actress. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress, along with four other international awards, for her portrayal of a Sicilian widow in The Rose Tattoo. Born in Rome to an Egyptian father and an Italian-Jewish mother, she worked her way through Rome’s Academy of Dramatic Art by singing at night clubs. During her career, her only child was stricken by Polio when he was 18 months old and remained crippled.

She was referred to as “La Lupa,” the “perennial toast of Rome” and a “living she-wolf symbol” of the cinema. Time magazine described her personality as “fiery,” and drama critic Harold Clurman said her acting was “volcanic.” In the realm of Italian cinema, she was “passionate, fearless, and exciting,” an actress that film historian Barry Monush calls “the volcanic earth mother of all Italian cinema.” Director Roberto Rossellini called her “the greatest acting genius since Eleonora Duse. Playwright Tennessee Williams became an admirer of her acting and wrote The Rose Tattoo specifically for her to star in, a role for which she received her first Oscar in 1955.

After meeting director Goffredo Alessandrini she received her first screen role in La Cieca di Sorrento and later achieved international fame in Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, considered the first significant movie to launch the Italian neorealism movement in cinema. As an actress she became recognized for her dynamic and forceful portrayals of “earthy lower-class women” in such films as The Miracle, Bellissima, The Rose Tattoo, The Fugitive Kind, with Marlon Brando and directed by Sidney Lumet, and Mamma Roma. As early as 1950, Life magazine had already stated that Magnani was “one of the most impressive actresses since Garbo.”

Magnani was born in Rome, Italy to a Calabrese father, Francesco Del Duce, and a Roman mother, Marina Magnani. She was raised by her maternal grandmother in a slum district of Rome. Her formal education lasted only until age 14, when she enrolled in a French convent school in Rome. There, she learned to speak French and play piano, which she later played expertly. She also developed a passion for acting from watching the nuns stage their Christmas play.

Anna Quirentia Nilsson was a Swedish born American actress who achieved success in American silent movies.

Anna Q. Nilsson was born in Ystad, Skåne County, Sweden in 1888. Her middle name, “Quirentia ” is derived from her date of birth, March 30 Saint Quirinius’ Day. At the age of 8 her father got a job at the local sugar factory in Hasslarp, a small community outside Helsingborg in Sweden where she spent most of her school years. She did very well in school, graduating with highest marks. Due to her good grades she was hired as sales clerk in Halmstad on the Swedish west coast, unusual for a young woman from a worker’s family at the time. But she had set her mind on going to America.

In 1905, she emigrated to the United States through Ellis Island. In the new country, the Swedish teenager started working as a nursemaid and learned English quickly. Soon she started working as a model. Already in 1907, she was named “Most beautiful woman in America”. Penrhyn Stanlaws, one of the most successful and sought after cover artists of his day, picked Anna Q. Nilsson to become one of his models.

Nilsson’s modeling led her to getting a role in the 1911 film Molly Pitcher. Films of special note for Anna were Seven Keys to Baldpate, Soldiers of Fortune, The Toll Gate and The Luck of the Irish, and The Lotus Eater .

Anne Baxter was an American actress known for her performances in films such as The Magnificent Ambersons, All About Eve, The Razor’s Edge and The Ten Commandments. Baxter was born in Michigan City, Indiana to Kenneth Stuart Baxter and Catherine Wright; her maternal grandfather was the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Baxter’s father was a prominent executive with the Seagrams Distillery Co. and she was raised in New York City in a well-to-do home, and attended the prestigious Brearley School. At age 10, Baxter attended a Broadway play starring Helen Hayes, and was so impressed that she declared to her family that she wanted to become an actress. By the age of 13, she had appeared on Broadway. During this period, Baxter learned her acting craft as a student of the famed teacher Maria Ouspenskaya.

At 16 Baxter screen-tested for the role of Mrs. DeWinter in Rebecca, losing out to Joan Fontaine because director Alfred Hitchcock considered her “too young” for the role, but the strength of that first foray into movie acting secured her a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox. Her first movie role was in 20 Mule Team in 1940. She was chosen by director Orson Welles to appear in The Magnificent Ambersons, based on the novel by Booth Tarkington. Baxter co-starred with Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney in 1946’s The Razor’s Edge, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

In 1950, she was chosen to co-star in All About Eve, largely because of a resemblance to Claudette Colbert, who had initially been chosen to co-star in the film; the original idea being to have her character gradually come to visually mirror Colbert’s over the course of the film. Baxter received a nomination for Best Actress for the title role of Eve Harrington. Later during that decade, Baxter also continued to act in professional theater. According to a program from the production, Baxter appeared on Broadway in 1953 opposite Tyrone Power in Charles Laughton’s John Brown’s Body, a play based upon the narrative poem by Stephen Vincent Benét. In 1953 she appeared opposite Montgomery Clift in Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess.