Trivia: Pixie-ish British actress Keira Knightley went from a relative unknown to a blockbuster leading lady after 2002's sleeper soccer flick Bend It Like Beckham caught on with an international audience. Born in Teddington, London, England, in 1985, young Knightley was enticed by the lure of cinema at an early age. Playwright mother Sharman McDonald and actor father Will Knightley were at first reluctant to let their daughter follow them into show business. Although they would accommodate her wish three years later, their strict demand that their daughter study through school holidays and only take jobs that didn't interfere with her education ensured that Keira would keep her priorities straight.Trained in dance from an early age, Knightley made her film debut when she was 12 in Moira Armstrong's romantic drama A Village Affair. Gradually climbing the credits with subsequent roles in Innocent Lies (1995) and the made-for-TV features Treasure Seekers (1996) and Coming Home (1998), she got her first big break when cast as the decoy queen in the eagerly anticipated Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Knightley resembled the actual queen (portrayed by Natalie Portman) so much that her mother couldn't distinguish the two and some fans still insist both were portrayed by Portman. Returning to non-decoy status for the television miniseries Oliver Twist (2000), Knightley stayed with the small screen as Robin Hood's daughter in the 2001 adventure Princess of Thieves. Although audiences would truly begin to take note of her talent in the thriller The Hole that same year, her star-making turn in the sleeper comedy drama Bend It Like Beckham endeared her to audiences everywhere and ultimately served as her breakthrough starring role. Playing the best friend to Parminder K. Nagra, Knightley proved that she could turn what might have been little more than a noteworthy supporting role into a truly spunky, scene-stealing performance. As Lara Antipova in the 2002 miniseries Doctor Zhivago, Knightley gracefully slipped into a role that was previously made famous by Julie Christie, and the timeless romantic drama proved a hit with U.K. television viewers. With the release of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, however, the actress was catapulted into an entirely new realm of popularity. Opposite Johnny Depp's truly eccentric portrayal of pirate Jack Sparrow, Knightley charmed as the beautiful young maiden whose blood may hold the key to life for a group of undead pirates.While King Arthur (2004) and Domino (2005) were high-profile flops, Knightley's status as a movie-star on both sides of the pond was firmly cemented in early 2006 when she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her role in 2005's Pride & Prejudice. 2006 also saw the release of the sequel Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, which was shot back-to-back with the franchise's third entry, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, which was scheduled for release in 2007. In the meantime, Knightley forged ahead on the period drama Silk, opposite Michael Pitt. As the decade wore on, Knightly remained a fixed presence on screen, appearing in such films as The Duchess, London Boulevard, A Dangerous Method, Anna Karenina, and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.Knightley appeared in a pair of indie films in 2014, {Laggies and Begin Again, as well as the big-budget action film Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. However, she earned the most praise that year for her supporting turn in The Imitation Game, playing a woman who helps crack German codes during WWII. She garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her work in that film, which also scored Best Picture and Best Actor nods.

Trivia: Was recruited to the University of Mount Union to play soccer. Studied at American Players Theatre. Cast as Honey in a Steppenwolf Theatre production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 2010; the show eventually transferred to Broadway in 2012 Made her big screen debut alongside Ben Affleck in 2014's Gone Girl.

Trivia: Often mistaken for British, Alessandro Nivola has established himself as one of the American actors most likely to assume a flawless English accent in his films. Nivola, whose combination of charismatic good looks, vowel-laden name, and work in a number of British films have both confused and delighted critics and viewers, is actually a product of the East Coast. The son of an Italian-born academic father and a Boston blue-blood mother, Nivola was born and raised in Boston. Taking an early interest in acting, he grew up attending drama camp in the summer and got an internship at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre in Waterford, Connecticut, where he began acting on the stage. His love of acting continued while he was a student at the Tony Philips Exeter Academy and Yale University; by the time he was a sophomore at Yale, he had landed an agent and was making regular trips to New York City for auditions.Nivola got his first professional jobs with the Yale Repertory Theatre and a Seattle-based company. He broke into films in 1997 with a small role in Inventing the Abbotts and the more substantial part of Nicolas Cage's psychotic genius brother in John Woo's Face/Off. He then crossed the ocean, and the accent barrier, to star in the British noir drama I Want You (1998), which cast him as an enigmatic man with a dark past, and in Patricia Rozema's saucy adaptation of Mansfield Park (1998). It was the latter film that gave Nivola his first significant dose of recognition and respect, with critics and viewers alike marveling at his portrayal of the dashing and morally dubious Henry Crawford, not to mention his seamless English accent. Nivola again worked with a largely British cast and crew the following year to make Kenneth Branagh's musical version of Love's Labour's Lost (2000), in which he played a king whose vow to forsake love for intellectual enlightenment becomes severely jeopardized by the arrival of a comely French princess (Alicia Silverstone) and her ladies in waiting. That same year, he returned to the other side of the Atlantic to portray a Backstreet Boys-type singer in Mike Figgis' Time Code 2000, an experimental feature filmed entirely in one take. In the years to come, Nivola would remain a consistent presence on screen, appearing in movies like Junebug, Grace is Gone, and The Eye, as well as on the TV series The Company.

Trivia: Supporting actor Rory Cochrane made his film debut with a small role in James Dearden's A Kiss Before Dying (1991). Prior to that, while still enrolled at New York City's LaGuardia High School, he had appeared in the CBS television docudrama Saturday Night With Connie Chung (1989); he then appeared in an episode of the ABC series H.E.L.P. (1990). Cochrane has subsequently earned recognition for playing memorable character roles in independent features. He is best known for playing the constantly zoned-out teenaged stoner Slater in Richard Linklater's ode to adolescence in the 1970s, Dazed and Confused (1993). Other notable roles include a turn as a troubled teen wrangling with a dysfunctional father (Jeff Goldblum) in Fathers and Sons (1992) and Cochrane's multilayered and funny portrayal of a paranoid, gun-loving biker in Love and a .45 (1994). Cochrane continued to work steadily in little-seen independent films like Empire Records, and The Low Life. He did have a major role in James Toback's confrontational Black and White. He appeared in Hats's War opposite fellow Dazed and Confused alum Cole Hauser. Cochrane scored a role on the CSI spin-off CSI: Miami, but his character was killed off. In 2006 Cochrane would be cast again by Richard Linklater in his adaptation of A Scanner Darkly. Cochrane would remain active on screen as the years rolled on, apperaing in movies like Public Enemies and on shows like The Company, CSI: Miami, and 24.

Trivia: A burly, thickset, and occasionally scruffy character actor with a domineering and imposing presence, Peter Gerety often accepted roles as ordinary working-class stiffs, judges, or inner-city law officers. A performer with equal footing in film and on the stage, Gerety took his premier onscreen bow during the early '80s but first began drawing substantial attention over a decade later. Gerety remains best known for his multi-season portrayal (1996-1999) of Detective Stuart Gharty on the cop drama Homicide: Life on the Street. He also played the recurring role of Judge Daniel Phelan on another Baltimore-set crime series, The Wire (2002-2008). Big-screen projects include Sleepers (1996), K-PAX (2001), Syriana (2005), Charlie Wilson's War (2007), Leatherheads (2008), and Public Enemies (2009).

Trivia: Tall, chiseled-face character actor Robert John Burke has been acting since the 1970s, but he is best known to art house audiences as a regular member of New York-based director Hal Hartley's stock company of decidedly non-Hollywood actors. Born on Long Island, Burke studied acting at S.U.N.Y. Purchase in the early '70s. After he graduated from college, Burke began acting in TV, appearing on such shows as As the World Turns and Happy Days. Though he made his feature film debut in The Chosen (1981), Burke devoted his energies in the early '80s to an experimental teaching program designed to involve students directly in the arts. Burke returned to movies and TV in the latter half of the 1980s with roles in actioner Wanted Dead or Alive (1986), TV movie comedy Pass the Ammo (1989), and late-'80s dance trend vehicle Lambada (1989). Burke's fortunes began to change when he was cast in the lead role of an enigmatic ex-con who returns to his Long Island hometown in the then-unknown Hartley's first feature, The Unbelievable Truth (1990). Shot on a shoestring budget in 11 days, The Unbelievable Truth garnered positive notice for Hartley's distinctly offbeat, dark comic sensibility and his stars' deadpan, wry performances. Burke followed The Unbelievable Truth with a supporting part in the Oscar-nominated 1930s coming of age film Rambling Rose (1991) and a high-profile starring role replacing Peter Weller as the imposing eponymous cyborg law enforcer in Robocop 3 (1992). Burke stayed busy from then on, alternating between independent movies and Hollywood projects. Working with Hartley again, Burke starred as one of a pair of brothers searching for their ballplayer-turned-anarchist father in the quirky yet appealing Simple Men (1992); he played a smaller role in Hartley's troubled romance triad Flirt (1995). Burke also acted more than once with the far less celebrated independent filmmaker Eric Schaeffer, appearing in Schaeffer's industry insider comedy My Life's in Turnaround (1993) and self-indulgent romantic comedy If Lucy Fell (1996). Outside of the New York independent scene, Burke played Reese Witherspoon's African gamekeeper father in the children's adventure A Far Off Place (1993), joined the distinguished cast populating Tombstone (1993) (the Kurt Russell version of the Wyatt Earp Western legend), appeared in Oliver Stone's third Vietnam movie, Heaven and Earth (1993), and starred as the cursed obese lawyer in Stephen King's horror yarn Thinner (1996). Continuing to show his versatility in both comedy and drama, Burke joined the supporting cast of the light-hearted buddy chase movie Fled (1996) and starred as Natasha Gregson Wagner's father in the bayou love story First Love, Last Rites (1997). Burke returned to TV in the late '90s in two acclaimed HBO productions, the ambitious miniseries From the Earth to the Moon (1998) and the wrenching Vietnam War docudrama A Bright Shining Lie (1998). At the start of the 2000s, Burke reunited with Hal Hartley for the Cannes Film Festival entry No Such Thing (2001). Drawing upon his varied experience, not to mention his formidable mien, Burke played the mammal/lizard Beast to Sarah Polley's Beauty in Hartley's singular reworking of the fairy tale romance.

Trivia: Of English, Irish, Italian, Iranian and Armenian descent.Grew up in Kansas.Was going to play college football but received a scholarship to study acting.Worked as a fisherman, playwright, movie theater usher and circus performer.Has played a disciple of Batman's villain the Joker multiple times, including The Dark Knight (2008) and the television series Gotham.The film Animals (2014) was inspired by his experience with heroin addiction, which earned him the Special Jury Prize for Courage in Storytelling at the 2014 SXSW Film Festival.A member of Caffeine Theatre and Shattered Globe Theatre Company in Chicago, Illinois.