Trivia: On stage, screen, and television, powerhouse actress Glenda Jackson displayed a fierce intelligence and a brazen toughness that have bordered on abrasiveness. With her sharp facial features, Jackson is more handsome than glamorous, but this has only helped her career in that it provided her the opportunity to play a wide variety of strong-willed, smart, and sexy women. She specialized in dramas but also dabbled in comedies. The daughter of a Liverpool bricklayer, Jackson left school at age 16 to join an amateur acting troupe, taking odd jobs to support herself. After ten years of scraping by, she was invited to join the Theatre of Cruelty, an offshoot of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and cast as Charlotte Corday in Peter Brook's internationally award-winning The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis De Sade (aka Marat/Sade). In 1966, Jackson reprised her role in the film version, her first starring role; three years before, she had debuted with a bit part in This Sporting Life. Jackson worked closely with director Ken Russell, first appearing in his adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1969) as Gudrun. The role earned Jackson the first of two Academy Awards. In 1971, she was nominated for another Oscar for Sunday, Bloody Sunday, and earned her second award for the romantic comedy A Touch of Class (1973). In 1971, Jackson also won an Emmy for playing Queen Elizabeth on the highly acclaimed British miniseries Elizabeth R. Other notable television appearances include the title role in the moving account of Patricia Neal's recovery from a stroke The Patricia Neal Story (1981). Throughout much of her adult life, Jackson has been passionate about politics. In 1990, she unsuccessfully ran for a seat in the British Parliament. She tried again in 1992 and succeed in winning the Hampstead seat. Since the election, Jackson has retired from acting to devote her energies to her party and her constituents.

Trivia: Icon of British cool in the 1960s, leading action star in the late '70s, and knighted into official respectability in 1993, Michael Caine has enjoyed a long, varied, and enviably prolific career. Although he played a part in some notable cinematic failures, particularly during the 1980s, Caine remains one of the most established performers in the business, serving as a role model for actors and filmmakers young and old. The son of a fish-porter father and a charwoman mother, Caine's beginnings were less than glamorous. Born Maurice Micklewhite in 1943, in the squalid South London neighborhood of Bermondsey, Caine got his first taste of the world beyond when he was evacuated to the countryside during World War II. A misfit in school, the military (he served during the Korean War), and the job pool, Caine found acceptance after answering a want ad for an assistant stage manager at the Horsham Repertory Company. Already star struck thanks to incessant filmgoing, Caine naturally took to acting, even though the life of a British regional actor was one step away from abject poverty. Changing his last name from Micklewhite to Caine in tribute to one of his favorite movies, The Caine Mutiny (1954), the actor toiled in obscurity in unbilled film bits and TV walk-ons from 1956 through 1962, occasionally obtaining leads on a TV series based on the Edgar Wallace mysteries. Caine's big break occurred in 1963, when he was cast in a leading role in the epic, star-studded historical adventure film Zulu. Suddenly finding himself bearing a modicum of importance in the British film industry, the actor next played Harry Palmer, the bespectacled, iconoclastic secret agent protagonist of The Ipcress File (1965); he would go on to reprise the role in two more films, Funeral in Berlin (1966) and The Billion Dollar Brain (1967). After 12 years of obscure and unappreciated work, Caine was glibly hailed as an "overnight star," and with the success of The Ipcress Files, advanced to a new role as a major industry player. He went on to gain international fame in his next film, Alfie (1966), in which he played the title character, a gleefully cheeky, womanizing cockney lad. For his portrayal of Alfie, Caine was rewarded with a Golden Globe award and an Oscar nomination. One of the most popular action stars of the late '60s and early '70s, Caine had leading roles in films such as the classic 1969 action comedy The Italian Job (considered by many to be the celluloid manifestation of all that was hip in Britain at the time); Joseph L. Manckiewic's Sleuth (1972), in which he starred opposite Laurence Olivier and won his second Oscar nomination; and The Man Who Would Be King (1976), which cast him alongside Sean Connery. During the 1980s, Caine gained additional acclaim with an Oscar nomination for Educating Rita (1983) and a 1986 Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters. He had a dastardly turn as an underworld kingpin in Neil Jordan's small but fervently praised Mona Lisa, and two years later once again proved his comic talents with the hit comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, in which he and Steve Martin starred as scheming con artists. Although Caine was no less prolific during the 1990s, his career began to falter with a series of lackluster films. Among the disappointments were Steven Seagal's environmental action flick On Deadly Ground (1994) and Blood and Wine, a 1996 thriller in which he starred with Jack Nicholson and Judy Davis. In the late '90s, Caine began to rebound, appearing in the acclaimed independent film Little Voice (1998), for which he won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of a seedy talent agent. In addition, Caine -- or Sir Michael, as he was called after receiving his knighthood in 2000 -- got a new audience through his television work, starring in the 1997 miniseries Mandela and de Klerk. The actor, who was ranked 55 in Empire Magazine's 1997 Top 100 Actors of All Time list, also kept busy as the co-owner of a successful London restaurant, and enjoyed a new wave of appreciation from younger filmmakers who praised him as the film industry's enduring model of British cool. This appreciation was further evidenced in 2000, when Caine was honored with a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his portrayal of an abortionist in The Cider House Rules. After launching the new millennium with both a revitalized career momentum and newfound popularity among fans who were too young to appreciate his early efforts, Caine once again scored a hit with the art-house circuit as the torturous Dr Royer-Collard in director Phillip Kaufman's Quills. Later paid homage by Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone when the muscle-bound actor stepped into Caine's well-worn shoes for a remake of Get Carter (in which Caine also appeared in a minor role) the actor would gain positive notice the following year for his turn as a friend attempting to keep a promise in Last Orders. As if the Get Carter remake wasn't enought to emphasize Caine's coolness to a new generation of moviegoers, his turn as bespectacled super-spy Austin Powers' father in Austin Powers in Goldfinger proved that even years beyond The Italian Job Caine was still at the top of his game. Moving seamlessly from kitsch to stirring drama, Caine's role in 2002's The Quiet American earned the actor not only some of the best reviews of his later career, but another Oscar nomination as well. Caine had long demonstrated an unusual versatility that made him a cult favorite with popular and arthouse audiences, but as the decade wore on, he demonstrated more box-office savvy by pursuing increasingly lucrative audience pleasers, almost exclusively for a period of time. The thesp first resusciated the triumph of his Muppet role with a brief return to family-friendly material in Disney's Secondhand Lions, alongside screen legend Robert Duvall (Tender Mercies, The Apostle). The two play quirky great-uncles to a maladjusted adolescent boy (Haley Joel Osment), who take the child for the summer as a guest on their Texas ranch. The film elicited mediocre reviews (Carrie Rickey termed it "edgeless as a marshmallow and twice as syrupy") but scored with ticket buyers during its initial fall 2003 run. Caine then co-starred with Christopher Walken and Josh Lucas in the family issues drama Around the Bend (2004). In 2005, perhaps cued by the bankability of Goldfinger and Lions, Caine landed a couple of additional turns in Hollywood A-listers. In that year's Nicole Kidman/Will Ferrell starrer Bewitched, he plays Nigel Bigelow, Kidman's ever philandering warlock father. Even as critics wrote the vehicle off as a turkey, audiences didn't listen, and it did outstanding business, doubtless helped by the weight of old pros Caine and Shirley Maclaine. That same year's franchise prequel Batman Begins not only grossed dollar one, but handed Caine some of his most favorable notices to date, as he inherited the role of Bruce Wayne's butler, a role he would return to in both of the film's sequels, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. Caine contributed an elegiac portrayal to Gore Verbinski's quirky late 2005 character drama The Weatherman, as Robert Spritz, the novelist father of Nic Cage's David Spritz, who casts a giant shadow over the young man. In 2006, Caine joined the cast of the esteemed Alfonso Cuaron's dystopian sci-fi drama Children of Men, and lent a supporting role to Memento helmer Christopher Nolan's psychological thriller The Prestige. In 2009 Caine starred as the title character in Harry Brown, a thriller about a senior citizen vigilante, and the next year worked with Nolan yet again on the mind-bending Inception.

Trivia: Three-time Tony Award nominee Kate Nelligan has pursued a successful acting career in three separate English-speaking nations. While attending the University of Toronto, the Canadian-born Nelligan transferred to London, England's Central School of Speech and Drama. It was in Bristol that she first appeared on stage professionally with the Old Vic in 1973; one year later, she returned to London for her stage bow there. In 1975, Nelligan made her screen debut in The Romantic Englishwoman, but most American filmgoers saw her first as Lucy in the Frank Langella version of Dracula (1979). Several appearances in British made-for-TV movies followed in the early 1980s; most of these popped up on US TV screens courtesy of the burgeoning Arts & Entertainment cable network. In 1980 she made her first Canadian film, Mr. Patman. Kate Nelligan's most recent movie appearances have been in such American projects as Frankie and Johnny (1990), The Prince of Tides (1991), and Shadows and Fog (1992).

Trivia: Best known for his portrayal of anguished souls, sinister villains, and twisted Nazis, Teutonic actor Helmut Berger has earned international acclaim. Born Helmut Steinberger in Salzburg, Austria, but raised in Stuttgart, Germany, Berger learned to act at the University of Perugia in Italy and started out in English and French television commercials. He first worked in movies as an extra until he was discovered by Italian director Luchino Visconti and given the lead in his controversial, powerhouse drama The Damned (1969). From there he found steady employment in European and occasionally American films. In the U.S., Berger spent a season on television nighttime soap Dynasty. Berger also has a busy television career and occasionally directs both TV shows and feature films.

Trivia: Though his name has never become a household word, distinguished English character actor David De Keyser boasts one impressive resumé. Adventurous filmgoers will doubtless recall De Keyser as one of the three contributors (alongside Miranda Richardson and Mike Nichols) to David Hare's riveting "filmed theater" piece The Designated Mourner (1997), but even the most diligent cinephiles may be surprised to discover that De Keyser's work stretches back several decades prior to this. The thespian actually racked up an overwhelming litany of roles in well-respected, A-list features during the late '60s, '70s, '80s, and '90s, typically playing colorful British or Jewish eccentrics. Throughout, De Keyser imbued his characterizations with multifaceted emotional and tonal nuances that more than rivaled the contributions of his onscreen contemporaries. Born in London, England, in 1927, De Keyser first attained recognition when he paired up twice with controversial filmmaker John Boorman, first as Zissell in that director's eccentric 1965 cinematic debut, Having a Wild Weekend (the Hard Day's Night-like screen venture of the Dave Clark Five), then as David in Boorman's failed, seriocomic social allegory Leo the Last (1970), alongside Marcello Mastroianni. De Keyser then contributed supporting roles to three key (albeit wildly different) British films of the '70s: he played physicians in Sean Connery's penultimate James Bond vehicle, Diamonds Are Forever (1971) and Melvin Frank's sleeper romance A Touch of Class (1973), and essayed the role of Joseph Schenck in Ken Russell's opulent, erotic period piece Valentino (1977), alongside Rudolf Nureyev and Leslie Caron. The '80s marked a less active but equally relevant time for De Keyser -- relevant because while his roles grew more infrequent, they were typically parts of greater critical estimation -- such as Rabbi Zalman in Barbra Streisand's underrated musical Yentl (1983) and Janet Suzman's father in Euzhan Palcy's apartheid drama A Dry White Season (1993). As indicated, however, De Keyser didn't really receive full audience recognition until Mourner in 1997. In that film -- a series of enigmatic, elliptical theater monologues written by Wallace Shawn and delivered straight into the camera -- the actor portrays Howard, a dissident poet at odds with the oppressive political regime that holds power, and the father-in-law of Mike Nichols' loveless egoist Jack. De Keyser's next major role arrived when he signed on to portray Emmanuel, the patriarch of the Sonnenschein clan of Hungarian Jews, in István Szabó's three-hour historical epic Sunshine (1999). De Keyser then lent a supporting role (as Dom André) to Norman Jewison's fine, overlooked political thriller The Statement (2003). David De Keyser is the father of the late actor Alexei de Keyser, who died in 2004.

Trivia: In films from the early 1940s, American actor Phil Brown held down supporting roles in most of his Hollywood films. Brown was eighth-billed as Jimmy Brown in his earliest screen credit, the Paramount aviation epic I Wanted Wings (1941). He was disturbingly convincing as a homicidal maniac in Calling Dr. Gillespie (1942), snapping from normality to viciousness within seconds in several scenes. In The Killers (1946), Brown played Nick Adams, who in the Hemingway story on which the film was based was the narrator but who wound up with little more than a bystander part in the film's opening scene. Moving to Europe in 1950, Brown was put to good use as the victim of a jealous husband in the British-filmed Obsession (1949), released in America as The Hidden Room. Phil Brown remained in England and the Continent for the balance of his career.

Trivia: Mainly known as a stage actress, blonde Doris Nolan played Katharine Hepburn's elegant sister in the second screen version of Philip Barry's Holiday (1938). She was quite effective in the role but Hepburn took no prisoners and screen stardom was not to be. After a few less memorable attempts, Nolan returned to Broadway where she would spend two years in the hit wartime comedy The Doughgirls. She married Canadian actor Alexander Knox and together they resettled in Great Britain when he got in trouble with the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Trivia: Making her screen debut in Jean-Pierre Melville's highly regarded thriller Le Samourai (The Godson), French actress Nathalie Delon played supporting roles and occasional leads in films of the '70s, often in films starring her former husband, Alain Delon. In addition to acting, Delon has also directed two films, They Call That an Accident (1983) and Sweet Lies (1988).