Trivia: The half-brother of silent film matinee idol Conway Tearle, American actor Godfrey Tearle was raised in England, where he made his stage bow at age 9 in the company of his actor parents. Not as good-looking or charismatic as sibling Conway, Godfrey nonetheless enjoyed a longer and more rewarding career as a character player. Having made his film debut in 1908, Tearle acted in films in both Hollywood and England, seldom getting more than ten minutes' footage but always making a strong impression. He was the ostensibly above-reproach "landed gentry" who turned out to be the head of a spy ring in Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1935) and despite his advanced years was given the leading role as a gallant RAF pilot in One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1941). One of Sir Godfrey Tearle's best remembered roles was as Franklin D. Roosevelt in MGM's 1946 account of the Manhattan Project, The Beginning of the End. Tearle was a last minute replacement for Lionel Barrymore, whose outspoken anti-FDR stance had prompted Roosevelt's widow Eleanor to refuse Barrymore permission to portray her husband.

Trivia: Yorkshire's own Eric Portman was on stage from 1924, mostly in Shakespearean roles. He kicked off his British film career in 1933, remaining within that country's film industry until his death, save for a brief visit to Hollywood in 1937 to play a minor role in The Prince and the Pauper. Shuttling from hero to villain and back again with finesse, Portman most strikingly demonstrated his versatility in a brace of Powell-Pressburger films of the war years: he played a scurrilous escaped Nazi in 49th Parallel (1941), then portrayed a heroic RAF officer in One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942). As he grew older, Eric Portman harnessed his haughty bearing to play many a cashiered military officer and down-at-heels aristocrat; either way, his characters seldom removed their noses from the air.

Trivia: Born Brian Williams, he trained for the stage at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, beginning his professional stage career at age 17; after appearing in many plays over several years he developed into a popular leading man with the Liverpool Repertory and on the West End. In 1929 he came to the U.S. to appear on Broadway, shortly thereafter debuting onscreen in the American production of Charlie's Aunt (1930). He played leads and supporting roles in many British and some Hollywood films, remaining consistently busy onscreen until 1942 and then again from 1946-52. He wrote several plays, sometimes in collaboration with his wife, Margaret Vyner.

Trivia: He worked for a time as a school teacher, then began acting professionally onstage in 1930. In 1933 he debuted onscreen, going on to an intermittently busy film career as a character lead over the next three-plus decades. He specialized in playing rustics and simpletons. He founded the Mermaid Theater in London in 1959 and became its director. In 1969 he was knighted; in 1979 he became the second actor to be honored with a peerage (the first was Laurence Olivier), becoming a lord with the title of baron. He was married to actress Josephine Wilson, with whom he appeared in The Citadel and Chance of a Lifetime (1950); he co-produced, co-directed, and co-wrote the latter film.

Trivia: Hugh Burden was a British playwright and actor, most prolific in the latter category in movie character parts. Born in Ceylon and educated in England, Burden made his stage debut in 1933. Nine years later he appeared in his first film, One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1941), perhaps the best showcase up to its time for male British talent. The quality of Hugh Burden's films ranged from the heights of No Love for Johnnie (1961) and Funeral in Berlin (1966) to the depths of The House in Nightmare Park (1973), but the actor never stinted in giving every role his best shot.

Trivia: British actress Googie Withers, born Georgette Withers, professionally adopted her nickname "Googie" only when she embarked upon her career. The daughter of a British military officer stationed in what is now West Pakistan, the convent-educated Withers prepared for a life on-stage by studying at the Italia Conti, the Helena Lehminski Academy, and the Buddy Bradley School of Dancing. Her first professional engagement, at age 12, was as a chorus singer. In films from 1934, Withers hit her peak popularity in the 1940s with such efforts as On Approval (1944), Pink String and Sealing Wax (1946), and It Always Rains on Sunday (1948). Her onscreen forte was elegant shrewery, often of a homicidal or self-destructive nature. After her mid-'50s marriage to actor John McCallum, Withers relocated to Australia, toting up impressive stage credits "down under." She resumed her film and TV career in character roles in the mid-'80s. Googie Withers was the subject of her husband's 1979 biographical volume Life with Googie.

Trivia: British stage actress Pamela Brown's film appearances were sporadic but memorable; she was often cast in haughty or eccentric roles. Her notable features include impressive sloe eyes, pointy chin, a come-hither smile, and a deep resonant voice. Brown studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, then made her stage debut as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet at Stratford-on-Avon in 1936, when she was 19. She played a large variety of roles for the Old Vic and made her highly successful Broadway debut in 1947 in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Brown debuted onscreen in One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1942) and made on-and-off appearances in films until 1973's Lady Caroline Lamb. She won an Emmy for her work in Victoria Regina on American TV.

Trivia: Redheaded British actress Joyce Redman attended the RADA before making her first professional appearance in 1935. Redman has since worked with virtually every major repertory troupe in England, as well as Paris' Comedie Francaise. Her biggest stages successes of the 1940s were Shadow and Substance and the London production of Broadway's Claudia. In films since 1942's One of Our Aircraft is Missing, Ms. Redman was Oscar-nominated for her performance as Mrs. Watters in 1963's Tom Jones. Anyone who has seen that film will not soon forget Joyce's sexually supercharged eating scene, nor her lighthearted "so-what" shrug upon learning that she might have slept with her own son. In 1965, Joyce Redman received a second Oscar nomination for her work as Emilia in Othello (1965), a literal filmization of Sir Laurence Olivier's National Theatre Company production.

Trivia: In films from 1930, Scottish character-actor Hay Petrie usually showed up in eccentric bit roles. Petrie's larger film assignments included the unspeakable Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop (1936) and the mentally defective John Aloysius Evan in 21 Days Together (1937). Many consider his portrayal of the MacLaggan in The Ghost Goes West (1936) to be the actor's finest hour and a half. Active until his death, Hay Petrie's last role of note was Uncle Pumblechook in Great Expectations (1946).

Trivia: At age 11 he began appearing in the Australian ballet, and later appeared in stage musicals and toured with Pavlova's dance company. In 1933 he moved to England and joined the Sadler's Wells Ballet; soon he became that company's principal dancer, and in the '40s he choreographed many of its productions. He devoted most of the '50s to acting, appearing with the Old Vic in productions of Shakespeare, then returned to ballet in the '60s; in 1965 he was appointed co-director of the Australian Ballet company. Beginning in the early '40s, he appeared sporadically in films; some of his work involved dancing -- such as The Red Shoes (1948), which he also choreographed -- and some involved straight dramatic roles. He co-directed (with Rudolf Nureyev) and played the title role in the ballet-film Don Quixote (1973). He was knighted in 1950.

Trivia: Hirsute, puckish "renaissance man" Peter Ustinov was born in England to parents of Russian lineage. Trained at the London Theatre Studio, Ustinov was on stage from the age of 17, performing sketches written by himself in the 1939 revue Late Joys. In 1940, the year that his first play, Fishing for Shadows, was staged, the 19-year-old Ustinov appeared in his first film. Just before entering the British army, Ustinov penned his first screenplay, The True Glory (1945). School for Secrets (1946) was the first of several films starring, written, and directed by Ustinov; others include Vice Versa (1946), Private Angelo (1949), Romanoff and Juliet (1961) (adapted from his own stage play), and Lady L (1965). Perhaps Ustinov's most ambitious film directorial project was Billy Budd (1962), a laudable if not completely successful attempt to transfer the allegorical style of Herman Melville to the screen. As an actor in films directed by others, Ustinov has sparkled in parts requiring what can best be described as "justifiable ham" -- he was Oscar-nominated for his riveting performance as the addled Nero in 1951's Quo Vadis and has won the Best Supporting Actor prize for Spartacus (1961) and Topkapi (1964). Never one to turn down a good television assignment, Ustinov has appeared on American TV in such guises as King George and Dr. Samuel Johnson, winning the first of his three Emmy awards for the latter characterization; he is also a frequent talk show guest, regaling audiences with his droll wit and his mastery over several dialects. While he has never starred on-camera in a weekly TV series, his voice could be heard essaying virtually all the roles on the 1981 syndicated cartoon series Dr. Snuggles. The closest he has come to repeating himself was with his frequent theatrical film and TV-movie appearances as Agatha Christie's Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, in the late '70s and early '80s. The author of several plays (the most popular of which included Love of Four Colonels and Photo Finish) and books (including two autobiographies), Peter Ustinov was still going strong into the 1990s, making a long-overdue return to Hollywood in the 1992 film Lorenzo's Oil.

Trivia: Royal Academy of Dramatic Art graduate and ex-Royal Air Force pilot Roland Culver quietly pursued a stage career from 1925 and a film career from 1930, reliably if unspectacularly playing a steady stream of leading roles. By the mid-'40s, Culver developed into a dry-witted, low-key character actor turning in memorable work in such films as On Approval (1943) and Dead of Night (1945). He moved to Hollywood in 1946, where for the next five years he essayed such "dependable" gentlemanly characterizations as Heavenly emissary Mr. Jordan in Down to Earth (1947). Back in England in the early '50s, he continued to play prominent parts in films like The Holly and the Ivy (1953). Working regularly in TV, he could be seen as Menenius in Spread of the Eagle, a 1962 BBC series based on the Roman plays of Shakespeare. Roland Culver persevered in small but impressive roles until his retirement in 1982.

Trivia: British actor Rome Stewart (born Septimus Wemham Ryott) played leads in hundreds of his country's silent films. Following the advent of sound, he was relegated to character roles.

Trivia: British stage actor John Salew made the transition to films in 1939. The manpower shortage during WWII enabled the stout, balding Salew to play larger and more important roles than would have been his lot in other circumstances. He usually played suspicious-looking characters, often Germanic in origin. His screen assignments include such parts as William Shakespeare (yes, that William Shakespeare) in the comedy-fantasy Time Flies (1944), Grimstone in the Gothic meller Uncle Silas (1947), and the librarian in the psychological thriller Night of the Demon (1957). John Salew was active into the TV era, playing the sort of parts that John McGiver essayed in the U.S.

Trivia: Robert Beatty spent his early adulthood in Canada as a gas-company cashier, salesman and amateur actor. Upon arriving in London, Beatty enrolled at the RADA, making his film debut as an extra and stand-in. During World War II, Beatty achieved fame through his eyewitness radio reports of the nightly London bombings. In most of his postwar film, stage, radio and TV work, Beatty was cast as a rough-hewn American or Canadian. One of his favorite stage roles was rude 'n' crude American junk dealer Harry Brock in Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday. He also played more than his share of detectives, most prominently as radio's Phillip O'Dell, and on the 1958 TV series Dial 999. Beatty was given a chance to demonstrate his versatility in the dual role of a milquetoast British hubby and a slick Italian gangster in Her Favorite Husband (1950). Later film roles included Lord Beaverbrook in The Magic Box (1951), Halvorsen in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and two separate characters in Superman III (1980) and Superman IV (1984). On television, Robert Beatty was seen in the miniseries Jesus of Nazareth (1977, as Proculus) and The Martian Chronicles (1980), and as President Ronald Reagan in the 1987 PBS special Breakthrough at Reykajavik.

Trivia: A one time studio gofer, still photographer, and comic actor, Michael Powell became one of the most celebrated and controversial directors ever to come out of England. Born in Canterbury, Powell became enamored of films while still a teenager and, after a start in the mid-'20s and a stint shooting stills and serving as a co-scenarist with Alfred Hitchcock in the early sound era, Powell broke into directing in low-budget British thrillers and comedies. After directing and writing his first notable movie in 1937, The Edge of the World, he moved to London Films where he began working with Emeric Pressburger, a gifted young author and screenwriter. Their two-decade association began shortly after they left London Films (where they collaborated on The Spy in Black and Powell co-directed The Thief of Bagdad). The wartime thrillers Contraband and Forty-Ninth Parallel -- the latter attracted much attention (including Oscar nominations for Best Picture and best original story) -- resulted in the creation of The Archers, an independent production company. Powell and Pressburger went on to jointly write, produce, and direct The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I'm Going, and Stairway to Heaven during World War II. The idiosyncratic humor and point-of-view of these films alienated many British critics, but delighted audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. After the war, Powell and Pressburger made a series of movies that emblazoned their names around the world: Black Narcissus, a story of nuns who are nearly destroyed by their own passions while trying to found a convent in the Himalayas; The Red Shoes, a phenomenally successful film about the life and death of a ballet dancer, whose multi-year run in America and multimillion-dollar success made possible such pictures as An American in Paris and The Tales of Hoffmann, an opera/ballet amalgam of unprecedented stylistic flare and daring. The early '50s saw a decline in fortunes for the filmmakers, and their partnership dissolved in 1956. Powell continued to make movies of a fiercely personal nature until 1960, when the critical reaction to Peeping Tom -- about a man who mixes voyeurism, cinema, and murder, and is now considered a classic -- ended his career in England. He worked for American and European television during the 1960s and '70s, and was rediscovered in the late '70s with the help of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, who regarded Powell as one of the most important influences on their individual work. Museum retrospectives, restorations, and reopenings of his classic films followed, along with a multi-volume autobiography that he completed prior to his death in 1990.

Trivia: A rotund, often mustachioed character comedian, James B. Carson (born James Frelich) enjoyed a long stint touring in vaudeville and burlesque before entering films full-time in the mid-1930s. Often playing waiters, Carson -- a Missourian -- affected the mannerisms and accent of an excitable Frenchman when waiting on the likes of Joan Crawford and Clark Gable in Love on the Run; Jeanette MacDonald and Allan Jones in The Firefly (1937); and Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour, and others in The Road to Zanzibar (1941). Carson retired from films due to illness in the late '40s.

Trivia: British actor John Longden played the hero in a number of silent films during the late '20s and into the '30s. He later became a noted character actor. Before becoming an actor, Longden, a native of the West Indies, worked as a mining engineer.