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: 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: British actor David Buck began his theatrical career while studying at Cambridge and made his professional debut in the early 1950s with London's English Stage Company; following that he worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Buck also appeared in films, on television, and wrote and adapted radio plays.

Trivia: Dark-eyed, dark-haired British actress Nanette Newman was still in her teens when she made her first film appearance in Personal Affairs (1953). The wife of director Bryan Forbes, Newman has been featured in several of Forbes' best films, including The Whisperers (1966), The Wrong Box (1968) and The Stepford Wives (1975). She is a familiar presence on British television, starring in the weekly series Let Their Be Love (1982) and Late Expectations (1987). Newman is also the author of several cookbooks and children's books. Most recently, Nanette Newman was co-starred in the 1993 TV adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Trivia: Storklike British comic actor Leonard Rossiter came to films by way of the revue stage. His most prolific film years were 1965 through 1980, during which time his earthy humor brightened such overblown features as Hotel Paradiso (1966), Oliver (1968) and Barry Lyndon (1974). His best-remembered appearance during this period was as Quinlan in the Peter Sellers/Blake Edwards comedy The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976). Leonard Rossiter died in harness, collapsing during a London stage appearance in 1984.

Trivia: Born Wladyslaw Sheybal. Polish character actor in English-language films, onscreen from the '50s.

Trivia: John Barry was one of the best-known composers of soundtrack music of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, but his career carried him through a multitude of music genres and styles. He was best-known in film in connection with his work on the James Bond pictures, but Barry was also the holder of five Academy Awards, none of them for the Bond movies. Born Free (for which he won Oscars for Best Score and Best Song), The Lion in Winter, Out of Africa, and Dances With Wolves are hardly unknown films or scores. Additionally, from 1957 until the early '60s as leader of The John Barry Seven, Barry was one of the best-known figures in popular music and early rock & roll in England. Born in York, England, on November 3, 1933, John Barry was the son of a small movie theater chain owner and a former concert pianist. He showed an avid interest in music as a boy and initially studied piano, although he switched to the trumpet in his teens. After spending much of his boyhood steeped in classical music, he discovered jazz. His idol was Harry James and his favorite music was made by Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, and the Dorsey Brothers. Barry studied piano and composition with the music master of York Minster Cathedral, Dr. Francis Jackson, and had a deep interest in arranging. Growing up around his father's movie theater business, Barry was always cognizant of the power and influence of the cinema, but it was a specific film, A Song to Remember, dealing with the life of Fryderyc Chopin, that first demonstrated to him the power of music in movies and got him interested in the field. He also creditedMax Steiner's score for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Anton Karas' music for The Third Man as favorite film scores from his early life. Barry played with a local jazz band in his mid-teens, and was lucky enough to get himself assigned to a musical unit in the British army when he was called up for service at age 18. During his two years of army service, he tried his hand at arranging, and he later enhanced his skills by taking a correspondence course offered by Bill Russo, one of Stan Kenton's arrangers. Once he was back in civilian life, Barry offered his arrangements to some of the top bandleaders in England, among them Ted Heath, Jack Parnell, and Johnny Dankworth. Dankworth actually used two of them, and at Parnell's suggestion, Barry started his own band. The result was John Barry & the Seven, later known as the John Barry Seven. He moved the group to London in 1957 and approached Jack Good, the producer of British television's top music showcase Six-Five Special, but was turned down for the show. After a few weeks and some successful live engagements, including a gig as the backing band for Tommy Steele, the show's producers changed their minds and the John Barry Seven made it onto the Six-Five Special. It was out of their appearances on the program that they were signed to EMI's Parlophone Records label. The group's next big gig was as one of the resident house bands for Good's new program, Oh Boy!, which was a showcase for many of the most dynamic young rock & roll singers coming up in England, including Cliff Richard. It was from there that Barry moved on to become music director for Drumbeat, a dramatic program series starring a young singer/actor named Adam Faith. From 1959 until 1962, he and Faith were an unbeatable combination, both onscreen and in the recording studio, releasing a string of major British hits through the Parlophone label. The John Barry Seven also enjoyed hits of their own, including "Hit or Miss" and a version of the Ventures' "Walk Don't Run." They were known for their unusual sound, owing to their bold yet precise playing and their heavy use of electric piano and other relatively uncommon instruments (this in a time when the electric bass was barely tolerated). They were among the star instrumental acts of the day and, surprisingly, cut albums for EMI's Columbia Records, which was already the home of the Shadows, the group's biggest rivals. In 1960, Barry was also invited to write his first film score for the juvenile delinquency drama Beat Girl, starring Adam Faith. The results were an impressive mix of brass, heavy electric guitar (courtesy of the John Barry Seven, guitarist Vic Flick), and orchestra. Barry was engaged by the producers of a film called Dr. No to write and arrange a finished score from work that was originally begun by composer Monty Norman. The film itself was a hit and Barry's work sufficiently impressed the producers, Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, enough to get him a gig writing the full score for the next movie, and for more than two decades worth of subsequent James Bond movies up through 1985's A View to a Kill. Several of these featured songs that Barry co-wrote -- including "Goldfinger," "Thunderball," and "You Only Live Twice" -- became hits of varying proportions and longevity in their own right for artists such as Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, and Nancy Sinatra. The best of his James Bond songs may be the most unusual, such as "We Have All the Time in the World" from On Her Majesty's Secret Service, sung by Louis Armstrong. If Beat Girl established Barry's British film credentials, Dr. No and the next two movies in the series (From Russia With Love and Goldfinger) made Barry's name international. It was with Born Free, however, that he moved into the front ranks of popular film composers, with the score and Oscar-winning title song. From then on, he was in a position to score some of the biggest and most daring films being made in England or Hollywood, ranging from the hour-long experimental film Dutchman to high-profile dramas like The Lion in Winter (for which he won his third Oscar). In 1962, the same year he composed the music for the first James Bond movie, Barry also left EMI to join the independent Ember Records label. In addition to doing his own recordings, Barry produced and arranged the music for dozens of Ember artists, including Chad & Jeremy, and also produced such best-selling comedy albums as Fool Britannia, Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse's savage satire of the Profumo scandal that nearly toppled the British government. In the midst of his burgeoning film work, Barry found time to make albums of his own on occasion, usually featuring re-recordings of his best movie-related music. In 1999, he also released one album of his classical instrumental style compositions, The Beyondness of Things. Barry suffered a life-threatening injury at the end of the '80s from which his recovery seemed problematic. He survived with help from a very good physician and one of the first results of this new lease on life was Barry's music for Dances With Wolves, which was one of his most ambitious soundtrack creations ever, filled with complex orchestral parts and sweeping, almost Mahler-like melodic arcs and textures, earning him his fifth Oscar in the process. In 1992, he was nominated for his sixth Oscar for the film Chaplin. He died in 2011 at the age of 77.