Trivia: The son of British stage actor Frederick Rains, Claude Rains gave his first theatrical performance at age 11 in Nell of Old Drury. He learned the technical end of the business by working his way up from being a two-dollars-a-week page boy to stage manager. After making his first U.S. appearance in 1913, Rains returned to England, served in the Scottish regiment during WWI, then established himself as a leading actor in the postwar years. He was also featured in one obscure British silent film, Build Thy House. During the 1920s, Rains was a member of the teaching staff at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art; among his pupils were a young sprout named Laurence Olivier and a lovely lass named Isabel Jeans, who became the first of Rains' six wives. While performing with the Theatre Guild in New York in 1932, Rains filmed a screen test for Universal Pictures. On the basis of his voice alone, the actor was engaged by Universal director James Whale to make his talking-picture debut in the title role of The Invisible Man (1933). During his subsequent years at Warner Bros., the mellifluous-voiced Rains became one of the studio's busiest and most versatile character players, at his best when playing cultured villains. Though surprisingly never a recipient of an Academy award, Rains was Oscar-nominated for his performances as the "bought" Senator Paine in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), the title character in Mr. Skeffington (1944), the Nazi husband of Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946), and, best of all, the cheerfully corrupt Inspector Renault in Casablanca (1942). In 1946, Rains became one of the first film actors to demand and receive one million dollars for a single picture; the role was Julius Caesar, and the picture Caesar and Cleopatra. He made a triumphant return to Broadway in 1951's Darkness at Noon. In his last two decades, Claude Rains made occasional forays into television (notably on Alfred Hitchcock Presents) and continued to play choice character roles in big-budget films like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).

Trivia: Frequently cast as a world-weary continental, Marius Goring actually hails from the British Isle of Wight. The son of a physician, Goring was educated at Cambridge and in Europe, picking up an "ear" for foreign dialects along the way. An amateur actor since his teens, Goring made his professional stage debut in the early 1930s. His official film debut was in the lush-budgeted Rembrandt (1936), though in fact he first appeared on camera in the 1935 quota quickie Consider Your Verdict. Goring was at his flamboyant best in a brace of Powell-Pressburger productions of the 1940s: he played the Gallic "Operator 71" in the 1946 fantasy A Matter of Life and Death and was seen as the brilliant composer Julian Craster in The Red Shoes (1947). As the neurotic millionaire yachtsman Alberto Bravano in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), Goring elicited boos from the gentlemen in the audience as he tried to purchase the affections of Ava Gardner. A more heroic Goring was seen in the 1954 television series The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel; he later starred on the British TV espionager The Expert, which ran sporadically from 1968 through 1974. Marius Goring was the husband of actress Lucie Mannheim, who died in 1975.

Trivia: In her tragically short career, Swedish actress Marta Toren spent more time in Hollywood and the European Continent than in her native country. Signed by Universal on the strength of her sole Swedish film Eviga Lankar (1947), Toren found herself in a French-Algerian role in Casabah (1948). She was Dick Powell's vis-a-vis in Rogue's Regiment (1948), a Foreign Legion opus set in Indochina, then was utilized as an Israeli freedom fighter in Sword in the Desert (1949). In brief, she played practically everything but a Swede in a variety of exotically mounted films. Sirocco (1951), which costarred her with Humphrey Bogart, was set in Syria; Assignment Paris (1952) was set in France; and from 1952 through 1956, Ms. Toren headlined films made in France and Spain. Marta Toren never did get back to the Swedish film industry; she died of a brain disease at the age of 31.

Trivia: Born Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich ze Schluderpacheru, Herbert Lom enjoyed a successful acting career in his native Czechoslovakia, principally in theater. He made his screen debut in Zena Pod Krizem (1937) and made one more movie in Czechoslovakia before emigrating to England in 1938. He acted at The Old Vic in London, among other companies, before turning to British films, where his good looks, cultured accent and mannerisms, and intense eyes got him cast in such unusual roles as Napoleon Bonaparte (in The Young Mr. Pitt) in between slightly more anonymous parts. Lom's real breakthrough role was in Compton Bennett's 1946 psychological drama The Seventh Veil, as Dr. Larsen, the psychiatrist treating neuroses of the pianist portrayed by Ann Todd. Lom might have become a kind of Eastern (or Middle) European successor to Charles Boyer, but he was too good an actor to limit himself to romantic parts; instead, he was more like a Czech Jean Gabin. Lom often played highly motivated villains in the 1950s and '60s, most notably in Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950), in which he brought surprising humanity to the role of a brutal, vengeful gangster, and Sidney Gilliat's State Secret (1950). He reprised the role of Napoleon in King Vidor's sprawling 1956 production of War and Peace, and was a memorably humane, well-spoken Captain Nemo in the Ray Harryhausen production of Mysterious Island (1961); he also played the title role in a 1962 production of The Phantom of the Opera, but Lom's best movie during this period -- despite having some of his shortest screen time -- was Anthony Mann's El Cid, in which he played the Muslim leader Ben Yussuf. He counter-balanced this work with a newly revealed flair for comedy, utilized in the Pink Panther movies, starting with A Shot in the Dark, where his long-suffering bureau chief Dreyfus was forever dreading Inspector Clouseau's latest blunder. He was also Simon Legree in the 1965 German musical production of Uncle Tom's Cabin (as Onkel Tom's Hütte). During the late '60s and '70s, he began appearing in horror films of various types, following a path similar to that blazed by his British-born contemporary Michael Gough. He has kept his hand in gentler and more complex roles, however, including that of the sardonically humorous Soviet bureau chief in Ronald Neame's Hopscotch (1980), and a sympathetic physician in David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone (1983). In 2012, Lom passed away in his sleep at the age of 95.