Trivia: Famed for her saintly, natural beauty, Ingrid Bergman was the most popular actress of the 1940s; admired equally by audiences and critics, she enjoyed blockbuster after blockbuster -- until an unprecedented scandal threatened to destroy her career. Born August 29, 1915, in Stockholm, Sweden, Bergman was only two years old when her mother died; her father passed on a decade later, and the spinster aunt who had become her guardian perished only a few months after that. Her inheritance allowed her to study at Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theatre, and in 1934 she made her screen debut after signing to Svenskfilmindustri with a small role in Munkbrovregen. Bergman's first lead performance followed a year later in Brunninger, and with the success of the 1936 melodrama Valborgsmassoafen, she rose to become one of Sweden's biggest stars. Later that year, she starred in the romance Intermezzo, which eventually made its way to New York where it came to the attention of producer David O. Selznick. After signing a Hollywood contract, she relocated to America where her first film, 1939's Intermezzo: A Love Story, was an English-language remake of her earlier success. Bergman's fresh-scrubbed Nordic beauty set her squarely apart from the stereotypical movie starlet, and quickly both Hollywood executives and audiences became enchanted with her. After briefly returning to Sweden to appear in 1940's Juninatten, Selznick demanded she return to the U.S., but without any projects immediately available he pointed her to Broadway to star in Liliom. Bergman was next loaned to MGM for 1941's Adam Had Four Sons, followed by Rage in Heaven. She then appeared against type as a coquettish bad girl in the latest screen adaptation Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. However, it was 1942's Casablanca which launched her to superstardom; cast opposite Humphrey Bogart after a series of other actresses rejected the picture, she was positively radiant, her chemistry with Bogart the stuff of pure magic. Now a major box-office draw, she won the coveted lead in 1943's For Whom the Bell Tolls with the blessing of the novel's author, Ernest Hemingway; when her performance earned an Academy Award nomination, every studio in town wanted to secure her talents.Bergman next starred in Sam Wood's Saratoga Trunk, but because the studio, Warner Bros., wanted to distribute more timely material during wartime, the picture's release was delayed until 1944. As a result, audiences next saw her in Gaslight, starring opposite Charles Boyer; another rousing success, her performance won Best Actress honors from both the Oscar and Golden Globe voters. The 1945 Spellbound, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, was another massive hit, and a year later they reunited for Notorious. Sandwiched in between was The Bells of St. Mary's, and all told, the three pictures helped push Bergman to the position of Hollywood's top female box-office attraction. Upon fulfilling her contract with Selznick, she began freelancing, starring as a prostitute in 1948's Arch of Triumph; the public, however, reacted negatively to her decision to play against type, and later that year she was even more saintly than usual as the title heroine in Joan of Arc. Expected to become a blockbuster, the film performed to only moderate success, and after a similarly tepid response to the 1949 Hitchcock thriller Under Capricorn, she began to reconsider her options. Like so many viewers around the world, Bergman had been highly moved by director Roberto Rossellini's Italian neorealist masterpiece Roma Citta Aperta; announcing her desire to work with him, she accepted the lead in 1950's Stromboli. During production, Bergman and Rossellini fell in love, and she became pregnant with his child; at the time, she was still married to her first husband, Swedish doctor Peter Lindstrom, and soon she was assailed by criticism the world over. After divorcing Lindstrom, Bergman quickly married Rossellini, but the damage was already done: Stromboli was banned in many markets, boycotted by audiences in others, and despite much curiosity, it was a box-office disaster. Together, over the next six years, the couple made a series of noteworthy films including Europa '51, Siamo Donne, and Viaggio in Italia, but audiences wanted no part of any of them; to make matters worse, their marriage was crumbling, and their financial resources were exhausted. In 1956, Bergman starred in Jean Renoir's lovely Elena et les Hommes, but it too failed to return her to audience favor.Few stars of Bergman's magnitude had ever suffered such a sudden and disastrous fall from grace; even fewer enjoyed as remarkable a comeback as the one she mounted with 1957's Anastasia, a historical tale which not only proved successful with audiences but also with critics, resulting in a second Academy Award. For director Stanley Donen, Bergman next starred in 1958's Indiscreet, followed by The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. Also in 1958, she married for the third time, to Swedish impresario Lars Schmidt, and when a series of planned projects failed to come to fruition she simply went on sabbatical, appearing in a television presentation of The Turn of the Screw in 1959 but otherwise keeping out of the public eye for three years. She resurfaced in 1961 with Aimez-Vous Brahms? Another three-year hiatus followed prior to her next feature project, The Visit. After 1965's The Yellow Rolls Royce, Bergman appeared in the 1967 Swedish anthology Stimulantia and then turned to the stage, touring in a production of Eugene O'Neill's More Stately Mansions.Bergman's theatrical success re-ignited Hollywood's interest, and Columbia signed her to star in 1969's hit Cactus Flower; 1970's Spring Rain followed, before she returned to stage for 1971's Captain Brassbound's Conversion. After winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her work in 1974's Murder on the Orient Express, Bergman appeared opposite Liza Minnelli in 1976's A Matter of Time before returning to Sweden to star in 1978's superb Herbstsonate, the first and only time she worked with her namesake, the legendary director Ingmar Bergman. After penning a 1980 autobiography, Ingrid Bergman: My Story, in 1982, she starred in the television miniseries A Woman Called Golda, a biography of the Israeli premier Golda Meir; the performance was her last -- on August 29 of that year she lost her long battle with cancer. In subsequent years, her daughter, Isabella Rossellini, emerged as a top actress and fashion model.

Trivia: During his lifetime, it was hard to determine when and where actor Yul Brynner was born, simply because he changed the story in every interview; confronted with these discrepancies late in life, he replied, "Ordinary mortals need but one birthday." At any rate, it appears that Brynner's mother was part Russian, his father part Swiss, and that he lived in Russia until his mother moved the family to Manchuria and then Paris in the early '30s. He worked as a trapeze artist with the touring Cirque D'Hiver, then joined a repertory theater company in Paris in 1934. Brynner's fluency in Russian and French enabled him to build up a following with the Czarist expatriates in Paris, and his talents as a singer/guitarist increased his popularity. And when Michael Chekhov hired Brynner for his American theater company, he added a third language -- English -- to his repertoire. After several years of regional acting, Brynner was hired by the Office of War Information as an announcer for their French radio service. In 1945, Brynner was cast as Tsai-Yong in the musical play Lute Song, which starred Mary Martin; the production opened on Broadway in 1946, and, though its run was short, Brynner won the Most Promising Actor Donaldson award. He went on to do theater in London and direct early live television programs in the States, including a children's puppet show, Life With Snarky Parker. In 1949, the actor made his movie debut as a two-bit smuggler in a Manhattan-filmed quickie Port of New York, which has taken on a video-store life of its own since lapsing into the public domain. On the strength of his Lute Song work of several years earlier, Brynner was cast as the King of Siam in Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1951 musical The King and I. The play was supposed to be a vehicle for Gertrude Lawrence, with the king an important but secondary role; but so powerful was Brynner's work that the role was beefed up in rehearsal, causing supporting actor Murvyn Vye to quit the show when Vye's only song was cut to give more stage time to Brynner. The King and I was an enormous hit, supplying Brynner with the role of a lifetime, one in which he would repeat brilliantly in the 1956 film version -- and win an Oscar in the process. Cecil B. DeMille, impressed by Brynner's King performance, cast the actor as the Egyptian Pharoah Rameses I in DeMille's multimillion-dollar blockbuster The Ten Commandments (1956). It became difficult for Brynner to play a "normal" character after this, so he seldom tried, although he came close to subtle believability in Anastasia (1956) and The Journey (1959). The first baldheaded movie idol, Brynner occasionally donned a wig or, as in Taras Bulba (1962), a Russian pigtail, but his fans (particularly the ladies) preferred him "scalped," as it were. Outside of his film work, Brynner was also an accomplished photographer, and many of his pictures appeared in major magazine spreads or were used as official studio production stills. Hollywood changed radically in the '70s, and the sort of larger-than-life fare in which Brynner thrived thinned out; so, in 1972, the actor agreed to re-create his King and I role in an expensive weekly TV series, Anna and the King. But it lasted all of eight weeks. Brynner's last major film role was in the sci-fi thriller Westworld (1973) as a murderously malfunctioning robot, dressed in Western garb reminiscent of the actor's wardrobe in 1960's The Magnificent Seven. What could have been campy or ludicrous became a chilling characterization in Brynner's hands; his steady, steely-eyed automaton glare as he approached his human victims was one of the more enjoyably frightening filmgoing benefits of the decade. In 1977, Brynner embarked upon a stage revival of The King and I, and though he was dogged by tales of his outrageous temperament and seemingly petty demands during the tour, audiences in New York and all over the country loved the show. The actor inaugurated a second King tour in 1985; this time, however, he knew he was dying of lung cancer, but kept the news from both his fans and co-workers. Unable to perform the "Shall We Dance" waltz or get all the words out for the song "A Puzzlement," Brynner nonetheless played to packed audiences willing to shell out 75 dollars per ticket. Two months after the play closed in 1985, Brynner died in a New York hospital -- still insisting that his public not know the severity of his condition until after his death, although he had recorded a dramatic public-service announcement to be broadcast afterward that blamed the illness on smoking.

Trivia: Helen Hayes, the First Lady of the American Theater, made most of her infrequent film appearances after an allergy to theater dust forced her to retire from the stage. Her stage career began when she was five; at age nine, she made her first Broadway appearance. By 1918, she was a star. When she married playwright Charles MacArthur in 1928, the couple came to Hollywood briefly, where she won her first Oscar for The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931). Other memorable roles during that time included her role as a nurse in A Farewell to Arms (1932) with a very young Gary Cooper, and What Every Woman Knows (1934). Unhappy in Hollywood, she returned to the stage, where she reigned as one of the outstanding American stage actresses. One of her most famous roles was Queen Victoria in Victoria Regina. She won a Tony Award the first year they were presented, in 1947, for Happy Birthday, and another in 1958 for Time Remembered. Throughout the '40s, '50s, '60s and into the '70s, Hayes made numerous television appearances, winning an Emmy as Best Actress in 1952 and starring in the short-lived comic mystery series The Snoop Sisters with Mildred Natwick in 1971. She returned to films in the 1950s, making an impressive showing as the Dowager Empress in Anastasia (1956) and winning another Oscar for her role in Airport (1970). In her later years, she often played kind but mischievous old ladies. Her son is actor James MacArthur. Hayes wrote several memoirs, prompted to write originally by the death of her daughter.

Trivia: Earthy Russian character actor Akim Tamiroff was relatively aimless, not settling upon a theatrical career until he was nearly 19. Selected from 500 applicants, Tamiroff was trained by Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theater School. While touring the U.S. with a Russian acting troupe in 1923, Tamiroff decided to remain in New York and give Broadway a try. He was quite active with the Theatre Guild during the 1920s and early '30s, then set out for Hollywood, hoping to scare up movie work. After several years' worth of bit roles, Tamiroff's film career began gaining momentum when he was signed by Paramount in 1936. He became one of the studio's top players, appearing in juicy featured roles in A-pictures and starring in such B's as The Great Gambini (1937), King of Chinatown (1938), and The Magnificent Fraud (1939). Essaying a wide variety of nationalities, Tamiroff was most frequently cast as a villain or reprobate with a deep down sentimental and/or honorable streak. He was a favorite of many directors, including Cecil B. DeMille, starring in Union Pacific (1939), Northwest Mounted Police (1940), and Preston Sturges' The Great McGinty (1940). He was twice nominated for the best supporting actor Oscar for his work in The General Died at Dawn (1936) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943). During the 1950s, Tamiroff was a close associate of actor/director Orson Welles, who cast Tamiroff in underhanded supporting roles in Mr. Arkadin (1955), Touch of Evil (1958), and The Trial (1963), and retained his services for nearly two decades in the role of Sancho Panza in Welles' never-finished Don Quixote. Akim Tamiroff continued to flourish with meaty assignments in films like Topkapi (1964) and After the Fox (1966), rounding out his long and fruitful career with a starring assignment in the French/Italian political melodrama, Death of a Jew (1970).

Trivia: Born to British parents in Argentina, Martita Hunt was raised on a ranch in that South American country. She first set foot in England at age 10, when her family moved back. In 1920, one year before her stage debut with the Liverpool Repertory, Hunt appeared in an obscure 2-reel comedy, A Rank Outsider. From 1923 through 1932, she was exclusively a London stage actress; she made her talking picture debut in Reserved for Ladies (1932), then spent the remainder of her career alternating between stage and screen assignments. Whether playing the regal Queen Matilda in Becket (1964) or the balmy Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, Hunt was always every inch the lady on screen (Well, nearly always; after all, she did play the blowsy "Ma" in 1941's East of Piccadilly).

Trivia: British actor Felix Aylmer may not be popularly known in the United States, but his was one of the longest and most prestigious careers in the 20th-century British theatre. Aylmer's first stage work was done with another theatrical giant, Sir Seymour Hicks, in 1911. Two years later, Aylmer was engaged by the then-new Birmingham Repertory, premiering as Orsino ("If music be the food of love...") in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. After World War I service, Aylmer established himself as one of the foremost interpreters of the works of George Bernard Shaw; he also concentrated on the London productions of such American plays as Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee (no partisanship here!) Aylmer made his Broadway bow in a production of Galsworthy's Loyalties, periodically returning to the states in such plays as Flashing Stream, wherein he played First Lord of the Admiralty Walter Hornsby, which some regard as his finest performance. Like most British actors, Aylmer acted in plays to feed his soul and films to pay his bills. His motion picture debut was in Escape (1930), after which he averaged a picture a year. Aylmer was seen by American audiences in such internationally popular films as The Citadel (1938), Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948), Quo Vadis (1951) and Separate Tables (1958). The actor was something of a hero to his fellow actors for his efforts in their behalf during his long tenure as president of British Equity, the performers' trade union; in 1965 Aylmer was knighted for his accomplishments. Active until his eighties, Sir Felix Aylmer made one of his last film appearances as the Judge in The Chalk Garden (1964), a role he'd originated on stage eight years earlier.

Trivia: Born in China to Russian parents, Ivan Desny spent his formative years in Paris. It was Desny's bad luck to be there when the Nazis marched in, and he spent the war in a German labor camp along with thousands of other Russian expatriates. After the war, Desny drifted into French films, first as an extra, then as a leading man. Essentially a European actor, Desny has appeared in scattered American films, notably Anastasia (1956), Song Without End (1960) and Disney's Bon Voyage (1962). Though his film career spans four decades, Ivan Desny is most fondly remembered by English fans for his 1950 portrayal of blackmailing social climber Emile l'Angelier in director David Lean's Madeleine.

Trivia: Though born in New York, actress Natalie Schafer built her stage reputation upon playing British aristocrats. She entered films in 1944, co-starring with Lana Turner and Robert Walker in Marriage Is a Private Affair. Her most famous role was as social butterfly Lovey Howell on the zany TV sitcom Gilligan's Island, a part she essayed from 1964 through 1967, then reprised in the many Gilligan TV-movie and cartoon sequels of the 1970s and 1980s. From 1934 through 1942, Natalie Schafer was the wife of actor Louis Calhern.

Trivia: Though born in Czechoslovakia, actor Karel Stepanek was generally regarded as a German actor due to his extensive film work in Germany (as Karl Stepanek) in the years before World War II. Stepanek fled to England in 1940, where, like many European refugee actors, he specialized in portraying Teutonic villains. He tried to stay away from out-and-out Nazi roles, but his predilection for wearing black uniforms and barking out guttural commands left little doubt as to the political preferences of Stepanek's screen characters. One of his most typical characterizations could be found in the 1946 POW drama, The Captive Heart; Stepanek also registered well as a friendlier foreigner in The Fallen Idol (1949). Commuting between London and Hollywood, Karel Stepanek continued to fight World War II, usually on the wrong side, into such '60s films as Sink the Bismarck! (1960), I Aim at the Stars (1960) and Operation Crossbow (1965).

Trivia: French actress Katherine Kath made her first English-language screen appearance in Moulin Rouge (1952). She went on to appear in several films set in Paris, among them Anastasia (1956) and Gigot (1962). In the latter film, she was afforded second billing -- right after Jackie Gleason -- as Colette, the streetwalker mother of innocent little Nicole (Diane Gardner). She was briefly married to British filmmaker Jack Clayton, though curiously was never directed by him. Active until 1987, Katherine Kath's later screen roles included Catherine de Medici in 1971's Mary Queen of Scots.

Trivia: Timid-looking British character actor, onscreen from 1952 and best-known for voicing Wallace in the Wallace & Gromit films and starring in the long-running British series Last of the Summer Wine. Sallis died in 2017, at age 96.