Trivia: The 12th of 13 children of a Welsh miner, actor Richard Burton left his humble environs by winning a scholarship to Oxford. Blessed with a thrillingly theatrical voice, Burton took to the stage, and, by 1949, had been tagged as one of Britain's most promising newcomers. Director Philip Dunne, who later helmed several of Burton's Hollywood films, would recall viewing a 1949 London staging of The Lady's Not for Burning and watching in awe as star John Gielgud was eclipsed by juvenile lead Richard Burton: "He 'took' the stage and kept a firm grip on it during every one of his brief appearances." A few years after his film debut in The Last Days of Dolwyn (1949), the actor was signed by 20th Century Fox, which had hopes of turning him into the new Lawrence Olivier -- although Burton was not quite able to grip films as well as he did the stage. Aside from The Robe (1953), most of Burton's Fox films were disappointments, and the actor was unable to shake his to-the-rafters theatricality for the smaller scope of the camera lens. Still, he was handsome and self-assured, so Burton was permitted a standard-issue 1950s spectacle, Alexander the Great (1956). His own film greatness would not manifest itself until he played the dirt-under-the-nails role of Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger (1959). In this, he spoke the vernacular of regular human beings -- rather than that of high-priced, affected Hollywood screenwriters -- and delivered a jolting performance as a working-class man trapped by the system and his own personal demons. Following a well-received Broadway run in the musical Camelot, Burton was signed in 1961 to replace Stephen Boyd on the benighted film spectacular Cleopatra (1963). It probably isn't necessary to elaborate on what happened next, but the result was that Burton suddenly found himself an international celebrity, not for his acting, but for his tempestuous romance with co-star Elizabeth Taylor. A hot property at last, Burton apparently signed every long-term contract thrust in front of him, while television networks found themselves besieged with requests for screenings of such earlier Burton film "triumphs" as Prince of Players (1955) and The Rains of Ranchipur (1956). In the midst of the initial wave of notoriety, Burton appeared in a Broadway modern-dress version of Hamlet directed by John Gielgud, which played to standing-room-only crowds who were less interested in the melancholy Dane than in possibly catching a glimpse of the Lovely Liz. Amidst choice film work like Becket (1964) and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1966), Burton was also contractually obligated to appear with Taylor in such high-priced kitsch as The V.I.P.s, (1963) The Sandpiper (1965), and Boom! (1968). A few of the Burton/Taylor vehicles were excellent -- notably Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (she won an Oscar; he didn't, but should have) -- but the circus of publicity began to erode the public's ability to take Burton seriously. It became even harder when the couple divorced, remarried, and broke up again. Moreover, Burton was bound by contract to appear in such bland cinematic enterprises as Candy (1968), Villain (1971), The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), The Klansman (1974), and that rancid masterpiece Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). So low had Burton's reputation sunk that when he delivered an Oscar-caliber performance in Equus (1977), it was hailed as a "comeback," even though the actor had never left. (Once again he lost the Oscar, this time to Richard Dreyfuss.) Burton managed to recapture his old performing fire in his last moviemaking years, offering up one of his best performances in his final picture, 1984 (1984). He died later that year.

Trivia: Professionally, British actor Robert Newton was two people: The wry, sensitive, often subtle performer seen in such plays as Noel Coward's Private Lives and such films as This Happy Breed (1944), and the eye-rolling, chop-licking ham in such roles as Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist (1948) and Long John Silver (arr! arr!) in Treasure Island (1950). Born into a gifted family -- his mother was a writer, his father and his siblings painters -- Newton made his professional debut when he was 15 with the British Repertory Company. Before he was 25, Newton had toured the world as an actor and stage manager, making his Broadway bow when he replaced Laurence Olivier in Private Lives. There was little of Olivier (except perhaps the older Olivier) in most of Newton's movie roles; despite his wide actor's range, he seemed happiest tearing a passion to tatters in such films as Jamaica Inn (1939), Blackbeard the Pirate (1952) and The Beachcomber (1954). Ripe though his acting could be, it was clear Newton knew his audience. From 1947 through 1951 he was one of Britain's top ten moneymaking film stars, so who were the critics to tell him what to do? Newton's final film role was the dogged Inspector Fix in the blockbuster Around the World in 80 Days (1956). Less than one month after completing Around the World in 80 Days, Robert Newton died of a heart attack in the arms of his wife.

Trivia: Lending his mellifluous voice and regal mien to more than 100 films, British actor James Mason built a long career playing assorted villains, military men, and rather dubious romantic leads. Born the son of a wool merchant in the British mill town of Huddersfield, Mason excelled in school and earned a degree in architecture from Cambridge in 1931. Having acted in several school plays, however, he thought he had a better shot at earning a living as an actor rather than an architect during the Great Depression. Mason won his first professional role in The Rascal and made his debut in London's West End theater world in 1933 with Gallows Glorious. A year after he joined London's Old Vic theater, he made his screen debut in Late Extra in 1935. Mason became a regular British screen presence in late '30s "quota quickies," including The High Command (1937). The actor made a career and personal breakthrough, however, with I Met a Murderer (1939). Along with co-writing, co-producing, and starring in the film, he also wound up marrying his leading lady, Pamela Kellino, in 1940. Mason became Britain's biggest screen star a few years later with his performance as the sadistic title character in the Gainsborough Studios melodrama The Man in Grey (1943). He cemented his fame as the cruel romantic leads women loved in the critically weak, but highly popular, Gainsborough costume dramas Fanny by Gaslight (1944) and The Wicked Lady (1945), finally achieving international stardom for his charismatic performance as Ann Todd's cane-wielding mentor in the well-received The Seventh Veil (1946). Rather than immediately going to Hollywood, however, Mason remained in England. Revealing that he could be more than just brutal leading men in weepy potboilers, he added an artistic as well as popular triumph to his credits with Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947). Starring Mason as a doomed IRA leader hunted by the police, Odd Man Out garnered international raves, and he often cited it as his favorite among his many films.After co-starring in the British drama The Upturned Glass (1947), the Masons headed to Hollywood in 1947. Spurning a long-term studio contract, Mason became one of Hollywood's busiest free agents. Anxious not to be typecast, he bucked his image as the irresistible sadist by playing trapped wife Barbara Bel Geddes' kind boss in Max Ophüls' Caught and appearing as Gustave Flaubert in Vincente Minnelli's version of Madame Bovary (both 1949). Mason returned to roguish form (albeit tempered by sympathy) with his second Ophüls film, The Reckless Moment. Along with two superb turns as wily, disillusioned German Field Marshal Rommel in The Desert Fox (1951) and The Desert Rats (1953), Mason also engaged in a glorious Technicolor romance with Ava Gardner in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951) and played the villain in the swashbuckler The Prisoner of Zenda (1952). Calling on his suave intelligence, Mason starred as cool butler-turned-spy Cicero in what he considered his best Hollywood film, the espionage thriller 5 Fingers (1952). The actor played the treasonous Brutus in the director's excellent Shakespeare-adaptation Julius Caesar in 1953.Mason stepped behind the camera as director for the first and only time with the subsequent short film The Child (1954), featuring his wife and daughter Portland Mason. Returning to Hollywood acting, Mason garnered numerous accolades for George Cukor's lavish 1954 remake of A Star Is Born. 1954 proved to be a banner year for the actor, as his artistic triumph in A Star Is Born was accompanied by the popular screen version of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), featuring Mason as megalomaniac submarine skipper Captain Nemo. Bolstered by these successes, he used his clout to produce and star in Nicholas Ray's groundbreaking family drama Bigger Than Life (1956). Bigger Than Life was one of the first Hollywood movies to examine prescription drug abuse, but proved box-office poison. Soured on producing, Mason focused solely on acting for the latter half of the decade, working in Island in the Sun (1957), Cry Terror! (1958), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), and, most notably, North by Northwest (1959).Edging away from Hollywood, Mason took a supporting role in the British drama The Trials of Oscar Wilde in 1960. Having retained his British citizenship during his years in America, he left Hollywood permanently two years later, relocating to Switzerland with his family. After the move, Mason took on the challenge of playing agonized pedophile Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita. Whether duping clueless mother Shelley Winters into marriage, lusting after her teenage daughter Sue Lyon, or helplessly pursuing rival pervert Peter Sellers, Mason's Humbert was as much broken victim as scheming predator, injecting uneasy emotion into the difficult role. Despite appearing in such dubious fare as Genghis Khan (1965) and The Yin and Yang of Dr. Go (1971), Mason continued to resist typecasting with his strong turn as a lecherous friend in The Pumpkin Eater (1964), and distinguished himself in such films as Anthony Mann's sword-and-sandal epic The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) and the adaptation of Lord Jim in 1965. Showing his facility with lighter films, Mason earned a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his performance as ugly duckling Lynn Redgrave's older sugar daddy in the romantic comedy Georgy Girl (1966). Beginning a collaboration that would last until the end of his career, Mason followed that film with his first for director Sidney Lumet, playing a George Smiley-esque British spy in the exemplary John Le Carré adaptation The Deadly Affair (1967). Amid all this work, Mason met his second wife Clarissa Kaye on the set of Michael Powell's Australian romp Age of Consent (1969) and married her in 1971. With Kaye putting Mason ahead of her career, the actor maintained his prolific pace, starring in the skillful murder mystery The Last of Sheila (1973), playing Magwitch in a TV version of Great Expectations in 1974, appearing as an estate patriarch in the humid potboiler Mandingo (1975), a Cuban minister in the pre-Holocaust drama Voyage of the Damned (1976), and a weathered German colonel in Sam Peckinpah's only war film, Cross of Iron (1976). Mason's inimitable air of gravitas suited the role of Joseph of Arimathea in the made-for-TV film Jesus of Nazareth (1977), and enhanced the humor of his appearance as the God-like Mr. Jordan in Warren Beatty's highly popular romantic fantasy Heaven Can Wait (1978). Rarely turning down jobs even as he approached age 70, Mason joined fellow éminence grises Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck in the Nazi cloning thriller The Boys From Brazil (1978), was Dr. Watson to Christopher Plummer's Sherlock Holmes in Murder by Decree (1979), and played a sinister antiquarian in the TV vampire yarn Salem's Lot the same year. Mason managed to find the time to write and publish his autobiography Before I Forget in 1981. The following year, he earned some of the best reviews of his career -- and his final Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor -- for his subtle, nuanced performance as Paul Newman's harsh courtroom adversary in Lumet's sterling legal drama The Verdict. Mason suffered a fatal heart attack at his Swiss home in July 1984 at the age of 75.

Trivia: After two years' study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, British actor Robert Douglas ascended to leading-man status on the London stage. Among his earliest film appearances was a co-starring stint with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon in the Technicolor Alexander Korda production Over the Moon (1936). He spent six years as a pilot in the British Navy, then began his Hollywood career, playing dark-purposed, humorless villains opposite such swashbuckling leading men as Errol Flynn in 1949's The Adventures of Don Juan, Burt Lancaster in 1950's Flame and the Arrow, and Stewart Granger in 1952's The Prisoner of Zenda. He was starred as Benedict Arnold in The Scarlet Coat (1954) and as Agamemnon in Helen of Troy (1955). Rechanneling his energies into directing, Robert Douglas helmed several British and American TV productions, including 18 episodes of the 1960s series 12 O'Clock High. Robert Douglas' only big-screen directorial credit was 1964's Night Train, which starred Sean Flynn, the son of Douglas' Don Juan duelling opponent Errol Flynn.

Trivia: Torin Thatcher came out of a military family in India to become a top stage actor in England and a well-known character actor in international films and television. Born Torin Herbert Erskine Thatcher in Bombay, India, in 1905, he was the great-grandson and grandson of generals -- one of whom had fought with Clive -- but he planned for a quieter life; educated at Bedford School, he originally intended to become a teacher before being bitten by the acting bug. Instead, he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and later worked in every kind of theatrical production there was, from Greek tragedy to burlesque. Thatcher made his London debut in 1927 as Tranio in a production of The Taming of the Shrew with the Old Vic Company, and he subsequently portrayed both the Ghost and Claudius in Hamlet with the same company. In the years that followed, Thatcher was in more than 50 Shakespearean productions and 20 plays by George Bernard Shaw. The outbreak of the Second World War took Thatcher into uniform, and he served for six years in the army, achieving the rank of lieutenant colonel before he returned to civilian life in 1946. In 1944, Thatcher had made his first acquaintance of the theater world in New York when he found himself on leave in the city with only ten shillings in his pocket -- he spent it sparingly and discovered that Allied servicemen, even officers, were accorded a great many perks in those days; he was also amazed and delighted when he was recognized while on his way into a play in New York by a theatergoer who was able to name virtually every movie that he'd done in England over the preceding decade. He got a firsthand look at the city's generosity and also made sure to meet a number of people associated with the New York theater scene, contacts that served him in good stead when he returned to New York in 1946, as a civilian eager to pick up his career. He starred in two plays opposite Katharine Cornell, First Born and That Lady, and portrayed Claggart in a stage adaptation of Billy Budd, but his big success was in Noel Langley and Robert Morley's Edward My Son. Thatcher had been in movies in England since 1933, in small roles, occasionally in major and important films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Young and Innocent (1937) and Michael Powell's The Spy in Black (1939); his British career had peaked with a superb performance in a small but important role in Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol (1948). After moving to the United States, however, Thatcher quickly moved up to starring and major supporting roles in Hollywood movies, beginning with Affair in Trinidad (1952). He was busy at 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros. over the next decade, moving between their American and British units, and stood out in such hit movies as The Crimson Pirate (1952) (as the pirate Humble Bellows) and Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955). Although Thatcher could play benevolent characters, his intense expression and presence and imposing physique made him more natural as a villain, and he spent his later career in an array of screen malefactors, of whom the best known was the sorcerer Sokurah in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), directed by Nathan Juran. Thatcher and Juran were close friends and the director loved to use him -- the two became a kind of double act together for a time, turning up in "The Space Trader" episode of Lost in Space, guest-starring Thatcher and directed by Juran.

Trivia: Chips Rafferty was frequently described as "the Cary Grant of Australia," a reflection of his immense popularity rather than his choice of roles. Rafferty enjoyed a wide variety of on- and off-stage experiences before making his film bow in 1938's Ants in His Pants. Tall, tanned, and rugged, Rafferty seemed equally at home in an open-necked shirt in the Outback as he did in fancy duds on the streets of Melbourne -- much in the manner of his more modern counterpart, American leading man Sam Elliot. Rafferty's most popular starring films included Bush Christmas (1946), The Overlanders (1946), and Eureka Stockade (1948). He also appeared in character roles in several American films and TV programs, often cast as a "Lord-love-a-duck" stereotyped Aussie. Chips Rafferty collapsed on a Sydney street and died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 62.

Trivia: Australian-born character actor, onscreen from the '40s.

Trivia: More familiar for his radio work than his film appearances, American actor Ben Wright was active professionally from the early '40s. Dialects were a specialty with Wright, as witness his two-year hitch as Chinese bellhop Hey Boy on the radio version of Have Gun Will Travel. Most of Wright's film roles were supporting or bit appearances in such productions as A Man Called Peter (1955), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), My Fair Lady (1964), and The Fortune Cookie (1964). On TV, Wright was one of Jack Webb's stock company (including fellow radio veterans Virginia Gregg, Stacy Harris, and Vic Perrin) on the '60s version of Dragnet. Ben Wright's most frequently seen film appearance was as the humorless Nazi functionary Herr Zeller in the 1965 megahit The Sound of Music.

Trivia: Character actor, onscreen from 1952.

Trivia: Active in Australian radio and stage productions from childhood, Sydney native Michael Pate made his first film in 1949 on his home turf. Pate then moved to Hollywood, where he settled into villainous or obstreperous roles. He is best remembered for his portrayal of Indian chief Vittoro in John Wayne's Hondo (1953), a part he recreated for the 1966 weekly TV adaptation of Hondo, which top-billed Ralph Taeger. Other career highlights include the 1954 TV adaptation of Ian Fleming's James Bond novel Casino Royale, wherein Pate became the first actor to play CIA agent Felix Leiter (though both the character's name and nationality were changed), and PT 109 (1963), in which Pate played the Australian mariner who harangued future President John F. Kennedy (Cliff Robertson).During his Hollywood stay, Pate occasionally dabbled in screenwriting, collaborating on the scripts of Escape from Fort Bravo (1953) and The Most Dangerous Man Alive (1961). In 1968 he returned to Australia where, with such rare exceptions as the weekly TVer Matlock Police, he curtailed his performing activities to concentrate on producing, writing and directing. He produced the 1969 feature film Age of Consent, and later was put in charge of production of Amalgamated Television in Sydney. He made his feature-film directorial debut with the TV movie Tim (1979), which boasted an impressive early starring performance by Mel Gibson. He also adapted the screenplay of Tim from the novel by Colleen McCullough, earning the Australian equivalent of the Emmy Award for his efforts. Michael Pate is the author of two instructional books, The Film Actor and The Director's Eye.

Trivia: Irish stage actor Patrick O'Moore began his film career in 1934, playing a few leads in English films before settling in Hollywood. A close friend of actor Humphrey Bogart, O'Moore was seen to good advantage in such Bogart features as Sahara (1943) and Conflict (1945). Otherwise, most of his film roles were unbilled bits as clerks, constables, government officials, and military men. He kept active into the 1980s, playing small parts in such TV productions as QB VII and theatrical features as The Sword and the Sorcerer. Patrick O'Moore was at one time married to Broadway musical-comedy star Zelma O'Neal.

Trivia: The son of a Viennese drama critic, John Wengraf enjoyed an extensive -- and expensive -- theatrical training. Wengraf made his stage debut in repertory in 1920, then graduated to the Vienna Volkstheater. He flourished as an actor and director in Berlin until the Nazis came to power in 1933. Moving to England, he appeared in a few films there, and also participated in some of the first BBC live-television presentations. In 1941, he made his Broadway bow, and in 1942 launched his Hollywood career. An imposing-looking fellow who somewhat resembled British actor Leo G. Carroll, Wengraf was frequently cast as erudite Nazi officials; after the war, he specialized in portraying mittel-European doctors and psychiatrists. From the 1950s until his retirement in 1963, John Wengraf made several TV appearances, including two guest-star gigs on The Untouchables.