Trivia: Debonair and distinguished British star of stage and screen for more than 50 years, Sir Rex Harrison is best remembered for playing charming, slyly mischievous characters. Born Reginald Carey in 1908, he made his theatrical debut at age 16 with the Liverpool Repertory Theater, remaining with that group for three years. Making his British stage and film debut in 1930, Harrison made the first of many appearances on Broadway in Sweet Aloes in 1936. He became a bona fide British star that same year when he appeared in the theatrical production French Without Tears, in which he showed himself to be very skilled in black-tie comedy. He served as a flight lieutenant in the RAF during World War II, although this interruption in his career was quickly followed by several British films. Harrison moved to Hollywood in 1945, where his career continued to prosper. Among his many roles was that of the king in the 1946 production of Anna and the King of Siam. Harrison was perhaps best known for his performance as Professor Henry Higgins in the musical My Fair Lady, a character he played on Broadway from 1956-1958 (winning a Tony award in 1957) and again in its 1981 revival, as well as for a year in London in the late '50s; in 1964, he won an Oscar for his onscreen version of the role. He had previously received a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Julius Caesar in Cleopatra (1963). Harrison continued to act on both the stage and screen in the 1970s and into the '80s. He published his autobiography, Rex, in 1975, and, four years later, edited and published an anthology of poetry If Love Be Love. Knighted in 1989, he was starring in the Broadway revival of Somerset Maugham's The Circle (with Stewart Granger and Glynis Johns) until one month before he died of pancreatic cancer in 1990. Three of Harrison's six marriages were to actressesLilli Palmer, Kay Kendall, and Rachel Roberts.

Trivia: Samantha Eggar's father was a British Army brigadier and her mother was of Dutch/Portuguese extraction. Convent educated, Eggar became a stage actress in her teens. While performing in a Shakespeare play, Eggar was discovered by film producer Betty Box, who cast the tall, auburn-haired 23-year-old actress as a sluttish college coed in The Wild and the Willing (1961). Eggar's first international success was The Collector (1965), replacing Natalie Wood (who'd turned down the film) as the harried kidnap victim of obsessive Terence Stamp. Eggar garnered an Oscar nomination for her demanding performance, and also won the Cannes Film Festival award. Then followed a succession of unremarkable roles in films like Walk, Don't Run (1966) and Doctor Doolittle (1967) (which at least gave Eggar a chance to sing). She was better served in The Molly Maguires (1970) and Seven Per Cent Solution (1976), playing the wife of Sherlock Holmes crony Dr. Watson (Robert Duvall) in the latter. Eggar's prolific American TV work has included the role of Anna Leonowens in the expensive, short-lived weekly Anna and the King (1972). Samantha Eggar has managed to maintain her dignity and integrity despite far too many horror flicks like The Brood (1979).

Trivia: British entertainer Anthony Newley began as a child star, passing for 10 or 11 even as the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist (1948), when in fact he was already of driving and shaving age. As a young leading man, Newley learned the ins and outs of self-promotion, chiefly the ability to convince the populace that he could do anything well. In 1959, he became a pop recording star thanks to his singing appearance in Idle on Parade, but this was only the beginning. Stop the World, I Want to Get Off was cowritten by Newley and Leslie Bricusse, but to the world at large Anthony Newley, who also starred in the play, was the whole show. This 1961 London-to-Broadway musical was a superbly written piece and a success. Newley followed up this production with another stage collaboration with Bricusse, 1965's The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd, this time sharing the spotlight (but not without a struggle) with veteran Cyril Ritchard. Few people can remember the plotlines of either of Newley's musical plays, but such song standards as "What Kind of Fool Am I," "Gonna Build a Mountain," "Look at That Face" and "Where Would You Be?" have become audition standards. Newley's overwhelming stage presence didn't translate that well to films, with Dr. Doolittle being the most obvious example of this (it is said that Newley and co-star Samantha Eggar kidded around on the set so much that Rex "Dr. Doolittle" Harrison had to resoundingly insist upon professional decorum). Since Doolittle, Newley has been content to merely write songs for other people's movies, occasionally stepping before the camera in such pictures as Mr. Quilp (1975) and It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time (1976). And in 1969, Anthony Newley directed his then-wife Joan Collins in Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness, a woebegone attempt at "hip" which gained fame only through the embarrassed co-starring stints from Milton Berle and George Jessel, and the fact that many American newspapers refused (probably at the request of studio publicity flacks) to mention the film's slightly licentious title in their movie listings.

Trivia: One of England's most respected actors and directors, Sir Richard Attenborough made numerous contributions to world cinema both in front of and behind the camera. The son of a Cambridge school administrator, Attenborough began dabbling in theatricals at the age of 12. While attending London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1941, he turned professional, making his first stage appearance in a production of Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! He made his screen debut as the Young Sailor in Noel Coward and David Lean's In Which We Serve (1943), before achieving his first significant West End success as the punkish, cowardly, petty criminal Pinkie Brown in Brighton Rock. After three years of service with the Royal Air Force, Attenborough rose to film stardom in the 1947 film version of Brighton Rock -- a role that caused him to be typecast as a working-class misfit over the next few years. One of the best of his characterizations in this vein can be found in The Guinea Pig (1948), in which the 26-year-old Attenborough was wholly credible as a 13-year-old schoolboy. As the '50s progressed, he was permitted a wider range of characters in such films as The Magic Box (1951), The Ship That Died of Shame (1955), and Private's Progress (1956). In 1959, he teamed up with director Bryan Forbes to form Beaver Films. Before the partnership dissolved in 1964, Attenborough had played such sharply etched personalities as Tom Curtis in The Angry Silence (1960) and Bill Savage in Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964); he also served as producer for the Forbes-directed Whistle Down the Wind (1962) and The L-Shaped Room (1962). During the '60s, Attenborough exhibited a fondness for military roles: POW mastermind Bartlett in The Great Escape (1963); hotheaded ship's engineer Frenchy Burgoyne in The Sand Pebbles (1966); and Sgt. Major Lauderdale in Guns at Batasi (1964), the performance that won him a British Academy Award. He also played an extended cameo in Doctor Dolittle (1967), and sang "I've Never Seen Anything Like It in My Life," a paean to the amazing Pushmi-Pullyu. This boisterous musical performance may well have been a warm-up for Attenborough's film directorial debut, the satirical anti-war revue Oh, What a Lovely War (1969). He subsequently helmed the historical epics Young Winston (1972) and A Bridge Too Far (1977), then scaled down his technique for the psychological thriller Magic (1978), which starred his favorite leading man, Anthony Hopkins. With more and more of his time consumed by his directing activities, Attenborough found fewer opportunities to act. One of his best performances in the '70s was as the eerily "normal" real-life serial killer Christie in 10 Rillington Place (1971). In 1982, Attenborough brought a 20-year dream to fruition when he directed the spectacular biopic Gandhi. The film won a raft of Oscars, including a Best Director statuette for Attenborough; he was also honored with Golden Globe and Director's Guild awards, and, that same year, published his book In Search of Gandhi, another product of his fascination with the Indian leader. All of Attenborough's post-Gandhi projects were laudably ambitious, though none reached the same pinnacle of success. Some of the best of his latter-day directorial efforts were Cry Freedom, a 1987 depiction of the horrors of apartheid; 1992's Chaplin, an epic biopic of the great comedian; and Shadowlands (1993), starring Anthony Hopkins as spiritually motivated author C.S. Lewis. Attenborough returned to the screen during the '90s, acting in avuncular character roles, the most popular of which was the affable but woefully misguided billionaire entrepreneur John Hammond in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993), a role he reprised for the film's 1997 sequel. Other notable performances included the jovial Kriss Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street (1994) and Sir William Cecil in Elizabeth (1998). The brother of naturalist David Attenborough and husband of actress Sheila Sim, he was knighted in 1976 and became a life peer in 1993. Attenborough has chaired dozens of professional organizations and worked tirelessly on behalf of Britain's Muscular Dystrophy Campaign.In 1998 the venerable screen legend has a small part in the Oscar-nominated Elizabeth, and in 1999 he directed Grey Owl. Then, in 2007, at the age of 84 he directed the seeping World War II epic romance Closing the Ring with a stellar cast that included Shirley MacLaine, Christopher Plummer, Brenda Fricker, and Pete Postlethwaite. In 2008, he suffered several health setbacks and retired from filmmaking. He died in 2014, just before his 91st birthday.

Trivia: British actor Peter Bull made his stage debut in 1933 at age 21, his film debut one year later (The Silent Voice [1934]) and his Broadway bow the next year. He was brought to Hollywood for a small role in Marie Antoinette (1938), which costarred his lifelong friend and fellow Briton Robert Morley. In films, the corpulent Bull was often cast as unpleasant prosecuting attorneys, hard-hearted businessmen or officious government men (including the memorable camera-happy Russian ambassador de Sadasky in Dr. Strangelove [1963]); on stage, he enjoyed a wider variety of roles, and at one time ran his own repertory company. His career was put in abeyance for war service, during which he won the Distinguish Service Cross. Outside of his theatrical work, Bull was well known for his interest in astrology, and even better known for his fascination with teddy bears. He owned perhaps the world's largest and most valuable collection of teddies, and wrote several witty, informative books on the subject (one of his bears appeared prominently in the internationally popular TV serial Brideshead Revisited). Peter Bull died shortly after finishing his role in the movie Yellowbeard (1984), which also represented the last screen work of another prominent British performer, Marty Feldman.

Trivia: Towering, breathtakingly limber interpretive dancer Geoffrey Holder was born in Trinidad and educated at Queens Royal College. Holder's first professional dancing gig was in his brother Boscoe's travelling troupe. He toured the West Indies and Puerto Rico before making his New York stage debut in the 1954 Broadway musical House of Flowers. Heading his own troupe from 1956 onward, Holder appeared as both an ensemble dancer and as soloist and choreographer in "outside" productions. He made his dramatic bow in 1957 in the near-mime role of Lucky in Waiting for Godot. His subsequent stage work has earned him numerous awards, including two Tonys--one for direction, the other for costume design--for 1974's The Wiz. His film roles leaned towards the exotic, e.g. Baron Samedi in the 1973 Bond thriller Live and Let Die (1973) and Punjab in Annie (1981), and he provided the narration for Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 2005. He is best known to TV fans for his series of mid-1970 Seven Up commercials, in which he elegantly and laughingly extoled the virtues of "Un-Cola Nuts." Outside of his theatrical and film accomplishments, Holder is an accomplished painter, his works having been showcased in several major international exhibitions and was also the author of many books, including a 1974 volume on Caribbean cooking. He was married to dancer Carmen de Lavallade. Holder died in 2014 at age 84.

Trivia: Comedienne/singer Muriel Landers had a 20 year career in television and movies, the most memorable aspects of which were built around the mixture of her plump physique, sexy voice, and seemingly boundless energy. Born in Chicago in 1921, she made her small-screen performing debut in 1950, surprisingly -- given her subsequent established flair for comedy -- in a pair of dramas on the anthology series The Clock and Lux Video Theater. In the years immediately following, she would exploit her gifts for humor working on the big screen with the Three Stooges (#"Sweet And Hot") and on series such as Make Room For Daddy and The Jack Benny Program, as well as one Bob Hope special. Her girth was, of course, a frequent source of humor surrounding her performances -- she could have been the Totie Fields or the Wendie Jo Sperber of her era -- but Landers carried it well, and could look extremely attractive, and also had a sultry singing voice that she used on occasion to great effect. Jules White, the producer/director in charge of Columbia Pictures' B-movie unit, even proposed a new line of short subjects built around Landers, to be called "Girlie Whirls," but ended the project after a single such effort and, instead, put her to work alongside the Three Stooges. Landers continued performing until the start of the 1970s, when ill-health, caused by hyper-tension, forced her retirement. She passed away in 1977 age 55.

Trivia: The daughter of a retired sea captain, British actress Norma Varden was a piano prodigy. After study in Paris, she played concerts into her teens, but at last decided that this was be an uncertain method of making a living--so she went to the "security" of acting. In her first stage appearance in Peter Pan, Varden, not yet twenty, portrayed the adult role of Mrs. Darling, setting the standard for her subsequent stage and film work; too tall and mature-looking for ingenues, she would enjoy a long career in character roles. Bored with dramatic assignments, Varden gave comedy a try at the famous Aldwych Theatre, where from 1929 through 1933 she was resident character comedienne in the theatre's well-received marital farces. After her talkie debut in the Aldwych comedy A Night Like This (1930), she remained busy on the British film scene for over a decade. Moving to Hollywood in 1941, she found that the typecasting system frequently precluded large roles: Though she was well served as Robert Benchley's wife in The Major and the Minor (1942), for example, her next assignment was the unbilled role of a pickpocket victim's wife in Casablanca (1942). Her work encompassed radio as well as films for the rest of the decade; in nearly all her assignments Norma played a haughty British or New York aristocrat who looked down with disdain at the "commoners." By the '50s, she was enjoying such sizeable parts as the society lady who is nearly strangled by Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train (1951), the bejeweled wife of "sugar daddy" Charles Coburn in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and George Sanders' dragonlike mother in Jupiter's Darling (1955). Norma Varden's greatest film role might have been as the mother superior in The Sound of Music (1965), but the producers decided to go with Peggy Wood, consigning Varden to the small but showy part of Frau Schmidt, the Von Trapps' housekeeper. After countless television and film assignments, Norma Varden retired in 1972, spending most of her time thereafter as a spokesperson for the Screen Actors Guild, battling for better medical benefits for older actors.

Trivia: British music-hall performer Queenie Leonard made her film bow in 1937's The Show Goes On. Possessed of a wicked wit and boundless energy, Leonard quickly became a "pet" of Hollywood's British colony when she moved to the U.S. in 1940. With the exception of The Lodger (1944), few of her film appearances captured her natural effervescence; for the most part, she was cast as humorless domestics in such films as And Then There Were None (1944) and Life with Father (1947). In the 1950s and 1960s, she provided delightful voiceovers for such Disney cartoon features as Peter Pan (1953) and 101 Dalmatians (1961). Queenie Leonard was married twice, to actor Tom Conway and to art director Lawrence Paul Williams.

Trivia: A superior Hollywood craftsperson, Ray Erlenborn moved from acting into a highly specific arena -- that of sound effects artistry -- where he established himself as something of a maestro, not only with the engineering of aural special effects but with his own provision of voices for animated characters. A singer from the age of three, Erlenborn first toured with Hugo Hamlin's Proteges, and then Buddy Erlen and Dodo Reid on the vaudeville belt, followed by appearances as Spike of the Rinkeydink Gang in the "Winnie Winkle" shorts, and in scattered musical roles in Roy Rogers films. Erlenborn earned his most widespread fame decades later, however, by providing the voice of Rabbit in the Winnie the Pooh animated cartoons. During the 1960s and '70s, he also dubbed voices and laugh tracks for such series as The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and The Carol Burnett Show.