Trivia: Magical screen presence, fashion arbiter, shrine to good taste, and tireless crusader for children's rights, Audrey Hepburn has become one of the most enduring screen icons of the twentieth century. Best-known for her film roles in Breakfast at Tiffany's, My Fair Lady, Roman Holiday and Charade, Hepburn epitomized a waif-like glamour, combining charm, effervescence, and grace. When she died of colon cancer in 1993, the actress was the subject of endless tributes which mourned the passing of one who left an indelible imprint on the world, both on and off screen.Born into relative prosperity and influence on May 4, 1929, Hepburn was the daughter of a Dutch baroness and a wealthy British banker. Although she was born in Brussels, Belgium, her early years were spent traveling between England, Belgium, and the Netherlands because of her father's job. At the age of five, Hepburn was sent to England for boarding school; a year later, her father abandoned the family, something that would have a profound effect on the actress for the rest of her life. More upheaval followed in 1939, when her mother moved her and two sons from a previous marriage to the neutral Netherlands: the following year the country was invaded by the Nazis and Hepburn and her family were forced to endure the resulting hardships. During the German occupation, Hepburn suffered from malnutrition (which would permanently affect her weight), witnessed various acts of Nazi brutality, and at one point was forced into hiding with her family. One thing that helped her through the war years was her love of dance: trained in ballet since the age of five, Hepburn continued to study, often giving classes out of her mother's home.It was her love of dance that ultimately led Hepburn to her film career. After the war, her family relocated to Amsterdam, where the actress continued to train as a ballerina and modeled for extra money. Hepburn's work led to a 1948 screen test and a subsequent small role in the 1948 Dutch film Nederlands in Zeven Lessen (Dutch in Seven Lessons). The same year, she and her mother moved to London, where Hepburn had been given a dance school scholarship. Continuing to model on the side, she decided that because of her height and lack of training, her future was not in dance. She tried out for and won a part in the chorus line of the stage show High Button Shoes and was soon working regularly on the stage. An offer from the British Pictures Corporation led to a few small roles, including one in 1951's The Lavender Hill Mob. A major supporting role in the 1952 film The Secret People led to Monte Carlo, Baby (1953), and it was during the filming of that movie that fate struck for the young actress in the form of a chance encounter with Colette. The famed novelist and screenwriter decided that Hepburn would be perfect for the title role in Gigi, and Hepburn was soon off to New York to star in the Broadway show. It was at this time that the actress won her first major screen role in William Wyler's 1953 Roman Holiday. After much rehearsal and patience from Wyler (from whom, Hepburn remarked, she "learned everything"), Hepburn garnered acclaim for her portrayal of an incognito European princess, winning an Academy Award as Best Actress and spawning what became known as the Audrey Hepburn "look." More success came the following year with Billy Wilder's Sabrina. Hepburn won a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance in the title role, and continued to be a fashion inspiration, thanks to the first of many collaborations with the designer Givenchy, who designed the actress' gowns for the film.Hepburn also began another collaboration that year, this time with actor/writer/producer Mel Ferrer. After starring with him in the Broadway production of Ondine (and winning a Tony in the process), Hepburn married Ferrer, and their sometimes tumultuous partnership would last for the better part of the next fifteen years. She went on to star in a series of successful films during the remainder of the decade, including War and Peace (1956), 1957's Funny Face, and The Nun's Story (1959), for which she won another Oscar nomination.Following lukewarm reception for Green Mansions (1959) and The Unforgiven (1960), Hepburn won another Oscar nomination and a certain dose of icon status for her role as enigmatic party girl Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961). The role, and its accompanying air of cosmopolitan chic, would be associated with Hepburn for the rest of her life, and indeed beyond. However, the actress next took on an entirely different role with William Wyler's The Children's Hour (1961), a melodrama in which she played a girls' school manager suspected of having an "unnatural relationship" with her best friend (Shirley MacLaine).In 1963, Hepburn returned to the realm of enthusiastic celluloid heterosexuality with Charade. The film was a huge success, thanks in part to a flawlessly photogenic pairing with Cary Grant (who had previously turned down the opportunity to work with Hepburn because of their age difference). The actress then went on to make My Fair Lady in 1964, starring opposite Rex Harrison as a cockney flower girl. The film provided another success for Hepburn, winning a score of Oscars and a place in motion picture history. After another Wyler collaboration, 1965's How to Steal a Million, as well as Two for the Road (1967) and the highly acclaimed Wait Until Dark (1967)--for which she won her fifth Oscar nomination playing a blind woman--Hepburn went into semi-retirement to raise her two young sons. Her marriage to Ferrer had ended, and she had married again, this time to Italian doctor Andrea Dotti. She came out of retirement briefly in 1975 to star opposite Sean Connery in Robin and Marian, but her subsequent roles were intermittent and in films of varying quality. Aside from appearances in 1979's Bloodline and Peter Bogdanovich's 1980 They All Laughed, Hepburn stayed away from film, choosing instead to concentrate on her work with starving children. After divorcing Dotti in the early 1980s, she took up with Robert Wolders; the two spent much of their time travelling the world as part of Hepburn's goodwill work. In 1987, the actress was officially appointed UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador; the same year she made her final television appearance in Love Among Thieves, which netted poor reviews. Two years later, she had her final film appearance as an angel in Steven Spielberg's Always.Hepburn devoted the last years of her life to her UNICEF work, travelling to war-torn places like Somalia to visit starving children. In 1992, already suffering from colon cancer, she was awarded the Screen Actors' Guild Achievement Award. She died the next year, succumbing to her illness on January 20 at her home in Switzerland. The same year, she was posthumously awarded the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Trivia: One of the postwar era's most successful actors, Gregory Peck was long the moral conscience of the silver screen; almost without exception, his performances embodied the virtues of strength, conviction, and intelligence so highly valued by American audiences. As the studios' iron grip on Hollywood began to loosen, he also emerged among the very first stars to declare his creative independence, working almost solely in movies of his own choosing. Born April 5, 1916, in La Jolla, CA, Peck worked as a truck driver before attending Berkeley, where he first began acting. He later relocated to New York City and was a barker at the 1939 World's Fair. He soon won a two-year contract with the Neighborhood Playhouse. His first professional work was in association with a 1942 Katherine Cornell/Guthrie McClintic ensemble Broadway production of The Morning Star. There Peck was spotted by David O. Selznick, for whom he screen-tested, only to be turned down. Over the next year, he played a double role in The Willow and I, fielding and rejecting the occasional film offer. Finally, in 1943, he accepted a role in Days of Glory, appearing opposite then-fiancée Tamara Toumanova. While the picture itself was largely dismissed, Peck found himself at the center of a studio bidding war. He finally signed with 20th Century Fox, who cast him in 1944's The Keys of the Kingdom - a turn for which he snagged his first of many Oscar nods. From the outset, he enjoyed unique leverage as a performer; he refused to sign a long-term contract with any one studio, and selected all of his scripts himself. For MGM, he starred in 1945's The Valley of Decision, a major hit. Even more impressive was the follow-up, Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, which co-starred Ingrid Bergman. Peck scored a rousing success with 1946's The Yearling (which brought him his second Academy Award nomination) and followed this up with another smash, King Vidor's Duel in the Sun. His third Oscar nomination arrived via Elia Kazan's 1947 social drama Gentleman's Agreement, a meditation on anti-Semitism which won Best Picture honors. For the follow-up, Peck reunited with Hitchcock for The Paradine Case, one of the few flops on either's resumé. He returned in 1948 with a William Wellman Western, Yellow Sky, before signing for a pair of films with director Henry King, Twelve O'Clock High (earning Best Actor laurels from the New York critics and his fourth Oscar nod) and The Gunfighter. After Captain Horatio Hornblower, Peck appeared in the Biblical epic David and Bathsheba, one of 1951's biggest box-office hits. Upon turning down High Noon, he starred in The Snows of Kilimanjaro. To earn a tax exemption, he spent the next 18 months in Europe, there shooting 1953's Roman Holiday for William Wyler. After filming 1954's Night People, Peck traveled to Britain, where he starred in a pair of features for Rank -- The Million Pound Note and The Purple Plain -- neither of which performed well at the box office; however, upon returning stateside he starred in the smash The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The 1958 Western The Big Country was his next major hit, and he quickly followed it with another, The Bravados. Few enjoyed Peck's portrayal of F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1959's Beloved Infidel, but the other two films he made that year, the Korean War drama Pork Chop Hill and Stanley Kramer's post-apocalyptic nightmare On the Beach, were both much more successful. Still, 1961's World War II adventure The Guns of Navarone topped them all -- indeed, it was among the highest-grossing pictures in film history. A vicious film noir, Cape Fear, followed in 1962, as did Robert Mulligan's classic adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird; as Atticus Finch, an idealistic Southern attorney defending a black man charged with rape, Peck finally won an Academy Award. Also that year he co-starred in the Cinerama epic How the West Was Won, yet another massive success. However, it was to be Peck's last for many years. For Fred Zinneman, he starred in 1964's Behold a Pale Horse, miscast as a Spanish loyalist, followed by Captain Newman, M.D., a comedy with Tony Curtis which performed only moderately well. When 1966's Mirage and Arabesque disappeared from theaters almost unnoticed, Peck spent the next three years absent from the screen. When he returned in 1969, however, it was with no less than four new films -- The Stalking Moon, MacKenna's Gold, The Chairman, and Marooned -- all of them poorly received.The early '70s proved no better: First up was I Walk the Line, with Tuesday Weld, followed the next year by Henry Hathaway's Shootout. After the failure of the 1973 Western Billy Two Hats, he again vanished from cinemas for three years, producing (but not appearing in) The Dove. However, in 1976, Peck starred in the horror film The Omen, an unexpected smash. Studio interest was rekindled, and in 1977 he portrayed MacArthur. The Boys From Brazil followed, with Peck essaying a villainous role for the first time in his screen career. After 1981's The Sea Wolves, he turned for the first time to television, headlining the telefilm The Scarlet and the Black. Remaining on the small screen, he portrayed Abraham Lincoln in the 1985 miniseries The Blue and the Grey, returning to theater for 1987's little-seen anti-nuclear fable Amazing Grace and Chuck. Old Gringo followed two years later, and in 1991 he co-starred in a pair of high-profile projects, the Norman Jewison comedy Other People's Money and Martin Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear. Fairly active through the remainder of the decade, Peck appeared in The Portrait (1993) and the made-for-television Moby Dick (1998) while frequently narrating such documentaries as Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick (1995) and American Prophet: The Story of Joseph Smith (2000).On June 12, 2003, just days after the AFI named him as the screen's greatest hero for his role as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, Gregory Peck died peacefully in his Los Angeles home with his wife Veronique by his side. He was 87.

Trivia: One of the most versatile American movie actors of the mid-20th century, Eddie Albert missed out on stardom but, instead, enjoyed a 50-year-plus screen career that encompassed everything from light comedy and zany satire to the most savage war dramas. Born Edward Albert Heimberger in Rock Island, IL, he attended the University of Minnesota. After working as everything from soda jerk to a circus acrobat (with a short stint as a nightclub and radio singer), Albert headed for New York City, where he scored a hit in the play Brother Rat, portraying military cadet Bing Edwards. He also starred in Room Service on-stage before heading to Hollywood, where he was signed by Warner Bros. to recreate his stage role in the 1938 film Brother Rat. Albert was known for his comedic work during the early years of his career -- his other early major credits included The Boys From Syracuse and Boy Meets Girl on-stage and On Your Toes (1939) onscreen. When he did appear in dramas, such as A Dispatch From Reuters (1940), it was usually as a light, secondary lead or male ingénue, similar to the kinds of parts that Dick Powell played during his callow, youthful days. Albert had an independent streak that made him unusual among actors of his era -- he actually quit Warner Bros. at one point, preferring to work as a circus performer for eight dollars per day. The outbreak of World War II sent Albert into the U.S. Navy as a junior officer, and he distinguished himself during 1943 in the fighting on Tarawa. Assigned as the salvage officer in the shore party of the second landing wave (which engaged in heavy fighting with the Japanese), his job was to examine military equipment abandoned on the battlefield to see if it should be retrieved; but what he found were wounded men who had been left behind under heavy fire. Albert took them off the beach in a small launch not designed for that task, earning commendations for his bravery. A bona fide hero, he was sent home to support a War Bond drive (though he never traded on his war experiences, and didn't discussing them in detail on-camera until the 1990s). When Albert resumed his acting career in 1945, he had changed; he displayed a much more serious, intense screen persona, even when he was doing comedy. He was also a much better actor, though it took ten years, and directors Robert Aldrich and David Miller, to show the movie-going public just how good he was. Ironically, when Albert did return to films, the roles weren't really there for him, so he turned to television and theatrical work during the early '50s. His best movie from this period was The Dude Goes West (1948), an offbeat comedy-Western directed by Kurt Neumann in a vein similar to Along Came Jones. The mid-'50s saw Albert finally achieve recognition as a serious actor, first with his Oscar-nominated supporting performance in William Wyler's hit Roman Holiday (1953) and then, three years later, in Robert Aldrich's brutal World War II drama Attack!, in which he gave the performance of a lifetime as a cowardly, psychopathic army officer. From that point on, Albert got some of the choicest supporting dramatic parts in Hollywood, in high-profile movies such as The Longest Day and small-scale gems like David Miller's Captain Newman, M.D. Indeed, the latter film, in which he played a more sympathetic disturbed military officer, might represent his single best performance onscreen. His ability at comedy wasn't forgotten, however, and, in 1965, he took on the starring role of Oliver Wendell Douglas (opposite Eva Gabor) in the TV series Green Acres, in which he got to play the straight man to an array of top comic performers for six seasons. The show developed a cult following among viewers, ranging from small children to college students, and became a pop-culture institution. The movie business had changed by the time Albert re-entered films in 1971, but he still snagged an Oscar nomination for his work (in a difficult anti-Semitic role) in Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid (1972). He also remained one of Robert Aldrich's favorite actors, and, in 1974, the director gave him a choice role as the sadistic warden, in The Longest Yard. He had another hit series in the mid-'70s with Switch, in which he and Robert Wagner co-starred as a pair of private investigators whose specialty was scamming wrongdoers. Albert was still working steadily into the early '90s, when he was well into his eighties. From the mid-'40s, the actor had acquired a deep, personal interest in politics, and produced a series of educational films intended to introduce grade-school students to notions of democracy and tolerance. By the '60s, he was also deeply involved in the environmental movement. Albert was married for decades to the Mexican-American actress Margo (who died in 1985); their son is the actor Edward Albert.

Trivia: Margaret Rawlings spent most of her life on the British stage where she had been performing since the 1920s. Rawlings was born a missionary's daughter in Osaka, Japan. She made her feature-film debut in The Way of Lost Souls (1929). Her subsequent film appearances include Roman Holiday (1953), Beautiful Stranger (1954) and Hands of the Ripper (1971).

Trivia: Paola Borboni ranked among Italy's finest interpreters of internationally renowned playwright Luigi Pirandello's work. She spent most of her long, distinguished career on stage and only occasionally ventured into feature films. Her most memorable film roles can be found in Federico Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953) and in Roman Holiday in which she played a crabby old charwoman in a scene with Audrey Hepburn.

Trivia: As with many of the best film music composers, Georges Auric was a child prodigy. At 15, the French-born Auric published his first compositions, and before he was 20 he had orchestrated and written incidental music for several ballets and stage productions. Considered "avant garde" in the days before atonality became commonplace, Auric was a favorite of such progressive filmmakers as Rene Clair and Jean Cocteau. It was for Cocteau's 1930 film Blood of a Poet that Auric wrote his first film score; his next assignment was Clair's A Nous a Liberte (1931), in which characters unexpectedly break into song at the drop of a chapeau. After the war, Auric wrote extensively for the British film industry, contributing scores to such films as Dead of Night (1945), Caesar and Cleopatra (1946) and Passport to Pimlico (1949). The music for these productions was as distinctly British as Auric's music for Les Parents Terribles (1949) and Orphee (1949) was unmistakably French. Auric's American films include Roman Holiday (1953), Heaven Knows Mr. Allison (1957), Bonjour Tristesse (1958) and The Innocents (1961). A few times, Auric found his work on the hit parade, as in the case of his love theme for Moulin Rouge (1952). Auric curtailed his cinema activities after 1962, when he was named director of the Paris Opera, though he kept his hand in the film business until 1969. While Georges Auric never won an Oscar, his work was cited several times by the Cannes Film Festival.

Trivia: Cinematographer Franz Planer was born in Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary), Czechoslovakia. Planer was a portrait photographer until 1919 when he began working in German film. He did not come to Hollywood until 1937, using the pseudonym Frank F. Planer. Planer is best known for his work with director Max Ophüls.

Trivia: French cinematographer Henri Alekan first studied optics before becoming an assistant cameraman in 1925. Three years later he was promoted to camera operator. During the early years of WWII, he was captured and imprisoned while fighting. Upon his escape from the POW camp in 1940, he became a French Resistance fighter. The next year, he began working as a full-fledged cinematographer, but did not shoot his first major film until late 1945. The film, Le Bataille du Rail, was a documentary directed by René Clément. Alekan was a versatile lighting director able to shoot a wide variety of styles with a deceptive ease ranging from costume fantasies to serious contemporary drama. In the late '50s, Alekan began directing short films.

Trivia: Starting out as a staff writer at RKO, Ian McLellan Hunter worked on the studio's Dr. Christian B-movies before moving up the ladder to better quality projects. In 1953, he won a Best Story Oscar for Roman Holiday -- or did he? Forty years after the award, the truth came out: Hunter had acted as a "front" for blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. Ironically, Hunter was, himself, hounded out of Hollywood during the Red Scare and forced to work pseudonymously until 1979. He spent his final creative years in television; his contributions to the small screen included adaptations of Tom Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again (1979) and Bruce Catton and John Leekley's The Blue and the Gray (1982). Hunter died in 1991.

Trivia: Briton John Dighton wrote for the stage until 1936, when he made the transition to films. Dighton's 1940s output included comedian Will Hay's last starring features, as well as the 1947 adaptation of Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby. Most gainfully employed by Ealing Studios, he collaborated on the screenplays of such sublime comedies as Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Man in the White Suit (1953), sharing an Academy Award nomination for the latter. He earned a second nomination for the American-financed Roman Holiday (1953). Two of his more popular stage plays, Happiest Days of Your Life and The Passionate Sentry, were successfully adapted for the screen by Dighton himself. John Dighton's final screen credit was his cinemadaptation of Shaw's The Devil's Disciple, penned in collaboration with Roland Kibbee.

Trivia: Colorado-born Dalton Trumbo began his professional life as a newspaper reporter and editor and, like a lot of people in those professsion, was drawn into the movie business in the mid '30s. His career as a screenwriter was rather routine during the later part of the decade, his most important scripts being Five Came Back (1939) and Kitty Foyle (1940). With the outbreak of World War II, the flashes of seriousness and spirituality that had shown up in his early work became more pronounced, and he wrote such classics as the fantasy A Guy Named Joe (1943) and the fact-based Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), which emphasized the need for sacrifice in order to win the war. Following the end of the war, Trumbo's career was blighted by the increasingly unfriendly political climate in Hollywood, where the studio heads had no use for men of ideas and ideals such as him. And then, in 1947, the roof fell in on him when he was called to testify about the alleged communist infiltration of the movie business and -- along with nine others -- refused to testify. Trumbo, who was suspect for his otherwise innocuous 1943 script for Tender Comrade (which was about communal living in wartime, not covert Communist propaganda), was cited for contempt of Congress and served a 10-month jail term. Officially unemployable by Hollywood, he moved to Mexico where he continued to write -- for fees far smaller than the $75,000 a year he'd been making from MGM before the contempt citation -- under assumed names. His script for The Brave One (1956, under the name Robert Rich) earned an Academy Award. That and other honors, most notably the Oscar earned by Michael Wilson's script for Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), helped undermine the blacklist, and Trumbo later worked openly on Exodus and Spartacus, two high-profile blockbuster productions released in 1960, as well as the more modest drama Lonely Are the Brave (1962). By the end of the '60s, with a new generation in control of Hollywood, Trumbo was welcomed back as a hero from a long war, and was permitted to direct a film adaptation of his 1939 antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun (1971) -- the film was honored at Cannes, and got a huge amount of press coverage in the United States due to its seeming relevance to the Vietnam War, but many of the accolades were really intended to compensate for past injustice, rather than to recognize the movie, which was received as overly preachy and didactic, as well as unremittingly grim, by most viewers. Trumbo also contributed late in life to the political thriller Executive Action (1973), which dealt with an alleged conspiracy to murder President Kennedy, and the adventure drama Papillon (1973).

Trivia: Born to a family of Italian aristocrats, Tullio Carminati hardly needed to work for a living. Even so, he was a professional actor by the age of 15 and a film performer at 18. He divided his time in the 1920s between romantic leads in films and meaty co-starring assignments on stage, often in the company of the great Eleanora Duse. His first American film was the 1925 silent mystery The Bat, in which his natural charm and charisma was harnessed to thoroughly mislead the audience. The best of his American talkies was One Night of Love (1934) wherein he appeared opposite opera diva Grace Moore. From 1935 onward, Carminatti starred in English and European films, briefly dropping from public view during the war years. Re-emerging as a suave character actor in the late 1940s, Tullio Carminatti kept working until 1963, when he was seen in his final film, Otto Preminger's The Cardinal.