Trivia: Since performing in a play at the City of Leicester Boys School, Michael Kitchen has done practically all there is for an actor to do: motion pictures, TV films, TV miniseries, stage plays, radio plays, and audio cassettes. International film audiences probably know him best as Chief of Staff Bill Tanner in the Pierce Brosnan James Bond productions, although he has played major roles in other high-profile movies, such as Out of Africa (1985) and Mrs. Dalloway (1997). He is also well known to worldwide TV audiences for major roles in popular miniseries, including The Brontes of Haworth (1973), A Fall of Eagles (1974), Freud (1984), and Oliver Twist (1999). 2000 was a remarkable year for Kitchen -- incredibly, he completed the following productions during that year: Proof of Life, a major film in which he shared the screen with Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan; Lorna Doone, a three-hour TV miniseries; Always and Everyone, an eight-hour TV series resembling America's ER; The Secret World of Michael Fry, a TV miniseries; The Railway Children, a TV film shown in the U.K. and in the U.S. on Masterpiece Theatre; New Year's Day, a major motion picture; and Second Sight: Parasomnia, another TV film. For an encore in 2001, he played the title role in Foyle's War, an eight-hour TV series about a World War II-era detective, then played Foyle again in another eight-hour series in 2002. He also signed on for another James Bond film, his third. Between 1971 -- when he appeared in the film Unman, Wittering and Zigo -- and the present, Kitchen has never wanted for work. The reason, quite simply, is that he is one of Britain's finest and most versatile actors. He has walked across the stages of the most prestigious playhouses in England, performing the works of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and other important playwrights. In motion pictures, he has also acted parts in productions based on the works of Franz Kafka (The Trial, 1993), Robert Louis Stevenson (Kidnapped, 1995), John Le Carre (The Russia House, 1990), and Nevil Shute (Crossing to Freedom, 1990).

Trivia: Studied architecture at Manchester University before applying to drama school. Performed in the year-long international tour of Geometry of Miracles. Joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2000, performing in As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet and The Comedy of Errors. Played Paul Milner in Foyle's War from 2002 to 2010. In 2006, starred as Charles in the first stage adaptation of The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Trivia: Performed with the Chichester Youth Theatre. Attended weekend classes at the Sylvia Young School as a child. Spent a year studying art on the John Hall Pre-University Course in Venice, Italy. Starred as Samantha Stewart in Foyle's War from 2002 to 2015. Nominated for the 2004 Most Popular Newcomer award at the National Television Awards.

Trivia: To refer to British actor Julian Ovenden as a "thespian" marks the understatement to end all understatements. The son of Queen Elizabeth II's chaplain, Ovenden came of age in a regal environment and, at an early point, demonstrated his sharpest and clearest talent in the musical realm. By seven years old, Ovenden received an invitation to sing at St. Paul's Cathedral; by the age of 13, he won a musical scholarship to Eton College. A tenure at Oxford University on a choral scholarship followed, as did post-graduate studies at London's esteemed Webber-Douglas Academy of Performing Arts, which found Ovenden acting opposite such legends as Nigel Hawthorne and under the aegis of director Michael Grandage.Ovenden pursued film and television acting alongside his theatrical and musical work from the earliest stages of his career. His first high-profile filmed role arrived around 2002, when cast in the Working Title telemovie Come Together opposite James D'Arcy. A popular turn as a doctor on the British series The Royal ensued, as did a role in the widely viewed miniseries Foyle's War (as Andrew Foyle) alongside the revered Michael Kitchen (Out of Africa). In 2004, Ovenden put his vocal and dramatic talents to use for a single television project: the Arthur Seidelman-directed telemovie A Christmas Carol: The Musical, starring Kelsey Grammer as Ebenezer Scrooge and Jane Krakowski as The Ghost of Christmas Past. Ovenden played Fred Anderson in that film. Meanwhile, the actor continued to pursue both theatrical and cinematic projects with equal vitality. Ovenden also signed for a regular supporting role on the 2008 series drama Cashmere Mafia, produced by Darren Star; however, the series didn't make it past its first season.

Trivia: A consummately British leading man, actor James Wilby cut his thespian teeth in the British theater world and appeared in a number of British period films during the 1980s and 1990s.Though he was born abroad, Wilby was educated in England, attending a private school and Durham University. Intent on becoming an actor, he studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in the early '80s and began acting in plays, including Another Country. He added films to his resumé, with small roles in the drama Privileged (1982), alongside fellow newcomer Hugh Grant, and the Lewis Carroll biopic Dreamchild (1985).Wilby firmly established himself as a rising British film actor with producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory's adaptation of the E.M. Forster novel Maurice in 1987. Centering on love affairs between Wilby's 1910s title youth and Hugh Grant and Rupert Graves, Maurice earned Wilby and Grant the Best Actor prize at theVenice Film Festival and an international art house audience. Wilby garnered more accolades for his performance as the repressed 1930s husband caught in a love triangle with wife Kristin Scott Thomas and interloper Rupert Graves in the highly regarded Evelyn Waugh adaptation A Handful of Dust (1988). Continuing his winning streak, Wilby subsequently appeared in Masterpiece Theater's well-mounted miniseries of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities (1989), and co-starred with Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins in another acclaimed Merchant/Ivory adaptation of E.M. Forster, Howards End (1992). Though the rest of Wilby's 1990s movies were not as impressively received, he continued to appear regularly in British films and TV, including Immaculate Conception (1992), the World War I drama Regeneration (1997), and the children's movie Tom's Midnight Garden (1998). Wilby reunited with Ismail Merchant in the producer's directorial effort Cotton Mary (1999), but the British colonial drama did not match the success of Wilby's prior Merchant/Ivory work.Wilby subsequently appeared among the distinguished ensemble populating Robert Altman's Oscar-winning period piece Gosford Park (2001). As "upstairs" guest the Honorable Freddie Nesbitt, Wilby was a most dishonorable schemer and a possible murder suspect in Altman's witty anti-Merchant Ivory dissection of the British class system and its usual depiction in polished costume dramas and Agatha Christie murder mysteries.

Trivia: Made his UK television debut in 1976's A Horseman Riding By. Appeared as Eddie Vincent in Casualty between 2002 and 2003. Starred in Waterloo Road between 2006 and 2014, making him the longest-serving cast member. Nominated for the 2010 Best Actor TV Choice Award, winning it three years in a row. Joined the cast of Coronation Street in 2015, as Steve McDonald's therapist.