Trivia: Born in India to an Indian mother and an Indo-Irish father, Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson spent an impoverished childhood in the subcontinent, before coming to England in 1928 to pursue an acting career. Because her bi-racial parentage would have been a subject of immense prejudice, Oberon began telling others that she was born to white parents on the Australian island of Tasmania -- a story she would keep up until almost the end of her life. It was Hungarian-born film mogul Alexander Korda who first spotted Oberon's screen potential, and began giving her parts in his pictures, building her up toward stardom with role such as Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). Although she was an actress of very limited range, Oberon acquitted herself well in movies such as The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), as Sir Percy Blakeney's wife, and her exotic good looks made her extremely appealing. She was cast opposite Laurence Olivier in the 1938 comedy The Divorce of Lady X, which was shot in Technicolor and showed Oberon off to even better advantage. Seeking to build her up as an international star, Korda sold half of Oberon's contract to Samuel Goldwyn in America, who cast her as Cathy in Wuthering Heights (1939). She moved to America with the outbreak of war, and also married Korda (1939-1945), but despite some success in That Uncertain Feeling, The Lodger, and A Song to Remember, her star quickly began to fade, and the Korda vehicle Lydia (1941), a slow-moving melodrama that had her aging 50 years, didn't help her career at all. Even a good acting performance in the Hitchcock-like chiller Dark Waters (1944) failed to register with the public. Oberon re-emerged only occasionally after the early '50s, until 1973 when she starred in, produced, and co-edited Interval, a strange romantic drama that costarred her future husband Robert Wolders, that failed to find good reviews or an audience.Oberon would marry three more times, to cinematographer Lucien Ballard in the late forties, to Italian industrialist Bruno Pagliali throughout the 60's, and finally, to actor Robert Wolders from the mid 70's until her death in 1979 at the age of 68.

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: Actress Ursula Jeans was born in India to British parents. She was a stage actress from her mid-teens, and a movie starlet from 1922. Maturing into a versatile leading lady in the talkie era, Jean's best-known screen role of the 1930s was Fanny Bridges in the Oscar-winning Cavalcade (1933). She remained a popular character lead into the 1960s in films like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and The Dam Busters (1955). Frequently on television, Jeans could be seen in such American productions as the 1963 video staging of Hedda Gabler, which starred Hedda Gabler. Previously married to actor Robert Irvine, Ursula Jeans' second husband was another highly-regarded fixture of British films, actor Roger Livesey.

Trivia: David Tree came into this world with about as fine an acting pedigree as anyone in history, and only a war injury prevented him from enjoying a longer, more important career on-stage or before the cameras. Born David Tree Parsons, he was the son of Alan Leonard Romaine Parsons and Viola Tree, who was the daughter of England's foremost actor of the late 19th century and early 20th century, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and of Lady Tree. Born in 1915, Tree amassed several good acting credits as a boy, making his debut, at age six, with a role in his mother's revival of The Tempest. He was educated at Eton and made his adult acting debut in 1934 in Antony and Cleopatra. Over the next few years, Tree worked at the Old Vic, the repertory company of the Playhouse, Oxford, and other companies. He was well received critically for his portrayals of Ferdinand in The Tempest and Feste in Twelfth Night, among other roles. He entered films in the mid-'30s and, from the outset, had a promising future onscreen, starting with important supporting roles in movies such as The Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1937) and Zoltan Korda's The Drum (1938), in which he played the key role of Lt. Escott. His screen career accelerated considerably when he was cast in Gabriel Pascal's production of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1938) (co-directed by Anthony Asquith) as Freddy Eynsford-Hill, who becomes the romantic partner of Wendy Hiller's Eliza Doolittle. Asquith later used Tree as the lead in his film version of Terence Rattigan's comedy French Without Tears (1939). Tree was equally good playing men of action, such as McKenzie in Tim Whelan's superb thriller Q Planes, or gently comedic romantic leads, as in Pygmalion. He worked in such major British productions as Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939) during the run up to the outbreak of the Second World War, and had the role of Charles Lomax in Major Barbara (1941). He interrupted his career to join the British war effort, however, serving in the Royal Artillery, where he lost an arm. He abandoned acting after returning to civilian life to become a farmer and wasn't seen again in movies until the early '70s when a friend, director Nicolas Roeg, persuaded Tree (by then, in his late fifties and had been out of acting for 30 years) to take the role of Anthony Babbage in his thriller Don't Look Now (1973). That was his last screen appearance.

Trivia: Elisabeth Welch was a black American actress/singer who followed in the footsteps of her contemporaries Adelaide Hall, Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, and Buddy Bradley, making her way from the United States to a major career in England. Born and raised in New York City, she studied for the stage and made her debut in the theatrical revue Blackbirds of 1928. She later appeared on-stage in Paris and then returned to New York, in a show called The New Yorkers, her featured number the Cole Porter song "Love for Sale." Such was the demand for her services, that Welch was off to England in 1933 for her London debut in Dark Doings; she followed this up later that same year in the Cole Porter show Nymph Errant, in which she sung the song "Solomon." Welch was received so well in England that she made it her home permanently, and enjoyed the kind of multi-tiered career that would have been virtually impossible for a black woman in America. On radio, her soft, sweet voice made her a star in the series Soft Lights and Sweet Music in 1934, and she also moved from Nymph Errant into the musical Glamorous Night; the movies also welcomed her, beginning in 1934 in Death at Broadcasting House, but it was her next two films that solidified her screen legacy, as she played opposite Paul Robeson in two of his best vehicles, Song of Freedom (1936) and Big Fella (1937). At times, even in England, she was limited onscreen to portraying a cabaret singer, as in the 1938 drama Over the Moon and the 1943 thriller Alibi; but when Welch got a real acting role, she could cut a memorable figure onscreen, such as her portrayal of Beulah, the cabaret hostess in the 1945 chiller Dead of Night. Welch actually spent a good chunk of WWII performing with Sir John Gielgud's company entertaining troops on Gibraltar and in other combat areas, but she managed to work in stage performances in works such as Arc de Triomphe in 1943, and she headlined the 1945 London Palladium revue Happy and Glorious, which enjoyed an 18-month run that carried it almost a year past the end of the war. Welch was still working regularly as a singer and actress in the (and her) '70s, appearing in movies such as Revenge of the Pink Panther, Arabian Adventure, and Derek Jarman's The Tempest, in which she portrayed a Goddess and sang "Stormy Weather," which (with apologies to Lena Horne) was something of a signature tune for her in England.

Trivia: German actor Carl Jaffe found it expedient to move to England in the late 1930s. Inevitably, Jaffe found himself cast as Nazis or heel-clicking Prussian aristocrats. His film characters in the postwar years were more sympathetic, but no less Teutonic. In the 1950s and 1960s, Carl Jaffe was often engaged to play Werner Von Braun types in such films as Rockets Galore (1954) and First Man Into Space (1958).

Trivia: After several years' worth of stage and film appearances in England, actress Evelyn Ankers came to Broadway in 1940 to appear in Ladies in Retirement. Besieged by offers from Hollywood, Evelyn chose to work at 20th Century-Fox, but production delays in her first American film led to her signing a contract with Universal Pictures. Despite her British upbringing, Evelyn was cast as the all-American heroine in her premiere Hollywood film, Abbott and Costello's Hold That Ghost (1941). With her co-starring stint in The Wolf Man (1941), Evelyn began her tenure as Universal's resident horror heroine, possessed of a blood-curdling scream. She also appeared in two Sherlock Holmes films, playing a villainess with a penchant for disguise in the second Holmes effort The Pearl of Death (1944). During the war years, the multilingual Ms. Ankers (who was born in Chile to British parents) starred in a radio program in Argentina. After her film career petered out, Evelyn appeared on several TV shows, most notably co-starring with Buster Keaton and Joe E. Brown in "The Silent Partner," a 1955 episode of Screen Director's Playhouse. Retired since the mid-1960s, Evelyn Ankers spent her last decades with her husband, actor and Lutheran lay minister Richard Denning, in their lavish home in Hawaii.

Trivia: Lancashire-born character actor Frank Atkinson appeared in at least 130 films in the 33 years between the advent of sound in 1930 and his death in 1963. His work extended to both sides of the Atlantic -- although he worked primarily in his native England, he did go over to Hollywood in the mid-1930's, where he seemed to keep busy at Fox. He was often in roles too small to be credited, but that didn't stop him from doing a memorable turn (or two) in pictures. Tall and slender, and with gaunt facial features that lent themselves to looks of eccentricity, and with a highly cultured speaking voice, he could melt unobtrusively into a scene, as an anonymous bit-player, or could, with the utterance of a few words or a look, transform himself into a wryly comedic presence -- he played everything from jailers, guards, garage attendants, and soldiers to upper-class twits, and, in a manner unique to his era, sometimes got into some gender-bending portrayals. His most interesting attributes were shown off in a pair of Raoul Walsh-directed features: Sailor's Luck (1933), starring James Dunn and Sally Eilers, in which Atkinson plays an overtly gay swimming pool attendant in an important scene in the middle of the picture; and in Me And My Gal (1932), an excellent romantic comedy/thriller starring Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett, in which he turns in a brief (but wonderfully rewarding) comedic tour-de-force as the funniest of a trio of effete, drunken waterfront tavern patrons, debating the matter of the type of fish with which one of them has been assaulted. His roles were usually not named, but Atkinson was highly regarded enough so that in The Green Cockatoo, he gets some memorable lines as a wry-toned butler named Provero, whose name becomes a comical issue. Atkinson also wrote screenplays and scripts for various British films in the 1930's, in genres ranging from light comedy to thrillers. Toward the end of his career, he also worked extensively in British television, on series such as Z-Cars and The Saint, and in 1963, the year of his death -- at age 69 -- he was in three television episodes as well as chalking up an uncredit appearance in Murder At the Gallop. In more recent years, thanks to the activity of various researches and scholars, and revivals of Fox's pre-Code features, especially Sailor's Luck, Atkinson has been mentioned in articles and books dealing with gay images and personae in Hollywood films.

Trivia: Lewis Gilbert started out as a child actor on the London stage and in British silent films. Making his last on-camera appearance in The Divorce of Lady X (1938), Gilbert remained in the movie industry as an assistant director. During World War II, he served with the U.S. Air Corps Film Unit, receiving his first opportunity to direct. After a string of documentaries, he helmed his first dramatic feature, The Ballerina (1947). His subsequent films include the superior wartime dramas Carve Her Name with Pride (1957) and Sink the Bismarck (1960), the tender coming-of-age study Loss of Innocence (1961) and the cynical sex seriocomedy Alfie (1967). He also helmed three James Bond epics, one with Connery (1967's You Only Live Twice) and two above-average Roger Moore efforts (The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker). The best of Lewis Gilbert's more recent films include a brace of adaptations of Willy Russell stage plays, Educating Rita (1983) and Shirley Valentine (1989).

Trivia: The daughter of actor-manager Samuel Rupert Woods and actress Lillie Roberts, Ethel Griffies began her own stage career at the age of 3. Griffies was 21 when she finally made her London debut in 1899, and 46 when she made her first Broadway appearance in Havoc (1924). Discounting a tentative stab at filmmaking in 1917, she made her movie bow in 1930, repeating her stage role in Old English (1930). Habitually cast as a crotchety old lady with the proverbial golden heart, she alternated between bits and prominently featured roles for the next 35 years. Her larger parts included Grace Poole in both the 1935 and 1944 versions of Jane Eyre, and the vituperous matron who accuses Tippi Hedren of being a harbinger of doom in Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). Every so often, she'd take a sabbatical from film work to concentrate on the stage; she made her last Broadway appearance in 1967, at which time she was England's oldest working actress. Presumably at the invitation of fellow Briton Arthur Treacher, Ethel Griffies was a frequent guest on TV's Merv Griffin Show in the late 1960s, never failing to bring down the house with her wickedly witty comments on her 80 years in show business.

Trivia: British actor Wilfred Hyde-White entered the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art upon graduation from Marlborough College. After some stage work, he made his first film in 1934 and became a stalwart in British movies like Rembrandt (1936) and The Demi-Paradise (1943), often billed as merely "Hyde White" and specializing in benign but stuffy upper-class types. Hyde-White received a somewhat larger role than usual in The Third Man (1949), principally because his character was an amalgam of two characters who were originally written for the erstwhile British comedy team Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne. Working both sides of the continent, Hyde-White appeared in such American productions as In Search of the Castaways (1962) and Gaily, Gaily (1969). His best-loved role was as Colonel Pickering in the 1964 Oscar-winner My Fair Lady, wherein he participated in two musical numbers, "The Rain in Spain" and "You Did It." Remaining in films until 1983, Hyde-White was still inducing audience chuckles in such films as The Cat and the Canary (1979), in which he appeared "posthumously" in a pre-filmed last will and testament.

Trivia: The son of British stage actor Willard Shine, Bill Shine first trod the boards at age six, playing the Stork in the pantomime Princess Posey. At fifteen, Shine made his first London stage appearance, and at eighteen was seen in the first of many films, Under the Greenwood Tree. Most often cast as an upper-class twit, Shine has also shown up in many a one-scene movie assignment as various reporters, commissioners, ticket sellers and executives. While seldom rising above the featured cast in films, Bill Shine achieved star status in the role of Conn in the 1950 production The Shaugran.