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: The sister of MGM screenwriter Cyril Hume, British actress Benita Hume began her London stage career at the age of 17. Two years later, she made her first film, The Happy Ending (1925). Among her earliest screen credits was 1926's Easy Virtue, written by Noel Coward and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. In Hollywood from 1932, Hume was at her best in sophisticated roles, notably as the title character in Worst Woman in Paris? (1933). She retired from films in 1938 to devote more time to her husband, actor Ronald Colman. Colman and Hume were frequent guests of radio's Jack Benny Program, playing Benny's long-suffering next-door neighbors; they also co-starred in the erudite radio situation comedy The Halls of Ivy, which ran from 1950 to 1952 and which became a TV series in 1954. After Colman's death in 1958, Benita Hume married an old friend, actor George Sanders; it was a happy union for both, one that lasted until Hume's own death in 1967.

Trivia: Actress Binnie Barnes enjoyed a 30-year career on both sides of the Atlantic, and despite appearances in several notable films in her native England, she found her most lasting success in Hollywood, where she was best remembered for her tart-tongued portrayals. She was born Gittel Enoyce Barnes in London to a British father who was Jewish and an Italian mother. She was raised Jewish, although she converted to Catholicism upon her second marriage; later in life, she also took the formal name Gertrude Maude Barnes. It took until her teens before she actually entered performing, as a trick-rope artist in vaudeville (billed as "Texas Binnie Barnes"). Around that career start at 15, she also worked as a nurse, chorus girl, dance hostess, and milkmaid over the next few years. Barnes didn't start formal acting until age 26, working with Charles Laughton on stage. And apart from one appearance in a 1923 silent, she made her proper screen debut in 1931 in a series of short films, cast opposite comedian Stanley Lupino. Barnes was later signed to Alexander Korda's fledgling London Films, through which she was cast in movies such as Counsel's Opinion (1932) and other minor productions, earning the princely sum of 35 pounds (roughly $180) a week, which was actually very good money by ordinary standards, but hardly as star's compensation. She had something of a breakthrough in Korda's 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII portraying Catherine Howard, which gave her valuable exposure in England and America (where the movie was extraordinarily popular). Barnes was in the stage version of Cavalcade which, in turn, led to Hollywood to do the movie version and marked the beginning of her American career. Although she was initially uncomfortable in Hollywood, it was there that she spent most of the rest of her screen career. It helped that during the next few years she suppressed her English accent and developed a new, sassier persona as a wise-cracking female character lead, with her tall, imposing beauty and good looks, she was still attractive, but was usually cast as the heroine's best friend or older sister, and frequently with the best lines in those roles. At her best in those years, Barnes was a sort of trans-Atlantic rival to Eve Arden, cast in the same kind of sarcastic, knowing, yet attractive female roles. She still occasionally worked in films in England, including Korda's The Private Life of Don Juan and The Divorce of Lady X (a remake of Counsel's Opinion, in which Merle Oberon played her former role, while Barnes played the wife in the comedy of mistaken identity).Barnes had a sense of humor about herself that allowed her to work comfortably opposite performers such as the Ritz Brothers (The Three Musketeers), in which she was turned upside down and shaken by the comic trio; Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in The Time of Their Lives, in which she had one of the funniest "in" joke lines in the history of Hollywood (when meeting the intense, taciturn housekeeper played by Gale Sondergaard, Barnes' character remarks, "Didn't I see you in 'Rebecca'?"). She also got to portray a lusty side to her screen persona as the lady pirate Anne Bonney in The Spanish Main (a role originally slated for June Duprez), which afforded her a great death scene as well as some fierce and entertaining interactions with Maureen O'Hara, as the two contended for the affections of Paul Henried.In 1940, she married her second husband, actor/announcer-turned-film executive Mike Frankovich, and the two eventually moved to Italy following the end of the Second World War. There she produced movies, as well as acting in them, including Decameron Nights (1953) (in which -- shades of Alec Guinness -- she played eight different roles). Barnes retired in 1955 to devote herself to her home life, but in the mid-'60s, at her husband's insistence, she started to work again, on television and in feature films. She resumed acting on The Donna Reed Show, in two episodes three seasons apart, and played Sister Celestine in The Trouble With Angels (1967) and its sequel, Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows (1968). Barnes' last screen appearance was in 40 Carats (1973), and during that same year she was a guest on The Tonight Show. She enjoyed a long and happy retirement, and passed away in 1998 at the age of 95, six years after her husband passed away.

Trivia: British leading lady Joan Gardner began supplementing her stage income with film roles in 1932, showing up in such quickies as Men of Tomorrow (1932) and Wedding Rehearsal (1932). Looking smashing in period costumes, Gardner was seen in the larger-budgeted Catherine the Great (1934) and The Private Life of Don Juan (1934). Perhaps her best screen assignment was as the lady friend of Roland Young in the 1937 fantasy The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1937). Joan Gardner retired from films in 1939 upon marrying producer/director Zoltan Korda.

Trivia: British actor Melville Cooper was 18 when he made his first stage appearance at Stratford-on-Avon. He settled in the U.S. in 1934, after making an excellent impression in the Alexander Korda-produced film The Private Life of Don Juan. The Pickwick-like Cooper was generally cast as snobbish, ineffectual society types or confidence tricksters; occasionally, as in 1939's The Sun Never Sets, he was given a chance at a more heroic role. Among Cooper's most famous screen portrayals were the Sheriff of Nottingham in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), the amorous Reverend Collins (altered to "Mr. Collins" to avoid censor problems) in Pride and Prejudice (1940), and the officious wedding-rehearsal supervisor in Father of the Bride (1950). Retiring from films in 1958, Melville Cooper returned to the stage, where he essayed such roles as Reverend Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest.

Trivia: British actress Athene Seyler began her career on-stage in 1908 and made her first silent film in the 1920s. Usually cast in comedies, Seyler's characters were notorious scene stealers. Toward the end of her career, she was designated a Commander of the British Empire. In 1944, she and co-writer Stephen Haggard published the still-popular guide The Craft of Comedy. Seyler died in 1990 at the age of 101.

Trivia: Bearlike, bushy-eyebrowed British actor Gibson Gowland began his stage career in England, where he was billed as T.E. Gowland. He came to America in the teens, almost immediately securing film work as a minor character actor. Director Erich Von Stroheim admired Gowland's naturalistic acting style, and cast the actor as the lead of two of his films. The better of the two was Greed (1924), in which Gowland etched an unforgettable portrait of an essentially decent man driven to madness and murder by his grasping, money-hungry wife. Gowland continued to play roughneck character parts throughout the silent era, returning to England in the 1930s. By 1940 Gibson Gowland was back in the U.S., where he spent his declining years playing bit roles in such films as The Wolf Man (1940) and Mrs. Miniver (1942).

Trivia: British actress Margaretta Scott made her first stage appearance at age 17 in 1929; five years later, she launched her lengthy film career. At first merely another of producer Alexander Korda's resident ingénues, she later carved a niche for herself in upper middle-class character roles. An early arrival on television (she was playing Shakespearean roles on the small screen as far back as 1937!), she was a fixture of the BBC historical miniseries of the 1960s and 1970s, notably as Catherine De Medici in the multipart Elizabeth R (1971). Among Margaretta Scott's handful of American film roles was Donna Lucia D'Alvadorez in the 1952 musical farce Where's Charley?

Trivia: Reversing the usual procedure, Scottish actor Edmund Breon began his film career in Hollywood in 1928, then returned to the British Isles in 1932. Breon was most often seen in self-effacing roles, usually military in nature. He was cast as Lt. Bathurst in The Dawn Patrol (1930), Colonel Morgan in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), and General Huddleston in Gaslight (1944). Among Edmund Breon's late-'40s assignments was the role of Julian Emery in the Sherlock Holmes opus Dressed to Kill (1946), an indication perhaps that the part had been slated for the real Gilbert Emery, a British actor who, like Breon, specialized in humble, passive characterizations.

Trivia: British actor Owen Nares played leads in many silent films. Following the advent of sound, he eventually became a character actor. Nares also was a matinée idol in London theater.

Trivia: Leading lady Gina Malo (born Janet Flynn in Cincinnati) appeared in a number of British films during the 1930s.

Trivia: Blonde British leading lady Heather Thatcher first appeared before the cameras in the 1915 version of The Prisoner of Zenda, but it was as a musical comedy star in West End productions that she achieved her greatest fame. From 1937 to 1944, Thatcher was a resident of Hollywood, appearing in regal, sometimes eccentric character roles. She played the Queen of France in If I Were King (1937), Lady Brandon in Beau Geste (1939), Rose Waterford in The Moon and Sixpence (1942), and Lady Delroy in Gaslight (1944). Heather Thatcher returned to the British film industry with Anna Karenina (1947), continuing to appear in supporting parts until her retirement in 1955.

Trivia: Stereotyped early on as a "silly ass" Englishman, Claud Allister perpetuated that stereotype in countless British and American films from 1929 through 1953. Allister made his Hollywood debut as Algy in 1929's Bulldog Drummond, then headed back to England to play peripheral roles in such Alexander Korda productions as The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) and The Private Life of Don Juan (1934). Back in America in 1936, Allister settled into a string of brief, frequently uncredited roles, nearly always as a supercilious high-society twit. The fruity vocal tones of Claud Allister were ideally suited to the title character in the 1941 Disney animated feature The Reluctant Dragon.

Trivia: A former reporter, dark-haired Virginia Bradford enjoyed a brief Hollywood career in the late '20s playing mainly supporting roles. A couple of good ingénue leads came in The Country Doctor (1927), in which her union with rich boy Frank Marion was opposed by the latter's stern father, and Stage Madness (1927), as Virginia Valli's long-lost daughter. She married British writer and critic Cedric Belfrage in 1929 and relocated to the United Kingdom.

Trivia: In films from 1930, Scottish character-actor Hay Petrie usually showed up in eccentric bit roles. Petrie's larger film assignments included the unspeakable Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop (1936) and the mentally defective John Aloysius Evan in 21 Days Together (1937). Many consider his portrayal of the MacLaggan in The Ghost Goes West (1936) to be the actor's finest hour and a half. Active until his death, Hay Petrie's last role of note was Uncle Pumblechook in Great Expectations (1946).

Trivia: The daughter of the Cuban Consul-General to Great Britain, Rosita Garcia (born Olga Garcia-Iniquez) was discovered by Hollywood director Rex Ingram and his wife Alice Terry, who were filming Where the Pavement Ends in Havana, Cuba. Fluent in English, Garcia was brought to Hollywood, where she appeared as an extra in Ben-Hur (1925). Ingram, however, remembered her when he was casting for his first and, as it turned out, only sound film, Baroud (aka Love in Morocco (1932). She played his daughter in this Bedouin romance and a bright future in films was expected. Alas, Rosita Garcia played only minor roles in her two remaining films, Alexander Korda's The Private Life of Don Juan (1933) and The Beachcomber (1938).

Trivia: Eccentric, high-voiced British comedienne/actress Elsa Lanchester started her career as a modern dancer, appearing with Isadora Duncan. Lanchester can be seen bringing unique and usually humorous interpretations to roles in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), opposite husband Charles Laughton; The Bride of Frankenstein (1934), where she appears both as a subdued Mary Shelley and a hissing bride; David Copperfield and Naughty Marietta (both 1935); Tales of Manhattan (1942) and Forever and a Day (1943), both with Laughton; Lassie Come Home (1943), in which she is unusually subdued as the mother; The Bishop's Wife (1947); The Inspector General and The Secret Garden (1949); and Come to the Stable (1949), for which she was nominated for an Oscar. She and Laughton are riotous together in Witness for the Prosecution (1957), for which she was also Oscar-nominated, and she also appeared in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and the Disney films Mary Poppins (1964), as the departing nanny Katie Nanna, and in That Darn Cat (1965). One of her best late performances was in Murder by Death (1976). Lanchester was also an actress at London's Old Vic, an outlandish singer, and a nightclub performer; she co-starred on The John Forsythe Show (1965-66), and was a regular on Nanny and the Professor in 1971.

Trivia: Burmese actor Abraham Sofaer had the strong semitic features and cultured mannerisms to allow him to play a variety of ethnic types. In various films and TV shows, Sofaer portrayed Jews, Arabs, Armenians, Turks and plenty of East Indians (though he usual shied away from the latter because, in his words, "it is so ridiculously easy"). Offscreen, Sofaer thought of himself as an old-school-tie Englishman. He came to London at age 19 to complete his education, secured a job as stage manager with a Shakespearian company, and went on to a British stage career in 1921 -- making his BBC television debut as early as 1936. One of his most famous portrayals in both England and on Broadway was as Disraeli in the original Helen Hayes production of Victoria Regina. Ensconced in Hollywood by the '50s, Sofaer continued to live the live of an English gentleman, playing cricket in his spare time. He also was a keen scholar of different cultures, especially Hebrew tribal customs. Among Abraham Sofaer's many films were Dreyfus (filmed in Britain in 1931), Elephant Walk (1956), The King of Kings (1961) and Head (1969); certainly Sofaer's most conspicuous film performance was as God Himself in A Matter of Life and Death (1945).

Trivia: American actor Douglas Fairbanks Sr., instilled with a love of dramatics by his Shakespearean-scholar father, was never fully satisfied with theatrical work. A born athlete and extrovert, Fairbanks felt the borders of the stage were much too confining, even when his theatrical work allowed him to tour the world. The wide-open spaces of the motion picture industry were more his style, and in 1915 Fairbanks jumped at the chance to act in the film version of the old stage perennial The Lamb. Fairbanks became the top moneymaker for the Triangle Film Company, starring in an average of 10 pictures a year for a weekly salary of $2000. He specialized in comedies--not the slapstick variety, but free-wheeling farces in which he usually played a wealthy young man thirsting for adventure. Fairbanks was a savvy businessman, and in 1919 he reasoned that he could have more control--and a larger slice of the profits -- if he produced as well as starred in his pictures. Working in concert with his actress-wife Mary Pickford (a star in her own right, billed as "America's Sweetheart"), his best friend Charlie Chaplin, and pioneer director D. W. Griffith, Fairbanks formed a new film company, United Artists. The notion of actors making their own movies led one film executive to wail, "The lunatics have taken over the asylum!", but Fairbanks' studio was a sound investment, and soon other actors were dabbling in the production end of the business. Still most successful in contemporary comedies in 1920, Fairbanks decided to try a momentary change of pace, starring in the swashbuckling The Mark of Zorro (1920). The public was enthralled, and for the balance of his silent career Fairbanks specialized in lavish costume epics with plenty of fast-moving stunt work and derring-do. While several of these films still hold their fascination today, notably The Thief of Baghdad (1924) and The Black Pirate (1926), some historians argue that Fairbanks' formerly breezy approach to moviemaking became ponderous, weighed down in too much spectacle for the Fairbanks personality to fully shine. When talkies came, Fairbanks wasn't intimidated, since he was stage-trained and had a robust speaking voice; unfortunately, his first talking picture, 1929's Taming of the Shrew (in which he co-starred with Mary Pickford), was an expensive failure. Fairbanks' talking pictures failed to click at the box office; even the best of them, such as Mr. Robinson Crusoe (1932), seemed outdated rehashes of his earlier silent successes. Fairbanks' last film, the British-made Private Life of Don Juan (1934), unflatteringly revealed his advanced years and his flagging energy. Marital difficulties, unwise investments and health problems curtailed his previously flamboyant lifestyle considerably, though he managed to stave off several takeover bids for United Artists and retained the respect of his contemporaries. Fairbanks died in his sleep, not long after he'd announced plans to come out of retirement. He was survived by his actor son Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who'd inherited much of his dad's professional panache and who after his father's death began a successful career in film swashbucklers on his own.