Trivia: The son of a Spanish waiter and an Italian housekeeper, Molina was born in London on May 24, 1953. Educated at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama, he began his career as one half of a street-corner comedy team but then turned to acting. While most thesps start at the bottom and ascend the ladder, Molina is an anomaly: he began at the top of the heap, first earning professional credibility (and his pedigree) as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and debuting cinematically in no less than Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), as the devious South American guide who leaves Harrison Ford for dead in an ancient temple before meeting his own end, courtesy of a particularly nasty booby trap. His subsequent resume for the rest of that decade reads like a "best of 1980s International Film": supporting roles in Mike Leigh's Meantime (1981), Peter Yates's Eleni (1985) , Richard Donner's Ladyhawke (1985),Chris Bernard's Letter to Brezhnev and Dusan Makavejev's Manifesto (1989), to name only a few. His contribution to Chris Bernard's gently underplayed, low-budget comedy Brezhnev (1985) (which, like Raiders, takes advantage of his slightly dark, Mediterranean complexion) is particularly a standout. He plays a Russian sailor who picks up Margi Clarke's Liverpool blue-collar worker Teresa King during leave, and whose only comprehensible line gives the film its biggest laugh: "Leeverpool. Bittles... Ahhhhh." Molina would spend the next several years appearing in a number of films, like An Education, as well as a number of TV projects like Harry's Law, Law & Order: L.A., and Roger & Val Have Just Got In.But Molina's most impressive contribution to cinema came in 1986, when he joined two fellow Brits, director Stephen Frears and actor Gary Oldman - and turned everyone's head in the process - in Prick Up Your Ears. That film, adapted from eccentric playwright Joe Orton's autobiography, casts Molina as Kenneth Halliwell, Orton's homosexual lover and eventual murderer, opposite Oldman. Practically unrecognizable as the bald, severely unhinged Halliwell, Molina is at once terrifying and pathetic, and gleaned a number of positive notices for his performance, though, for some odd reason, it was criminally overlooked at awards ceremonies and failed to earn Molina any acting laurels. A few years later, Molina joined the cast of Not Without My Daughter (1990). In this true-life account (adapted from Betty Mahmoody's memoir), he plays Moody, a Persian husband who takes his American wife (Sally Field) and daughter to Iran under the guise of "vacation," and virtually imprisons them, forcing her to plot escape. The role (and film) gleaned some controversy for its portrayal of Islam, but (the bearded) Molina glistened with dark, brooding intensity characteristic of the actor's finest work. Molina offered more sympathetic portrayals in such films as Mike Newell's Enchanted April (1992), Species (1995), and Mira Nair's The Perez Family (1995), as a Cuban immigrant struggling to make a new life for himself in Miami. In Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights, Molina evoked a deranged playboy precariously teetering on the edge of insanity - a role that further evinced boundless courage. 1999's ridiculous Dudley-do-Right, however (in which Molina) played the villain), didn't serve him as well; neither he, nor Brendan Fraser, nor Sarah Jessica Parker managed to rise above the silly script. Far more impressive (albeit smaller in scope) was the actor's sophomore collaboration with Anderson, that year's Magnolia, in a fleeting role as Solomon Solomon, the owner of the electronics shop where William H. Macy's Donnie Smith works. During 1999 and thereafter, Molina attempted to break into television sitcoms (1999's Ladies Man, 2002's Bram and Alice), but none of these efforts panned out. He continued to garner positive notices during this period, however, for his roles in such films as 2000's Chocolat and 2002's Frida. Molina earned a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination (finally!) in the latter, for his portrayal of chronically unfaithful painter Diego Rivera. In 2004, the actor traveled to megaplexes again, as the infamous Doc Oc in the critically-acclaimed box-office smash Spider-Man 2, and although ostensibly a defiantly commercial piece of Hollywood fluff, the film performed well on all fronts - critically and commercially. Considered by some to be the greatest example of the superhero genre ever produced, no small amount of the rave reviews given to the film were directed at Molina for his spot-on portrayal of the maniacal comic-book villain; The Los Angeles Times's Kenneth Turan rhapsodized, "As played by Alfred Molina with both computer-generated and puppeteer assistance, Doc Ock grabs this film with his quartet of sinisterly serpentine mechanical arms and refuses to let go."That same year (albeit in a much different cinematic arena and catering to a much different audience --- such is the magic of Molina's versatility), the actor played opposite John Leguizamo as Victor Hugo Puente, a sensationalism-hungry news anchor willing to do almost anything for ratings, in Sebastian Cordero's well-received psychological thriller Crónicas. Molina highlighted the cast of no less than six features throughout 2005 and 2006, but his highest-profile film from this period was Ron Howard's The Da Vinci Code, in which he plays the obese Bishop Aringarosa This May '06 release (adapted from Dan Brown's bestseller) sharply divided critics (most found it average). That same year, Molina contributed to two films by major directors: Kenneth Branagh drew on his background as a trained RSC member by casting Molina as Touchstone in his screen adaptation of Shakespeare's comedy of errors As You Like It, and he receives second billing (after Richard Gere) in Lasse Hallstrom's docudrama The Hoax. The picture tells the early-1970s story of Clifford Irving's (Gere) attempt to write and market a phony autobiography of Howard Hughes, with the assistance of right-hand man Richard Susskind (Molina). Molina married British actress Jill Gascoine (Northern Exposure, BASEketball) in 1985, who is sixteen years his senior. They have two sons.

Trivia: Best known as one-half of the British sketch comedy team French and Saunders and as the star of the long-running sitcom The Vicar of Dibley, the unabashedly full-figured, rubber-faced Welsh comedienne Dawn French began life in the harbor town of Holyhead, Anglesey, Wales, on October 11, 1957. As a young woman, French trained at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, where she famously met fellow student Jennifer Saunders, then another aspiring comic. The two not only forged a lifelong friendship, but teamed up at the tail end of the 1970s as a comedy act. French suggested that they audition in response to a Stage magazine ad for up-and-coming comedians; this led instantly to a niche at the infamous Comic Strip Club, performing alongside Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer, Peter Richardson, and others on a weekly basis. A regular gig with this troupe on its BBC "movie spoof" sketch comedy series The Comic Strip Presents -- which ran from 1982 to 1988, with a four-year revival in 1990 and a three-year revival in 1998 -- so furthered public awareness of French and Saunders and dramatically heightened their popularity that a spin-off series was naturally inevitable. French & Saunders debuted in 1987 to off-the-chart ratings and sensational critical reviews. The pair scripted and starred in episodes; French's most famous and beloved bits included caricatures of Catherine Zeta-Jones, Madonna, and Cher. French debuted in feature films circa 1987, alongside Saunders and many of her Comic Strip cohorts, in the jet-black comedy Eat the Rich -- a spoof of cannibalism with guest spots by Paul McCartney, Koo Stark, Robbie Coltrane, and others. The film, however, was understandably reviled by critics on both sides of the Atlantic and disappeared quickly, which may explain why French gravitated back to television. Alongside her ongoing involvement in French & Saunders as a writer and performer (which continued through the first several years of the new millennium), French launched a second series in 1994, The Vicar of Dibley. The program cast her as the supremely unconventional and irreverent (female) vicar of the title -- a new arrival in a village of eccentric people -- with a flair for devouring mounds of chocolate and tossing out potshots and double-entendres left and right. Vicar, like French & Saunders, scored with the public and press and lasted 13 years, finally wrapping in January 2007. In 2004, French -- perhaps having fully rebounded from the Eat the Rich debacle -- returned in full glory to feature films, this time more respectably and to improved critical reception. She lent a supporting role as The Fat Lady (in the painting) in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) and voiced Mrs. Beaver in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005). French also essayed the role of a therapist in Alek Keshishian's Love and Other Disasters, starring Brittany Murphy and Matthew Rhys. She voiced Miss Forcible in the 2007 animated fantasy Coraline. The characterization of The Fat Lady in Harry Potter is not a unique one for French. Early on, the comic actress used her weight (which has visibly increased over the years) as a key source of her schtick, not only in her BBC series but also in television advertisements. In late 2001, she did spots in the U.K. for Terry's Chocolate Orange segment candies which had her notoriously refusing to share, and an ad for Terry's Chocolate Orange Snowballs which had French rolling down a giant ski slope until she resembled a massive snowball. Off-camera, French is a vociferous proponent of "full-figured" women and markets the oversized female clothing line Sixteen 47 throughout Great Britain.