Trivia: Active in amateur theatricals from age three, Briton Brian Aherne studied for his craft at the Italia Conti School, making his professional bow when he was eight. Aherne would later claim that he remained an actor into adulthood (after a tentative stab at becoming an architect) mainly because he liked to sleep until ten in the morning. Successful on stage and screen in England, Aherne came to America in 1931 to appear in the first Broadway production of The Barretts of Wimpole Street. His first Hollywood film was 1933's Song of Songs, in which he appeared with Marlene Dietrich. Free-lancing throughout the 1930s, Aherne established himself as a gentlemanly Britisher who was willing to defend his honor (or someone else's) with his fists if needs be. Many of his roles were secondary, though he played the title role in 1937's The Great Garrick and was starred in a brace of Hal Roach productions in 1938 and 1939 (the actor wasn't crazy about the improvisational attitude at Roach, but he enjoyed the roles). He was Oscar-nominated for his sensitive performance of the doomed Emperor Maximillian in Juarez (1939). In the late 1950s, he put film and TV work aside for a theatrical tour as Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. Off-camera, Aherne was a licensed pilot and an aspiring writer: he penned a 1969 autobiography, A Proper Job, as well as a biography of his close friend George Sanders, A Dreadful Man. At one point in his life, Aherne was married to Joan Fontaine, but he knew the honeymoon was over when, out of pique, she ripped up a collection of his best reviews. Brian Aherne was the brother of Patrick Ahearne, a character player who showed up in such films as Titanic (1953), The Court Jester (1955) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1956).

Trivia: The daughter of playwright/screenwriter Allan Scott, actress Pippa Scott attended Radcliffe and UCLA before training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Scott made her Broadway bow in Child of Fortune, then worked steadily in the various live TV anthologies of the 1950s. Signed to a Warner Bros. contract in 1956, she made her first screen appearance as Lucy Edwards in the John Ford classic The Searchers. Alternating between TV, films and Broadway throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Scott amassed an impressive resumé, ranging from a starring assignment in the New York company of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger to recurring roles on such TV series as Mr. Lucky (1959-60) and The Virginian (1962-63 season only). Segueing gracefully into character roles in the 1970s, Scott was seen as the nursery-teacher lady friend of seasoned cop Jack Warden on the 1976 TV weekly Jigsaw John. Pippa Scott served as producer of the 1989 film Life on the Edge.

Trivia: Sydney Pollack was born to first generation Russian-Jewish Americans on July 1, 1934. After graduating from his Indiana high school, he went to New York and became a student at the Neighborhood Playhouse, a celebrated Greenwich Village school, where he studied under Sanford Meisner. He served two years in the army before returning to the Neighborhood Playhouse in 1958 as a teacher, and began appearing as an actor in live television dramas. His appearance in a John Frankenheimer-directed television production led him to a job as dialogue coach in the filmmaker's 1961 crime drama The Young Savages. He quickly moved into television, directing on programs such as "The Defenders," "The Naked City," "The Fugitive," "Dr. Kildare," and "Ben Casey" during the early and mid 1960s, and in 1965 made his feature film debut in the director's chair with The Slender Thread.Pollack established himself as a competent, if unexceptional, director in such works as This Property Is Condemned, and one sequence of the Frank Perry-directed drama The Swimmer (based on a work of John Cheever). However, his real breakthrough came in 1969 with the downbeat period drama They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, a brutal Depression-era piece set against the backdrop of a dance marathon contest, starring Jane Fonda and Gig Young. Young won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor while Pollack and Fonda were nominated for Best Director and Best Actress, respectively. (Fonda was said to have lost only because of the controversy surrounding her anti-Vietnam War activities.) Pollack again proved his skill at handling period drama four years later with The Way We Were, a romantic drama starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford that became one of the most popular serious movies of the decade. During the mid 1970s, Pollack also delved into the action genre with The Yakuza, about a kidnapping committed by Japanese gangsters. He achieved much greater success in 1975 with Three Days of the Condor, a post-Watergate suspense thriller starring Redford, Cliff Robertson and Faye Dunaway that proved an enduring favorite among genre fans as well as a hit with general audiences. Four years later, The Electric Horseman united his two top leads, Fonda and Redford, in a predictable but very successful update of the '30s screwball comedy, while Absence of Malice (1981), starring Paul Newman and Sally Field, took a much more serious tone in dealing with a story of an innocent man whose career is ruined by an ambitious reporter. In 1982, Pollack returned to comedy in top form with Tootsie, the story of an out-of-work actor (Dustin Hoffman) who achieves success by masquerading as a woman. The film scored a Best Director Oscar nomination for Pollack, as well as a win in the same category from the New York Critics Film Circle, and became the second highest grossing film of its year after E.T.. More success followed for the director with Out Of Africa (1985); starring Redford, it was one of a dwindling number of serious romantic dramas aimed at middle-class, middle-brow, middle-aged audiences that scored big at the box office. Unfortunately, another such outing with Redford, the 1990 Havana, was a notorious failure. Pollack was back on top in 1993 with The Firm, a wildly successful adaptation of John Grisham's thriller that starred Tom Cruise. However, mirroring the unpredictable fluctuations of fortune in Hollywood, his next directorial effort, a 1995 remake of Sabrina starring Harrison Ford, proved to be a colossal critical and financial flop. In 1999, Pollack and Ford reunited to make Random Hearts, a drama about a man and a woman Kristin Scott Thomas who discover that their respective spouses--who died in a plane crash--were lovers.In addition to directing, Pollack has also served as a producer on a number of films (including The Fabulous Baker Boys, Presumed Innocent, Dead Again and Sense and Sensibility) and frequently appears as an actor, both in his own films and those of other directors (he had a starring role in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives). In 1999, he could be seen portraying a wealthy man with some questionable pastimes in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.The 21st century found Pollack working far more often as a producer than as a director thanks in part to the production company he ran with director Anthony Minghella, Mirage. Those credits include such award-winning films as Iris, The Quiet American, and the big-screen adaptation of the novel Cold Mountain. After a layoff of over five years, Pollack returned to the director's chair twice in 2005. He created both his first documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry about the famous architect, and The Interpreter, an old-fashioned political thriller with Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman. In 2006 Pollack handled the producing duties on Anthony Minghella's drama Breaking & Entering, which reunited them with Cold Mountain star Jude Law. Pollack died of cancer at age 73 in May 2008.

Trivia: General-purpose actor Larry Blake made his screen debut playing a young Adolf Hitler in James Whale's troubled The Road Back (1937), only to see his scenes end up on the cutting room floor. A difficult actor to pigeonhole, Blake went on to play everything from cops to robbers in a long career that lasted through the late '70s and included such television shows as The Lone Ranger, The Adventures of Superman, Yancy Derringer, Perry Mason, Leave It to Beaver, Gunsmoke, The Munsters, The Beverly Hillbillies, Ironside, Little House on the Prairie, and Kojak. His son is Michael F. Blake, a well-known makeup artist and the biographer of silent screen star Lon Chaney.

Trivia: Short, stout Scottish actor David Thursby came to Hollywood at the dawn of the talkie era. Thursby was indispensable to American films with British settings like Werewolf of London and Mutiny on the Bounty (both 1935). He spent much of his career at 20th Century Fox, generally in unbilled cameos. Often as not, he was cast as a London bobby (vide the 1951 Fred Astaire musical Royal Wedding, in which he was briefly permitted to sing). David Thursby remained active until the mid-60s.