Trivia: Born in India to a British stockbroker and his Irish wife, Vivien Leigh first appeared on stage in convent-school amateur theatricals. Completing her education in England, France, Italy, and Germany, she studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art; not a particularly impressive pupil, Leigh continued her training with private tutors. In 1932, she briefly interrupted her pursuit of a theatrical career to marry London barrister Herbert Leigh Holman. Leigh made her professional stage bow three years later in The Sash, which never made it to London's West End; still, her bewitching performance caught the eye of producer Sydney Carroll, who cast Leigh in her first London play, The Mask of Virtue. She alternated between stage and film work, usually in flighty, kittenish roles, until being introduced to Shakespeare at The Old Vic. It was there that she met Laurence Oliver, appearing with him on-stage as Ophelia in Hamlet and Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and later together onscreen in 1937's Fire Over England. It was this picture which brought Leigh to the attention of American producer David O. Selznick, who brought his well-publicized search for the "perfect" Scarlett O'Hara to a sudden conclusion when he cast Leigh as the resourceful Southern belle in 1939's Gone With the Wind. The role won Leigh her first Oscar, after which she kept her screen appearances to a minimum, preferring to devote her time to Olivier, who would become her second husband in 1940. Refusing to submit to the Hollywood publicity machine, Leigh and Olivier all but disappeared from view for months at a time. The stage would also forever remain foremost in her heart, and there were often gaps of two to three years between Leigh's films. One of her rare movie appearances during the '50s was as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a performance for which she received a second Oscar. In her private life, however, Leigh began developing severe emotional and health problems that would eventually damage her marriage to Olivier (whom she divorced in 1960) and seriously impede her ability to perform on-stage or before the camera. Despite her struggles with manic depression, she managed to turn in first-rate performances in such films as The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961) and Ship of Fools (1965), and maintained a busy theatrical schedule, including a 1963 musical version of Tovarich and a 1966 Broadway appearance opposite John Gielgud in Ivanov. Leigh was preparing to star in the London production of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance when she was found dead from tuberculosis in her London apartment in 1967. In tribute to the actress, the lights in London's theater district were blacked out for an hour.

Trivia: Sir Ralph Richardson was one of the most esteemed British actors of the 20th century and one of his country's most celebrated eccentrics. Well into old age, he continued to enthrall audiences with his extraordinary acting skills -- and to irritate neighbors with his noisy motorbike outings, sometimes with a parrot on his shoulder. He collected paintings, antiquities, and white mice; acted Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Sophocles; and instructed theatergoers on the finer points of role-playing: "Acting," he said in a Time article, "is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing." Like the Dickens characters he sometimes portrayed, Richardson had a distinctly memorable attribute: a bulbous nose that sabotaged his otherwise noble countenance and made him entirely right for performances in tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies. In testament to his knowledge of poetry and rhyme, he married a woman named Meriel after his first wife, Muriel, died. Fittingly, Ralph David Richardson was born in Shakespeare country -- the county of Gloucestershire -- in the borough of Cheltenham on December 19, 1902. There, his father taught art at Cheltenham Ladies' College. When he was a teenager, Ralph enrolled at Brighton School to take up the easel and follow in his father's brushstrokes. However, after receiving an inheritance of 500 pounds, he abandoned art school to pursue his real love: creating verbal portraits as an actor. After joining a roving troupe of thespians, the St. Nicholas Players, he learned Shakespeare and debuted as Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice in 1921. By 1926, he had graduated to the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and, four years later, appeared on the stage of England's grandest of playhouses, London's Old Vic. Ralph had arrived -- on the stage, at least. But another four years passed before he made his first film, The Ghoul, about a dead professor (Boris Karloff) who returns to life to find an Egyptian jewel stolen from his grave. Richardson, portraying cleric Nigel Hartley, is there on the night Karloff returns to unleash mayhem and mischief. From that less-than-auspicious beginning, Richardson went on to roles in more than 70 other films, many of them classics. One of them was director Carol Reed's 1948 film, The Fallen Idol, in which Richardson won the Best Actor Award from the U.S. National Board of Review for his portrayal of a butler suspected of murder. Three years later, he won a British Academy Award for his role in director David Lean's Breaking the Sound Barrier, about the early days of jet flight. In 1962, Richardson won the Cannes Film Festival's Best Actor Award for his depiction of James Tyrone Sr., the head of a dysfunctional family in playwright Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. Because of Richardson's versatility, major studios often recruited him for demanding supporting roles in lavish productions, such as director Laurence Olivier's Richard III (1954), Otto Preminger's Exodus (1960), David Lean's Dr. Zhivago (1965), and Basil Dearden's Khartoum (1966). While making these films, Richardson continued to perform on the stage -- often varooming to and from the theater on one of his motorbikes -- in such plays as Shakespeare's Henry IV (Part I and II), Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, and Sheridan's School for Scandal. He also undertook a smorgasbord of movie and TV roles that demonstrated his wide-ranging versatility. For example, he played God in Time Bandits (1981), the Chief Rabbit in Watership Down (1978), the crypt keeper in Tales From the Crypt (1972), the caterpillar in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972), Wilkins Micawber in TV's David Copperfield (1970), Simeon in TV's Jesus of Nazareth (1977), and Tarzan's grandfather in Greystoke: the Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984). In his spare time, he portrayed Dr. Watson on the radio. Sir Ralph Richardson died in 1983 of a stroke in Marylbone, London, England, leaving behind a rich film legacy and a theater presence that will continue to linger in the memories of his audiences.

Trivia: "Handsome in a slightly eccentric fashion" was how film historian Bill Warren described Irish leading man Kieron Moore. On stage in his native country from 1941, Moore made his first British film in 1944. Though there was nothing archaic about his acting style, Moore seemed best suited to period roles: Vronsky in Anna Karenina (1948), Uriah in David and Bathsheba (1951). Moore's honest intensity enhanced the credibility of many otherwise hard-to-swallow plotlines in such "fantastic" films as Satellite in the Sky (1958) Dr. Blood's Coffin (1961), Day of the Triffids (1962) and Crack in the World (1965); his honest intensity enhanced the credibility factor of the otherwise hard-to-swallow plotlines. After his retirement from acting in 1967, Moore directed and narrated two Third World documentaries, 1975's The Progress of Peoples and 1979's The Parched Land, and also served as associate editor of the Roman Catholic periodical The Universe. He died on July 15, 2007, at the age of 82.

Trivia: The daughter of popular British musical comedy entertainer Bobby Howes, Sally Ann Howes made her first film at the age of 13. That film was Thursday's Child (1943), in which Howes was copacetically cast as a juvenile star whose fame wreaked havoc upon her family. At 15, Howes was given an opportunity for well-modulated hysterics in the multistoried horror classic Dead of Night (1945). She went on to play Kate Nickelby in Nicholas Nickelby (1947) and Kitty in Anna Karenina (1948) before finally graduating to adult roles. In 1958, Howes took time out from her film career to replace Julie Andrews in the long-running Broadway hit My Fair Lady; her "Henry Higgins" was Edward Mulhare. Sally Ann Howes was at one time the wife of composer Richard Adler, of Pajama Game and Damn Yankees fame.

Trivia: Burly, ruddy-faced Irish actor Niall MacGinnis looked as though he'd be well suited for an alley fight, but most of his film and stage roles were of an intellectual bent. Active on stage with the Old Vic, MacGinnis made his first film in 1935. For many film buffs, MacGinnis' fame rests on two dymamic leading roles. He portrayed the crafty black-arts practitioner (based on Alisteir Crowley) who falls victim to his own deviltry in the 1958 chiller Night of the Demon. And, as every Lutheran who ever attended a church-basement "movie night" well knows, Niall MacGinnis essayed the title role in the 1953 film Martin Luther.

Trivia: Born to British parents in Argentina, Martita Hunt was raised on a ranch in that South American country. She first set foot in England at age 10, when her family moved back. In 1920, one year before her stage debut with the Liverpool Repertory, Hunt appeared in an obscure 2-reel comedy, A Rank Outsider. From 1923 through 1932, she was exclusively a London stage actress; she made her talking picture debut in Reserved for Ladies (1932), then spent the remainder of her career alternating between stage and screen assignments. Whether playing the regal Queen Matilda in Becket (1964) or the balmy Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, Hunt was always every inch the lady on screen (Well, nearly always; after all, she did play the blowsy "Ma" in 1941's East of Piccadilly).

Trivia: On stage from the age of 11, Australia-born Marie Lohr eventually toted up more credits than any previous actress in British theatrical history. She settled into the English film industry in 1930, playing many a bejeweled grande dame. Lohr co-starred in the two major pre-war George Bernard Shaw adaptations, Pygmalion (1938; as Mrs. Higgins) and Major Barbara (1941; as Lady Britomart). Marie Lohr's postwar film characterizations included Grace Winslow in The Winslow Boy (1950) and stalwart POW Mrs. Dudley Frost in A Town Like Alice (1956).

Trivia: Born in Malaya (now Malaysia) to British parents, Michael Gough attended Wye Agricultural College before realigning his career goals by taking classes at the Old Vic. Gough made his first theatrical appearance in 1936 and his first film in 1948. He listed King Lear as his favorite stage role, though one suspects that he was equally fond of the character he portrayed in the 1979 Broadway hit Bedroom Farce, for which he won the Tony Award. Movie historian Bill Warren has noted that Gough, by accident or design, adopted two distinct film-acting styles. In such "straight" roles as Montrose in Rob Roy (1954), Norfolk in Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1972), Van der Luyden in The Age of Innocence (1993) and Bertrand Russell in Wittgenstein (1993), he was subtle and restrained; but when starring in such scarefests as Horrors of the Black Museum (1959) and Black Zoo (1962), his eye-bulging hamminess knew no bounds. Most contemporary filmgoers are familiar with Gough through his appearances as Alfred the Butler in the Batman theatrical features. Gough died at age 94 in the spring of 2011.

Trivia: British actor Hugh Dempster is best remembered as Col. Pickering in the theatrical production of My Fair Lady, a role he reenacted thousands of times over many years of touring. The London-born WW II RAF veteran also appeared in many films of the '30s, '40s, and '50s.

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: Helen Hayes, the First Lady of the American Theater, made most of her infrequent film appearances after an allergy to theater dust forced her to retire from the stage. Her stage career began when she was five; at age nine, she made her first Broadway appearance. By 1918, she was a star. When she married playwright Charles MacArthur in 1928, the couple came to Hollywood briefly, where she won her first Oscar for The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931). Other memorable roles during that time included her role as a nurse in A Farewell to Arms (1932) with a very young Gary Cooper, and What Every Woman Knows (1934). Unhappy in Hollywood, she returned to the stage, where she reigned as one of the outstanding American stage actresses. One of her most famous roles was Queen Victoria in Victoria Regina. She won a Tony Award the first year they were presented, in 1947, for Happy Birthday, and another in 1958 for Time Remembered. Throughout the '40s, '50s, '60s and into the '70s, Hayes made numerous television appearances, winning an Emmy as Best Actress in 1952 and starring in the short-lived comic mystery series The Snoop Sisters with Mildred Natwick in 1971. She returned to films in the 1950s, making an impressive showing as the Dowager Empress in Anastasia (1956) and winning another Oscar for her role in Airport (1970). In her later years, she often played kind but mischievous old ladies. Her son is actor James MacArthur. Hayes wrote several memoirs, prompted to write originally by the death of her daughter.

Trivia: Born in Ireland and educated in Switzerland, Austin Trevor fought for the British during WWI, then made his stage debut in America. In films from the early talkie era onward, Trevor gained a fan following with his appearances as Agatha Christie's dapper Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot in Alibi (1930) and Lord Edgeware Dies (1931). He also played A.E.W. Mason's Inspector Hanaud (a character very much in the Poirot mold) in the 1930 version of Mystery at the Villa Rose. Trevor's gift for foreign dialects kept him busy during the war years and after: In 1947, he played Vronsky in the Vivien Leigh version of Anna Karenina. On TV, he played Fowler in the sci-fi serial Quatermass 2. Austin Trevor remained active until 1966.

Trivia: British actor John Longden played the hero in a number of silent films during the late '20s and into the '30s. He later became a noted character actor. Before becoming an actor, Longden, a native of the West Indies, worked as a mining engineer.

Trivia: Educated at Switzerland's Fischer Institute, British character actor Michael Medwin was first seen on screen in 1946's Piccadilly Incident. He essayed breezy cockney bits and supporting roles in a number of war films as well as several lighthearted comedies of the Genevieve (1953) variety. With the 1967 "mod" seriocomedy Charlie Bubbles, Medwin switched hats to become a producer; his subsequent productions have included such off-the-track fare as If... (1968) and O Lucky Man (1973) etc. Even while producing, Medwin occasionally kept his hand in the acting game. British TV fans were offered a surfeit of Michael Medwin on the popular sitcoms The Army Game (1957-72) and Shoestring (1979-80).

Trivia: British lead actor, former juvenile, onscreen from age 11 in Anna Karenina (1948).

Trivia: Actor Gino Cervi appeared in his first play in 1924, and his first film eight years later. On stage, Cervi revelled in such extrovert roles as Othello and Falstaff. In films, Cervi endeared himself to audiences all over the continent in three prewar films directed by Alessandro Blassetti: Aldebaran (1935), Ettore Fieramosca (1939) and Un 'avventura di Salvatora Rosa (1939). His biggest hits of the 1940s, The Iron Crown (1940) and Four Steps in the Clouds (1942), were likewise made by Blassetti. After the war, Cervi was seen as the communist mayor in the Don Camillo films, and as Inspector Maigret in a long-running series of TV films based on the works of Georges Simenon. He was also the principal Italian voice-dubber for Sir Laurence Olivier's film appearances. Gino Cervi was the father of producer/director Tonino Cervi and the son of Italian theatre critic Antonio Cervi.

Trivia: British stage actor John Salew made the transition to films in 1939. The manpower shortage during WWII enabled the stout, balding Salew to play larger and more important roles than would have been his lot in other circumstances. He usually played suspicious-looking characters, often Germanic in origin. His screen assignments include such parts as William Shakespeare (yes, that William Shakespeare) in the comedy-fantasy Time Flies (1944), Grimstone in the Gothic meller Uncle Silas (1947), and the librarian in the psychological thriller Night of the Demon (1957). John Salew was active into the TV era, playing the sort of parts that John McGiver essayed in the U.S.

Trivia: Usually described as "the magnificent Helen Haye ", this regal British actress made her stage debut in 1898. Haye toured with the Frank Benson and Sir Beerbohm Tree repertory companies before making her London bow in 1911 as Gertrude in Hamlet. Her Broadway credits extended from 1925's The Last of Mrs. Cheyney to 1953's Anastasia, in which she beautifully cast as the Dowager Empress. After a brief flirtation with films in 1917, she plunged into moviemaking on a fairly regular basis in 1929. Her most famous screen roles include the socially proper wife of the master villain in Hitchcock's 39 Steps (1935), Countess Vronsky in Anna Karenina (1947), and the Duchess of York in Olivier's Richard III (1956). For many years, Helen Haye taught classes at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art; among her prize pupils were John Gielgud and Charles Laughton. Helen Haye should not be confused with American actress Helen Hayes.

Trivia: British actress Maxine Audley was better known for her stage work than her screen appearances. Nonetheless, she showed up in choice supporting roles in several films, starting with 1954's The Sleeping Tiger. Many of these parts were played in English-based films produced with American funding. Notable films in this vein include The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1957), The Vikings (1958) (seventh-billed, as Enid), and Our Man in Havana (1960). The one film featuring Maxine Audley that seems to be getting the most play on TV in recent years is a grim, low-budget British crime melodrama, Hell Is A City (1960).