Trivia: Discovered at age 3 while attending a production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle by a director who noticed his intense concentration. Mother accompanied him on set for all his projects until he began filming the TV series Skins when he was 17. Visited slums in the Kenyan city of Nairobi in 2010 to raise awareness about poverty as part of Christian Aid Week. Appeared in the video for the song "Lez be Friends" by the British musical-comedy act Midnight Beast in 2010. Modelled eyewear in a advert for the 2010 Tom Ford spring collection after appearing in Ford's film A Single Man. Played a villain in a 2014 commercial for Jaguar, part of a series that also featured Ben Kingsley and Tom Hiddleston.

Trivia: Actress Felicity Jones paid her dues as a teenager, playing a recurring character on the low-budget U.K. fantasy series The Worst Witch. Her next big break would be a TV role, as well, but part of Zoe Brogan on the drama Cape Wrath would come with considerably more prestige. Jones then branched out with a part in the 2008 of the novel Brideshead Revisited and a prominent role in the 2009 Stephen Frears film Chéri. Jones co-starred in the well-received romantic drama Like Crazy, and scored her first Oscar nomination for her work in 2014's The Theory of Everything playing the wife of celebrated scientist Stephen Hawking.

Trivia: Born on December 31, 1937, as the only son of a baker, Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins was drawn to the theater while attending the YMCA at age 17, and later learned the basics of his craft at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1960, Hopkins made his stage bow in The Quare Fellow, and then spent four years in regional repertory before his first London success in Julius Caesar. Combining the best elements of the British theater's classic heritage and its burgeoning "angry young man" school, Hopkins worked well in both ancient and modern pieces. His film debut was not, as has often been cited, his appearance as Richard the Lionhearted in The Lion in Winter (1968), but in an odd, "pop-art" film, The White Bus (1967).Though already familiar to some sharp-eyed American viewers after his film performance as Lloyd George in Young Winston (1971), Hopkins burst full-flower onto the American scene in 1974 as an ex-Nazi doctor in QB VII, the first television miniseries. Also in 1974, Hopkins made his Broadway debut in Equus, eventually directing the 1977 Los Angeles production. The actor became typed in intense, neurotic roles for the next several years: in films he portrayed the obsessed father of a girl whose soul has been transferred into the body of another child in Audrey Rose (1976), an off-the-wall ventriloquist in Magic (1978), and the much-maligned Captain Bligh (opposite Mel Gibson's Fletcher Christian) in Bounty (1982). On TV, Hopkins played roles as varied (yet somehow intertwined) as Adolph Hitler, accused Lindbergh-baby kidnapper Bruno Richard Hauptmann, and the Hunchback of Notre Dame.In 1991, Hopkins won an Academy Award for his bloodcurdling portrayal of murderer Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. With the aplomb of a thorough professional, Anthony Hopkins was able to follow-up his chilling Lecter with characters of great kindness, courtesy, and humanity: the conscience-stricken butler of a British fascist in The Remains of the Day (1992) and compassionate author C. S. Lewis in Shadowlands (1993). In 1995, Hopkins earned mixed acclaim and an Oscar nomination for his impressionistic take (done without elaborate makeup) on President Richard M. Nixon in Oliver Stone's Nixon. After his performance as Pablo Picasso in James Ivory's Surviving Picasso (1996), Hopkins garnered another Oscar nomination -- this time for Best Supporting Actor -- the following year for his work in Steven Spielberg's slavery epic Amistad. Following this honor, Hopkins chose roles that cast him as a father figure, first in the ploddingly long Meet Joe Black and then in the have-mask-will-travel swashbuckler Mask of Zorro with Antonio Banderas and fellow countrywoman Catherine Zeta-Jones. In his next film, 1999's Instinct, Hopkins again played a father, albeit one of a decidedly different stripe. As anthropologist Ethan Powell, Hopkins takes his field work with gorillas a little too seriously, reverting back to his animal instincts, killing a couple of people, and alienating his daughter (Maura Tierney) in the process.Hopkins kept a low profile in 2000, providing narration for Ron Howard's live-action adaptation of Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas and voicing the commands overheard by Tom Cruise's special agent in John Woo's Mission: Impossible 2. In 2001, Hopkins returned to the screen to reprise his role as the effete, erudite, eponymous cannibal in Ridley Scott's Hannibal, the long-anticipated sequel to Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs (1991). The 160-million-dollar blockbuster did much for Hopkins' bank account but little for his standing with the critics, who by and large found Hannibal to be a stylish, gory exercise in illogical tedium. Worse yet, some wags suggested that the actor would have been better off had he followed his Silence co-star Jodie Foster's lead and opted out of the sequel altogether. Later that year, the moody, cloying Stephen King adaptation Hearts in Atlantis did little to repair his reputation with critics or audiences, who avoided the film like the plague.The long-delayed action comedy Bad Company followed in 2002, wherein audiences -- as well as megaproducer Jerry Bruckheimer -- learned that Chris Rock and Sir Anthony Hopkins do not a laugh-riot make. But the next installment in the cash-cow Hannibal Lecter franchise restored a bit of luster to the thespian's tarnished Hollywood career. Red Dragon, the second filmed version of Thomas Harris' first novel in the Lecter series, revisited the same territory previously adapted by director Michael Mann in 1986's Manhunter, with mixed but generally positive results. Surrounding Hopkins with a game cast, including Edward Norton, Ralph Finnes, Harvey Keitel and Emily Watson, the Brett Ratner film garnered some favorable comparisons to Demme's 1991 award-winner, as well as some decent -- if not Hannibal-caliber -- returns at the box office.Hopkins would face his biggest chameleon job since Nixon with 2003's highly anticipated adaptation of Philip Roth's Clinton-era tragedy The Human Stain, a prestige Miramax project directed by Robert Benton and co-starring Nicole Kidman, fresh off her Oscar win for The Hours. Hopkins plays Stain's flawed protagonist Coleman Silk, an aging, defamed African-American academic who has been "passing" as a Jew for most of his adult life. Unfortunately, most critics couldn't get past the hurtle of accepting the Anglo-Saxon paragon as a light-skinned black man. The film died a quick death at the box office and went unrecognized in year-end awards.2004's epic historical drama Alexander re-united Hopkins and Nixon helmer Oliver Stone in a three-hour trek through the life and times of Alexander the Great. The following year, Hopkins turned up in two projects, the first being John Madden's drama Proof. In this Miramax release, Hopkins plays Robert, a genius mathematician who - amid a long descent into madness - devises a formula of earth-shaking proportions. That same year's comedy-drama The World's Fastest Indian saw limited international release in December 2005; it starred Hopkins - ever the one to challenge himself by expanding his repertoire to include increasingly difficult roles - as New Zealand motorcycle racer Burt Munro, who set a land speed record on his chopper at the Utah Bonneville Flats. The quirky picture did limited business in the States but won the hearts of many viewers and critics.He then joined the ensemble cast of the same year's hotly-anticipated ensemble drama Bobby, helmed by Emilio Estevez, about the events at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles just prior to RFK's assassination. Hopkins plays John Casey, one of the hotel proprietors.Hopkins long held true passions in arenas other than acting - specifically, painting and musical composition. As for the former, Hopkins started moonlighting as a painter in the early 2000s, and when his tableaux first appeared publicly, at San Antonio's Luciane Gallery in early 2006, the canvases sold out within six days. Hopkins is also an accomplished symphonic composer and the author of several orchestral compositions, though unlike some of his contemporaries (such as Clint Eastwood) his works never supplemented movie soundtracks and weren't available on disc. The San Antonio Symphony performed a few of the pieces for its patrons in spring 2006.Hopkins would remain a prolific actor over the next several years, appearing in films like The Wolfman, Thor, and 360.Formerly wed to actress Petronella Barker and to Jennifer Lynton, Hopkins married his third wife, actress and producer Stella Arroyave, in March 2003.

Trivia: Chameleon-like British actor Ben Kingsley has proven he can play just about anyone, from Nazi war criminals to Jewish Holocaust survivors to quiet British bookshop owners. For many viewers, however, he will always be inextricably linked with his title role in Gandhi, a film that won him an Oscar and the undying respect of critics and filmgoers alike.Of English, East Indian, and South African descent, Kingsley was born Krishna Bhanji on December 31, 1943 in Snaiton, Yorkshire, England. The son of a general practitioner, Kingsley started out in amateur theatricals in Manchester before making his professional debut at age 23. In 1967 he made his first London appearance at the Aldwych theater and then joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, devoting himself almost exclusively to stage work for the next 15 years (with the exception of two obscure films, Fear Is the Key [1972] and Hard Labour [1973]). When asked about his favorite stage roles, he listed Hamlet, The Tempest's Ariel, and Volpone's Mosca.American audiences first saw Kingsley in 1971, when he made his Broadway debut with the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1982, actor and director Richard Attenborough selected Kingsley for the demanding title role in the epic Gandhi. The film swept the international awards that year, earning the 39-year-old actor overnight success. Among the several awards he was honored with, Kingsley won a Best Actor Oscar. Adamantly refusing to recycle the same roles, Kingsley spent the next decade playing a wide spectrum of characters. Among his more notable parts were an Arab potentate in Harem (1985), an introverted bibliophile and "social rebel" in Turtle Diary (also 1985), a spy of little import in Pascali's Island (1988), an incorruptible American vice president in Dave (1992), New York gangster Meyer Lansky in Bugsy (1992), a Jewish bookkeeper in Schindler's List (1993), and a suspected Nazi war criminal in Death and the Maiden (1994). So many of his characters have been either taciturn or downright villainous that, upon being cast in a good-guy role in the escapist sci-fier Species (1995), Kingsley publicly expressed his relief in several widely circulated magazine articles.In the latter half of the 1990s, Kingsley continued to embrace a variety of eclectic roles, with turns as the Fool in Trevor Nunn's 1996 film adaptation of Twelfth Night, a media mogul in the 1997 made-for-HBO satire Weapons of Mass Distraction, and the barbarous barber Sweeney Todd in John Schlesinger's 1998 The Tale of Sweeney Todd. Kingsley also took Broadway by storm with his one-man show Edward Kean (later taped for cable), which was directed by his wife, Alison Sutcliffe. Though Kingsley had retained the variety in his career that he had so diligently pursued, the ever-sharp actor remained as focused as ever heading into the new millennium. For his role as a manipulative criminal with a strong power for persuasion in Sexy Beast (2001), Kingsley earned both a Golden Globe nomination and a third Oscar nomination. His fourth Academy nod would come just 2 years later with his role as a proud Arab-American patriarch in The House of Sand and Fog. Along with the Best Actor Oscar nomination, the role also netted Kingsley Golden Globe and Screen Actor's Guild nominations. Kingsley lost his Oscar bid for House to Sean Penn, who collected the statue for his contribution to Clint Eastwood's Mystic River. Over the next several years, Sir Ben Kingsley's acting choices often demonstrated the degree of difficulty that A-listers may encounter when seeking multilayered roles in respectable films, with solid scripts and direction; like many of his contemporaries, the magnificent thespian Kingsley turned up in more than one schlocky Hollywood stinker after House of Sand and Fog -- from Jonathan Frakes's ugly Thunderbirds revamp (2004) to Uwe Boll's horrendous, gothic fx-extravaganza BloodRayne (2006) (as evil ruler Lord Kagan). If anyone could ferret out the creme-de-la-creme of roles, however, Kingsley could, and he simultaneously proved it with contributions to the interesting 2005 biopic Mrs. Harris (as the ill-fated Scarsdale Diet Doctor) and the wondrous documentary I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life and Legacy of Simon Rosenthal (2007).2007 marked a banner year for Kingsley - his most active in quite some time, with contributions to no less than seven key pictures. In the most prominent, the John Dahl-directed crime comedy You Kill Me, Kingsley plays Frank Falenczyk, an alcoholic hit man who travels to Los Angeles to dry out, takes a job in a morgue, and strikes up a relationship with a relative of one of his victims. That same year, Kingsley re-projected his innate ability to essay ethnic roles convincingly, with his turn as one of two Russian police offers investigating an espionage case on a train, in Brad Anderson's thriller Trans-Siberian.Later that same year, Kingsley appeared opposite lead Dan Fogler in English director Chase Palmer's Number Thirteen - a period drama about Alfred Hitchcock's ill-fated attempt to realize one of his first movie projects.

Trivia: Started acting in his teens after a girl he was dating signed them up to audition for the Dutch version of the musical Chicago.Started working for theatre company Toneelgroep Amsterdam after graduating from Maastricht Academy of Dramatic Arts.Was awarded a Golden Calf for Best Actor at the Netherlands Film Festival in 2013 for his role in the feature film Wolf.Speaks Dutch, Arabic, French and English.