Trivia: Energetic red-haired leading lady Susan Hayward (born Edythe Marrener) specialized in portraying gutsy women who rebound from adversity. She began working as a photographer's model while still in high school, and when open auditions were held in 1937 for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind, she arrived in Hollywood with scores of other actresses. Unlike most of the others, however, she managed to become a contract player. Her roles were initially discouragingly small, although she gradually work her way up to stardom. For her role in Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947) -- the first in which she played a strong-willed, courageous woman -- Hayward received the first of her five Oscar nominations; the others were for performances in My Foolish Heart (1950), With a Song in My Heart (1952), I'll Cry Tomorrow (1956), and I Want to Live (1958), winning for the latter. Although the actress maintained her star status through the late '50s, the early '60s saw her in several unmemorable tearjerkers, and although she formally retired from films in 1964, that retirement was not a permanent one - as she later returned to the screen for a few more roles including parts in a couple of telemovies and one theatrical feature during the early 1970s. Her ten-year marriage to actor Jess Barker ended in 1954 with a bitter child-custody battle, and she died in 1975 after a two-year struggle with a brain tumor, one of several cast and crew members from 1956's The Conqueror to be stricken with cancer later in life.

Trivia: Born in India to a British military officer, Michael Craig was in his teens when he entered films in 1949 as an extra, or, as Leslie Halliwell so euphemistically put it, a "crowd artist." That same year, Craig made his inaugural stage appearance in The Merchant of Venice. Groomed for stardom by the Rank Organisation, he began receiving speaking parts in 1954. On the whole, his stage work, which consisted largely of Shakespeare, was more rewarding than his film efforts. As leading man in such films as Upstairs and Downstairs (1959) and Mysterious Island (1961), Craig was required to do little more beyond looking handsome and dependable. One of his few movie roles of substance was in The Angry Silence (1960), which he co-wrote (he would later contribute to the script of 1981's The Killing of Angel Street). Michael Craig was seen to better advantage in later years as a character actor.

Trivia: Actress Diane Baker's well-scrubbed, all-American beauty has frequently been employed as a cool veneer for film characters of smoldering passions. The daughter of actress Dorothy Harrington, Diane was studying at USC when she was tapped for her first film role as Millie Perkins' sister in 20th Century-Fox's The Diary of Anne Frank (1959); the studio then cast Diane as Pat Boone's "girl back home," who didn't get to go along on Boone's Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959). She remained at Fox until 1962, essaying the title role in the studio's re-remake of Tess of the Storm Country (1961). Her most famous screen assignment was at Columbia, where she portrayed axe murderess Joan Crawford's supposedly well-balanced daughter in Straitjacket (1963). Diane became a documentary director in the 1970s with Ashanya, and a producer with Never Never Land (1982). The best of Diane Baker's latter-day roles was the media-savvy politico mother of the kidnap victim in Silence of the Lambs (1991).

Trivia: Forceful character actor Edward Judd was born to English parents in the port city of Shanghai. Beginning his career in the Orient, Judd rose to modest fame on the British stage. He made his first starring film appearance in the 1948 culture-clash drama The Guinea Pig (aka The Small Voice). Judd's subsequent film roles found him playing against his somewhat brutish fame and brooding personality with wit and perspicacity. He worked frequently in science fiction films, notably X the Unknown (1957), The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) and First Men in the Moon (1964). To date, Judd's last film was 1987's The Kitchen Toto, still another culture-clash effort, this one filmed in Kenya. On television, Edward Judd was a regular on the British sci-fi series 1990.

Trivia: Trained at the Chekhov Theater School, British actor Paul Rogers entered films on a small-time basis in 1932. Rogers' "real" career began when he made his London stage debut in 1938. Following World War II service in the Royal Navy, Rogers established himself as a versatile Shakespearean actor, playing everything from Hamlet to Bottom. A frequent visitor to Broadway, he won a Tony award in 1967 for his performance in The Homecoming. His film roles include William Pitt in Beau Brummel (1954), Irish journalist Frank Harris in Trial of Oscar Wilde (1960) and Lt. Ratcliffe in Billy Budd. In 1987, Paul Rogers starred on the British TV series Portherhouse Blue.

Trivia: A native of Cyprus, actor Paul Stassino appeared in many British films of the '60s and early '70s. He also appeared on British television. He eventually left films to open a casino in Athens.

Trivia: British actress Gwen Nelson started her long career with the Old Vic company in the mid-'20s after training for the opera. She went on to play character roles on stage, television, and in feature films. She was often cast as a good-natured, genteel woman.

Trivia: Breaking into show business at 16 as the assistant to a "drunken magician" British character actor Peter Madden held down jobs ranging from race-car driver to stand-up comedian before settling into acting. He was frequently cast as slightly tattered politicians, as witness Nothing but the Best (1964) and Dr. Zhivago (1965). His deadpan portrayal of a Tibetan lama was one of the highlights of the otherwise patchy Hope-Crosby vehicle Road to Hong Kong (1962). Espionage fans will remember Peter Madden as Hobbs, John Drake's (Patrick McGoohan) immediate superior, on the mid-1960s TVer Secret Agent.

Trivia: Onscreen from 1948 through the mid-late 1980s, solemn-faced Marianne Stone probably appeared in more films than any other British actress her age. Though she had a few major roles early on, Stone quickly settled into featured parts and bits, often unbilled. She was equally adept at playing lower-class housewives, harpies, officious shop clerks, and ritzy society reporters, and is particularly remembered for her portrayal of Vivian Dankbloom in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962). Stone was married to London show-business columnist Peter Noble.