Trivia: Ruddy-faced British star Peter Finch was raised by relatives in France, India, and Australia after his parents divorced when he was two. He had several odd jobs during the Depression before working as a comedian's stooge in vaudeville. He began working in the legitimate theater in 1935 then in 1936 debuted onscreen in the Australian film Dad and Dave Come to Town. While sporadically appearing in Australian films over the next decade-plus, Finch continued working on stage and formed his own company; eventually he also became Australia's top radio actor. His work impressed Laurence Olivier, who brought him to London in 1949 where he performed impressively on the stage and landed supporting roles in numerous films. In the mid-'50s he began getting better film roles, becoming one of Britain's leading male stars. Between 1956-71 he won the British Film Academy "Best Actor" award four times. For his portrayal of a gay doctor in Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) he received a "Best Actor" Oscar nomination. His last film was Network (1976); during a promotional campaign for the film, he died of a massive coronary. That year he was posthumously awarded the Oscar for "Best Actor"--making him the first actor in Academy Award history to do so.

Trivia: Usually cast as nymphets or seductresses in low-budget horror films, blonde, baby-faced actress Linda Hayden launched her career at age 17 playing an over-sexed 15-year-old in the lurid melodrama Baby Love (1969). Hayden was a regular in the British-made Confessions series of sex comedies, of which only the first, Confessions of a Window Cleaner, ever made it to the U.S. Few of her subsequent films have had U.S. release. Hayden also periodically appears on stage and television.

Trivia: American actress Shelley Winters was the daughter of a tailor's cutter; her mother was a former opera singer. Winters evinced her mom's influence at age four, when she made an impromptu singing appearance at a St. Louis amateur night. When her father moved to Long Island to be closer to the New York garment district, Winters took acting lessons at the New School for Social Research and the Actors Studio. Short stints as a model and a chorus girl led to her Broadway debut in the S.J. Perelman comedy The Night Before Christmas in 1940. Winters signed a Columbia Pictures contract in 1943, mostly playing bits, except when loaned to United Artists for an important role in Knickerbocker Holiday (1944). Realizing she was getting nowhere, she took additional acting instructions and performed in nightclubs.The breakthrough came with her role as a "good time girl" murdered by insane stage star Ronald Colman in A Double Life (1947). Her roles became increasingly more prominent during her years at Universal-International, as did her offstage abrasive attitude; the normally mild-mannered James Stewart, Winters' co-star in Winchester '73 (1950), said after filming that the actress should have been spanked. Winters' performance as the pathetic factory girl impregnated and then killed by Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun (1951) won her an Oscar nomination; unfortunately, for every Place in the Sun, her career was blighted by disasters like Behave Yourself (1951).Disheartened by bad films and a turbulent marriage, Winters returned to Broadway in A Hatful of Rain, in which she received excellent reviews and during which she fell for her future third husband, Anthony Franciosa. Always battling a weight problem, Winters was plump enough to be convincing as middle-aged Mrs. Van Daan in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), for which Winters finally got her Oscar. In the 1960s, Winters portrayed a brothel madam in two films, The Balcony (1963) and A House Is Not a Home (1964), roles that would have killed her career ten years earlier, but which now established her in the press as an actress willing to take any professional risk for the sake of her art. Unfortunately, many of her performances in subsequent films like Wild in the Streets (1968) and Bloody Mama (1970) became more shrill than compelling, somewhat lessening her standing as a performer of stature.During this period, Winters made some fairly outrageous appearances on talk shows, where she came off as the censor's nightmare; she also made certain her point-of-view wouldn't be ignored, as in the moment when she poured her drink over Oliver Reed's head after Reed made a sexist remark on The Tonight Show. Appearances in popular films like The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and well-received theater appearances, like her 1974 tour in Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, helped counteract such disappointments as the musical comedy Minnie's Boys (as the Marx Brothers' mother) and the movie loser Flap (1970). Treated generously by director Paul Mazursky in above-average films like Blume in Love (1974) and Next Stop Greenwich Village (1977), Winters managed some excellent performances, though she still leaned toward hamminess when the script was weak. Shelley Winters added writing to her many achievements, penning a pair of tell-all autobiographies which delineate a private life every bit as rambunctious as some of Winters' screen performances.The '90s found a resurgence in Winters' career, as she was embraced by indie filmmakers (for movies like Heavy and The Portrait of a Lady), although she found greater fame in a recurring role on the sitcom Roseanne. She died of heart failure at age 85 in Beverly Hills, CA, in early 2006.

Trivia: Irish stage, film and TV actor Colin Blakely worked as a sporting goods salesman before turning to acting in his late 20s. Starting out in theatres in Belfast and Wales, he made his 1959 London debut in Sean O'Casey's Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy. Blakely spent most of the 1960s associated with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. Making his first film, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, in 1960, Blakely kept busy before the cameras until the mid-1980s in an exhausting variety of characterizations. Among his more sizeable movie roles was Dr. Watson in 1969's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Colin Blakely's final appearance was in the Masterpiece Theatre TV multiparter Paradise Postponed (1986).

Trivia: Entering films with 1960's Sink the Bismarck, British actor John Stride joined the ranks of reliable "authority" character players. He was kept busy in such productions as Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) (as Dad), Roman Polanski's MacBeth (1971) (as Ross), Juggernaut (1974), A Bridge too Far (1977) John Wayne's Brannigan (1975), Flash Gordon (1980) (as Zogi) and Chevy Chase's Oh Heavenly Dog (1984). In The Omen (1976), Stride enjoyed a few of that horror film's least harrowing moments in the role of a psychiatrist, while in the 1978 cartoon feature Lord of the Rings, Stride was heard but not seen as Treddan. John Stride's film roles were usually unstressed, but he was shown to better effect on the British TV series The Main Chance and The Wilde Alliance.

Trivia: Gangling Scottish character actor Graham Crowden seemed born to play over-sanctimonious priests, looney scientists and cadaverous undertakers. Following Shakespearean stage work, Crowden made his film bow in 1961's Why Bother to Knock? He became a favorite of film director Lindsay Anderson, who showed Crowden to excellent if bizarre advantage in such films as If (1969), O' Lucky Man! (1973) (in several roles) and Brittania Hospital (1982). Among Graham Crowden's non-Lindsay Anderson films were The Ruling Class (1973), The Little Prince (1974), Jabberwocky (1981), For Your Eyes Only (1982) and The Company of Wolves (1984).

Trivia: Supporting actor, onscreen from 1969.