Trivia: Irish actress Saoirse Ronan got her start in her native land on the television series The Clinic and Proof before parlaying her small-screen success into a career in Hollywood. Her first big-screen gig came in 2007, with a small supporting role in the Amy Heckerling romantic comedy I Could Never Be Your Woman, and later that year she could be seen as the 13-year-old version of the character Briony Tallis in the highly acclaimed drama Atonement, adapted from the Ian McEwan novel. Her work in that film garnered her strong notices, as well as Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress. She followed up that critically acclaimed work by taking the central role of the ill-fated adolescent girl, Susie Salmon, in Peter Jackson's 2008 adaptation of Alice Sebold's acclaimed novel The Lovely Bones. In 2011 she was the title character, a young assassin, in the action film Hanna which reteamed her with Atonement director Joe Wright. In 2012, she appeared in Neil Jordan's vampire tale Byzantium. The following year, she played the lead in The Host, a scifi thriller based on a novel by Stephenie Meyer. In 2014, Ronan had a small, but pivotal role, in Wes Anderson's ensemble film The Grand Budapest Hotel. She earned her second Oscar nomination in 2015 for her work in John Crowley's Brooklyn.

Trivia: With soulful, saucer-like eyes and a coy smile that hints at playfulness, Oscar-nominated actress Emily Watson burst onto the scene with her shattering performance in Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves, a role that almost went to period-piece queen Helena Bonham Carter. Born the daughter of an architect and an English professor in Islington, a borough of London, England, in January 1967, a sheltered upbringing initially led Watson to seek studies in English Literature. After studying in Bristol for three years, Watson made her first bid for drama school only to face disheartening rejection. After three years of working as a waitress and a secretary, she was eventually accepted into the London Drama Studio. It was during this early phase in her career that Watson would meet future husband Jack Waters.Launching her career upon joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1992, Watson soon set her sights on film. Fate intervened when actress Helena Bonham Carter pulled out of director Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves at the last minute due to the film's explicit sexuality. Despite her lack of big-screen experience, Watson landed the female lead in the film after only one brief screen test. Playing a spiritually driven woman whose oil-rig worker husband (Stellan Saarsgaard) becomes paralized, she exhibited a brash, religiously transcendent sexuality, stunning art-house audiences and recieving an Oscar nomination in the process. Though the subsequent marriage dramedy Metroland proved to be a nostalgia trip by comparison, Watson's honest performance again earned accolades. Watson's reputation continued to grow with her intimate, conflicted portrayal of the Multiple Sclerosis-stricken concert cellist Jacqueline Du Pre in Hilary and Jackie (1998), for which she was again Oscar-nominated, as well as when she played the love interest of an eccentric chess champion in The Luzhin Defence (2000).After joining the talented ensemble of Robert Altman's acclaimed comedy-mystery Gosford Park, Watson made serious inroads into Hollywood, first in 2002 as the love interest of a temperamental (to say the least) small-business owner played by Adam Sandler in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love. That same fall also saw her playing the love interest of a murderous psychopath in Brett Ratner's Hannibal prequel Red Dragon, and re-teaming with Metroland co-star Christian Bale in the little-seen sci-fi action vehicle Equilibrium. After doing voice work for Tim Burton's animated gothic Corpse Bride -- alongside the very woman she replaced in Breaking the Waves, Helena Bonham-Carter -- she returned to the British art-house scene with strong performances in such films as Separate Lives and director Richard E. Grant's autobiographical Wah-Wah.She appeared in the biopic Miss Potter, and the family fantasy film The Water Horse. In 2008 she was part of Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut Synecdoche, New York. Three years later she played the mother of a boy devoted to his beloved equine mate in Steven Spielberg's adaptation of War Horse, and in 2012 she appeared in Joe Wright's adaptation of Anna Karenina. The following year, she appeared in the film adaptation of the popular book The Book Thief. In 2014, she played Jane Hawking's mother in The Theory of Everything.

Trivia: One of Britain's more underrated actors, Samuel West first became known to international audiences in 1992 as the perpetually unfortunate Leonard Bast in the acclaimed Ismail Merchant/James Ivory adaptation of E.M. Forster's Howards End.The son of actors Timothy West and Prunella Scales, West was born in London on June 19, 1966. Taking to science rather than to acting when he was growing up, he attended Oxford University, where he planned to study physics. However, an interest in acting finally took hold, and West switched his studies to English and became involved with the University Experimental Theatre Club and Dramatic Society, touring Africa with it in 1986.Upon his graduation in 1988, West secured his first film role as a German aristocrat in Reunion. Although the film was critically well-received, it was largely unseen, and West subsequently did most of his work on television. His acclaimed performance in Howards End, for which he earned a British Academy Award nomination, gave him both greater respect and recognition. He went on to appear in a number of films of varying quality, doing particularly notable work in Persuasion (1995), Carrington (1995), and Jane Eyre (1996). He parodied the sort of period dramas in which he had made his name with his role as an upper-crust prig in Stiff Upper Lips in 1998, and that same year he finally broke through to modern dress in the Canadian film Rupert's Land, earning a Genie nomination for his portrayal of a clean-cut lawyer reluctantly dragged on an odyssey across the wilds of British Columbia. The following year, he was back in breeches and a frock coat for his bit part in Notting Hill, and that same year he could be seen taking to the sea in the popular British miniseries, Horatio Hornblower. In addition to his screen roles, West is known in his native country for his work on the stage, television, and radio, endearing many a listener to his deep, mellifluous voice.

Trivia: All expectations of staid English cinema aside, British actor Adrian Scarborough often forsook more conservative projects to essay a series of genial supporting roles (usually a common everyman) in edgy, occasionally provocative material, nearly always in his native U.K. His resumé includes a turn as biographer Daniel Farson in John Maybury's Love is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998), garage owner Frank (the angelic title character's brother-in-law) in Mike Leigh's Vera Drake (2004), and a minor role in Richard Eyre's visceral psychological drama Notes on a Scandal (2006). Scarborough also tackled period work with a bit part in Shekhar Kapur's period drama Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007).