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).

Trivia: Burly British actor Oliver Reed juggled over 60 film roles in 40 years and a full-blooded social life of women, booze, and bar fights, both of which became fodder for stories about one of England's darker leading men and villainous character actors. After getting his start in cult monster movies from Hammer Studios, Reed forged a body of work most associated with acclaimed directors Ken Russell, Richard Lester, and Michael Winner, in which he was able to sidestep his typecasting as a brooding heavy. Reed remains one of the only prominent British thespians never to amass any stage work, making him a pure film actor. Reed was born on February 13, 1938, in Wimbledon, England, a nephew of film director Sir Carol Reed (The Third Man). An antsy type given to partying with friends, Reed did not complete high school. He ended up taking on a variety of blue-collar jobs, including nightclub bouncer and hospital porter, and even a short career in pugilism. In 1960, he suddenly burst into films, showing up in the background of the Hammer films The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll and Sword of Sherwood Forest, and as a gay ballet dancer in The League of Gentlemen. His first starring role came with Hammer in 1961, as the title character in Curse of the Werewolf. Years later, he would serve as narrator on a full Hammer retrospective, putting his sonorous speaking voice to good use and paying homage to his roots. Such early work paved the way for a steady flow of bad-guy roles in horrors, costume dramas, and suspense thrillers. Reed's intense, glowering features could also be manipulated for believable ethnic characterizations. Titles such as These Are the Damned and Pirates of Blood River (both 1962) followed. His first of six collaborations with Michael Winner came with The Girl Getters in 1966. In 1968, he won his first leading role in a universally well-received film, the Oscar-winner Oliver!, directed by his uncle, in which he played murderous thief Bill Sikes. Despite complaints of nepotism, Reed insisted he had to persuade his uncle to cast him, even though his credentials closely matched the needs of the part. Another watershed moment came in 1969, when Ken Russell cast him as one of the leads in his adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love. While the film was a well-received treatise on sexuality and marriage, it achieved some notoriety for featuring the first-ever full-frontal male nudity in an English-language commercial film. Reed and Alan Bates engage in a memorable nude wrestling match that audaciously fleshes out the film's themes. Reportedly, Russell had planned to scrap the scene, worried about censor backlash, until Reed wrestled him into including it, literally pinning him down, in Russell's kitchen. Still, Reed told the Los Angeles Times he had to drink a bottle of vodka before he could relax enough to film the scene. The actor and director would work together five more times, including The Devils (1971) and Tommy (1975), in which Reed played Frank Hobbs. Reed was also known for portraying musketeer Athos in three of Richard Lester's film versions of Alexandre Dumas' famous tale. Reed appeared in The Three Musketeers (1973) and its sequel, The Four Musketeers (1975), which originally had been planned as one long movie. He revived the role in 1989 for The Return of the Musketeers. During filming of the windmill scene in the first film, Reed was nearly killed when he received an accidental stab wound in the neck. Add in 36 facial stitches following a bar fight in 1963, and the actor had more than his share of scrapes. Reed peaked in many ways in the mid-'70s, and had to settle on genre work for much of his career. Films such as Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hipe (1980), Venom (1982), Gor (1987), and Dragonard (1987) became his regular source of paychecks for many years. For every respite, such as Nicolas Roeg's Castaway (1987) or Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989), there was a return to familiar territory with garbage like House IV: Home Deadly Home (1991). Reed's most familiar role for modern audiences was also his last. The actor appeared in Oscar-winner Gladiator (2000) as Proximo, the amoral merchant who trains the enslaved fighters to kill and be killed. When he died midway through production, Reed unwittingly became part of a groundbreaking three-million-dollar endeavor by director Ridley Scott to digitally re-create his likeness in order to film Proximo's death scene. A three-dimensional image of Reed's face was scanned into computers so it could smile and talk, then digitally grafted onto a body double. Reed died in Malta, where Gladiator was being filmed, on May 2, 1999, the result of a heart attack brought on by one last night of hard drinking, which included three bottles of downed rum and arm wrestling victories over five sailors. He was survived by his third wife, Josephine Burge, as well as a son (Mark) and a daughter (Sarah), one each from his previous two marriages.

Trivia: Lead actress, onscreen from the '50s.

Trivia: Warren Mitchell might be the finest actor in England of his generation, which overlaps with Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, Albert Finney, Michael Caine, Ben Kingsley, and Alan Bates. Mitchell is certainly among the best of his profession from that era and the rival to any of those actors; the difference is that Mitchell has made his career almost exclusively in England. Born Warren Misell to an Orthodox Jewish family in London in 1926, he grew up over his grandmother's fish-and-chips shop in the East End. Misell's mother died when he was 13 and his father did his best holding the family together on his own. At around the same time, young Misell was partly alienated from his family when he chose to fulfill his obligation to the football team for which he was playing by participating in a game on Yom Kippur, the most sacred day in the Jewish calendar. Misell made it on his own as an actor through some lean years; after training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he married, had a family, and watched as his wife got steadier work than he did for many years while he raised the family. Misell's earliest professional credits on stage and screen date from 1954, when the 29-year-old actor, having changed his name to Warren Mitchell, appeared in a production of Can-Can at the Coliseum in London and made an appearance in the feature film Passing Stranger. He did The Threepenny Opera at the Royal Court Theatre, found some television work, and played ever larger roles in movies through the 1950s. Science fiction fans will remember him as Professor Crevett in The Crawling Eye; it was one of many avuncular and older-man roles that Mitchell played successfully in his thirties, following a pattern slightly similar to that of his colleague Lionel Jeffries. His screen work fairly exploded in the late '50s and kept Mitchell busy in character roles for the next decade. American audiences of a certain age may remember him as Abdul in the Beatles's feature film Help! (1965), and he also did some delightful work in episodes of The Avengers. In 1966, Mitchell got the role that turned him into a star when he won the lead in the television series Till Death Us Do Part. In the series, created by Johnny Speight, Mitchell played belligerent, bigoted, working-class, right-wing zealot Alf Garnett, head of a family that included his long-suffering wife, slightly bubble-headed daughter, and dedicated socialist son-in-law. Mitchell became an instant star on the series, which was an immediate hit in England and was popular enough to attract attention from America, where it was translated by producers Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin into All in the Family and became a star vehicle for Carroll O'Connor, in Alf's transatlantic equivalent, Archie Bunker. Mitchell ended up playing the role of Alf Garnett in numerous follow-up seasons and revivals, as well as a feature film, and the part became a defining point in his career. It also proved to be very controversial, as Mitchell brought so much humanity, and just enough gentleness, to the role of Alf Garnett that one could not be entirely repulsed by the character. Many pundits and columnists felt that he made the bigoted, racist figure too appealing, but others found him to be a compelling presence in the highly repulsive, deeply flawed character, which is the goal of any real actor. Luckily for his career, Mitchell was able to quickly move into other, better, and different roles, on stage and television, and now he had the recognition to get the offers. This culminated with a wave of recognition, highlighted by the Society of West End Theatre Award (the British equivalent of the Tony Award) for his portrayal of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman in 1979. Amid essaying roles in a vast range of modern and classical works, Mitchell also portrayed Shylock in the public television production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. In more recent years, Mitchell has been acclaimed for his King Lear as well, and entered the 21st century as one of the most highly regarded and popular actors in England.

Trivia: Short of stature and, during the 1970s, sporting thick-lensed glasses, British funnyman Ronnie Corbet spent 16 years as half of one of his country's most popular comic acts, the Two Ronnies. He has also had success on his own, as a comedian, a television personality, and an actor. Corbett was discovered as a young man by interviewer David Frost in the 1960s. Recognizing him for a talented comic, Frost booked Corbett on his television show many times. Corbett teamed with the much larger Ronnie Barker in the early '70s, and their television variety show debuted in 1971. The two could not be described as a comedy team in the normal sense, rather than working as a complementary pair of opposites like Abbott and Costello or Laurel and Hardy, the two were total opposites and often worked independently; somehow, their unlikely combination worked and their show ran through 1986. During the run of their hour-long show, several videotape retrospectives were released. The Two Ronnies continue to perform together, but Corbett has also successfully worked on his own on television, stage, and in feature films. He made his movie debut with a small role (opposite fellow neophyte Anthony Newly) in the comedy Top of the Form (1953). Corbett next appeared in Casino Royale (1967). Corbett's other film credits include Fierce Creatures (1997).