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: Actors Studio-graduate Michael J. Pollard was first thrust upon the public as Maynard G. Krebs' funky cousin on the 1959 TV series Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959). The leprechaunish Pollard had been hired as a potential replacement for Bob Denver (aka Maynard), who'd been drafted; but when Denver flunked his physical and returned to the series, Pollard was shown the exit. He went on to co-star in the 1961 musical Bye Bye Birdie (1961), then made his film debut in Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (1962). Pollard earned an Oscar nomination for his performance as the moronic C.W.Moss in Bonnie and Clyde (1967); he followed this triumph by sharing co-star billing with Robert Redford in Little Fauss & Big Halsey (1969), and by essaying the role of Billy the Kid in Dirty Little Billy (1972). In all the above-mentioned films, as well as his many TV appearances in series like The Andy Griffith Show, Lost in Space and Star Trek, Pollard essentially played the same character: a slow-witted, stammering child-man, ever out of step with an unfeeling world. Audiences eventually tired of Pollard's one-note characterizations. No longer a star, Michael J. Pollard has continued accepting sizeable character roles in films, and was seen as Leonard the handyman in the 1986 TV sitcom Leo and Liz in Beverly Hills. In 1990, Michael J. Pollard was reunited with his Bonnie and Clyde co-star Warren Beatty in Dick Tracy, playing the amusing supporting part of police wiretapper Bug Bailey (also in the Tracy cast was another B&C alumnus, Estelle Parsons).

Trivia: German actor Wolfgang Preiss first stepped before the cameras in 1942, then disappeared from the view of moviegoers for nearly a dozen years. Preiss gained belated celebrity in the 1960s as the demonic title character in the "Dr. Mabuse" film series, beginning with 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960). In American films, he tended to be typecast as high-ranking Nazis. Wolfgang Preiss' most prominent assignments in this vein were the roles of Erwin Rommel in Raid on Rommel (1971) and General Von Runstedt in A Bridge Too Far (1977).

Trivia: Character actor Peter Carsten has been onscreen from the '50s.

Trivia: John Alderton is a British leading man who has appeared on stage, television, and occasionally in lighter film roles. He began his film career in 1962.

Trivia: Scots actor James Donald made his first professional stage appearance sometime between 1935 and 1938, but would not achieve theatrical stardom until 1943's Present Laughter. Donald began making films in 1941, hitting his stride with his portrayal of Theo Van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956). He is most fondly remembered for his incisive performances in a trio of POW dramas: Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), The Great Escape (1963), and King Rat (1965). He also made a handful of memorable TV appearances, the last of which was the role of Murdstone in the 1970 all-star adaptation of David Copperfield. After a long period of inactivity, James Donald died of stomach cancer at the age of 75.