Trivia: Perhaps the actress most widely identified with corsets and men named Cecil, Helena Bonham Carter was for a long time typecast as an antiquated heroine, no doubt helped by her own brand of Pre-Raphaelite beauty. With a tumble of brown curls (which were, in fact, hair extensions), huge dark eyes, and translucent pale skin, Bonham Carter's looks made her a natural for movies that took place when the sun still shone over the British Empire and the sight of a bare ankle could induce convulsions. However, the actress, once dubbed by critic Richard Corliss "our modern antique goddess," managed to escape from planet Merchant/Ivory and, while still performing in a number of period pieces, eventually became recognized as an actress capable of portraying thoroughly modern characters. Befitting her double-barreled family name, Bonham Carter is a descendant of the British aristocracy, both social and cinematic. The great-granddaughter of P.M. Lord Herbert Asquith and the grandniece of director Anthony Asquith, she was born to a banker father and a Spanish psychotherapist mother on May 26, 1966, in London. Although her heritage may have been defined by wealth and power, Bonham Carter's upbringing was fraught with misfortune, from her father's paralysis following a botched surgery to her mother's nervous breakdown when the actress was in her teens. Bonham Carter has said in interviews that her mother's breakdown first led her to seek work as an actress and she was soon going out on auditions.She made her screen debut in 1985, playing the ill-fated title character of Trevor Nunn's Lady Jane. Starring opposite Cary Elwes as her equally ill-fated lover, Bonham Carter made enough of an impression as the 16th century teen queen to catch the attention of director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, who cast her as the protagonist of their 1986 adaptation of E.M. Forster's A Room With a View. The film proved a great critical success, winning eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. The adulation surrounding it provided its young star with her first real taste of fame, as well as steady work; deciding to concentrate on her acting career, Bonham Carter dropped out of Cambridge University, where she had been enrolled.Unfortunately, although she did indeed work steadily and was able to enhance her reputation as a talented actress, Bonham Carter also became a study in typecasting, going from one period piece to the next. Despite the quality of many of these films, including Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet (1990) and two more E.M. Forster vehicles, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991) and Howards End (1992), the actress was left without room to expand her range. One notable exception was Getting It Right, a 1989 comedy in which she played a very modern socialite. Things began to change for Bonham Carter in 1995, when she appeared as Woody Allen's wife in Mighty Aphrodite and then had the title role in Margaret's Museum. Bonham Carter's work in the film prompted observers to note that she seemed to be moving away from her previous roles, and although she still appeared in corset movies -- such as Trevor Nunn's lush 1996 adaptation of Twelfth Night -- she began to enhance her reputation as a thoroughly modern actress. In 1997, she won acclaim for her performance in Iain Softley's adaptation of The Wings of the Dove, scoring a Best Actress Oscar nomination in the process.After playing a woman stricken with Lou Gehrig's disease opposite offscreen partner Kenneth Branagh in the poorly received The Theory of Flight (1998) and appearing with Richard E. Grant in A Merry War (1998), Bonham Carter landed one of her most talked-about roles in David Fincher's 1999 Fight Club. As the object of Brad Pitt's and Edward Norton's desires, the actress exchanged hair extensions and English mannerisms for a shock of spiky hair and American dysfunction, prompting some critics to call her one of the most shocking aspects of a shocking movie. But Bonham Carter was soon gearing up for another surprising turn in director Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes (2001). If critics were shocked by her unconventional role in Fight Club, they would no doubt be left dumbfounded with her trading of extravagant period-piece costumes for Rick Baker's makeup wizardry as the simian sympathyser to Mark Wahlberg's Homo sapiens' plight.Burton would become Bonham Carter's partner both in film and in life, as the two would go on to cohabitate and have children, as well as continue to collaborate on screen. The actress would appear in Burton's films like Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland, Sweeny Todd, and Dark Shadows. Her often spooky personna in Burton's films no doubt helped her score the role of Beatrix Lestrange in the Harry Potter films, but Bonham Carter would also continue to take on more down to earth parts -- though for an actress of Bonham Carter's image, those roles included that of Queen Elizabeth in The King's Speech, and the crazed Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. She played Madame Thénardier in the 2012 adaptation of Les Misérables, and tackled screen icon Elizabeth Taylor in the television movie Burton & Taylor (2013).

Trivia: One of Canada's fastest-rising actors, Callum Rennie (also known as Callum Keith Rennie) came into the business at an age when most actors are considered to be heading steadily over the hill. Rennie had his breakthrough when he was 34, starring alongside Sandra Oh in Mina Shum's acclaimed Double Happiness (1994). Nominated for a Genie (Canada's equivalent of the Oscar) for his portrayal of Mark, the endearingly geeky guy who falls in love with Oh's character, Rennie was effectively introduced to audiences across Canada, many of whom wondered where he had been for so long.Born in Sunderland, Tyne-and-Wear, England, on September 14, 1960, Rennie moved to Edmonton, Alberta, with his family when he was barely out of diapers. Raised as the second of three sons in a middle-class family, he first thought about becoming an actor at the age of 18 and began appearing in local theatre productions. Unfortunately, any career aspirations he had took a back seat to an addiction to alcohol, one that would control his life until he was 33. Drinking heavily, Rennie continued his involvement with the theatre, appearing in a number of stage productions, but his work -- which often met with substantial acclaim -- was largely overshadowed by his addiction. Things finally began to change for Rennie in 1993, when he got into a bar fight that resulted in glass in his left eye and a vow to quit drinking. His ensuing sobriety was accompanied by a change in his career, marked by an increasing number of supporting roles on various TV programs, including a recurring spot on the CBC's My Life as a Dog, for which he won a Genie. Rennie's 1994 screen breakthrough in Double Happiness opened the door for more screen work, including Bruce McDonald's wickedly good but woefully little-seen Hard Core Logo (1997), a pseudo rock documentary that cast Rennie as an aging punk rocker. He also landed a starring role on Due South, an popular Canadian TV series that cast him as a hard-bitten Chicago cop.In 1998, Rennie won one of the most important roles of his career to date in Don McKellar's Last Night. An acclaimed film about the end of the world, it cast the actor as a man intent on trying every possible sexual variation imaginable in the time he has left. Rennie won a Genie for his performance, which imbued the character with more charm than smarm and captured both his efficacious self-assurance and surprising awkwardness. The film also allowed the actor to collaborate again with Sandra Oh, as well as director David Cronenberg; the following year, Cronenberg cast him in a substantial role in eXistenZ.As the 21st century began, Rennie could be seen in The Last Stop as well as Christopher Nolan's breakthrough hit Memento. He jumped back and forth between small and big-screen projects such as Bliss, Dark Angel, The Butterfly Effect, Blade: Trinity, The X-Files, Battlestar Galactica, and 24, finding one of his biggest successes when he was cast in the AMC mystery series The Killing as Rick Felder.

Trivia: Known for her intense intelligence and the range of unconventional characters she has brought to life, Australian actress Judy Davis has had a fairly brilliant career. Born in Perth, Western Australia, on April 23, 1955, Davis rebelled against her Catholic upbringing by leaving home at the age of 17 to join a rock band, which toured across Asia for six months. Upon her return to Australia, she soon gave up her singing career to attend the Western Australia Institute of Technology and then concentrated on another branch of performing at the National Institute of Dramatic Art. At NIDA she trained with the likes of Mel Gibson, with whom she starred in a school production of Romeo and Juliet.In her subsequent stage work, Davis gravitated toward characters whose significant traits alternated between steel-like strength and vacillating vulnerability: She played the title roles in Lulu and Piaf. In films from 1977, Davis ascended to stardom as Sybilla Melvin in director Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career (1979), a performance that won her several awards, including the Australian and British equivalents of the Oscar. She was likewise showered with industry and film-festival honors for her work in Hoodwink (1981), The Winter of Our Dreams (1982), Heatwave (1982), and Kangaroo (1984), appearing in the latter film with her husband, Colin Friels. She was nominated for an Emmy for her portrayal of young Golda Meir in the TV miniseries A Woman Called Golda (1982), and earned her first Oscar nomination for her interpretation of the enigmatic Adela Quested in David Lean's A Passage to India in 1984.Described by one colleague as "the patron saint of modern emotions," Davis has never done anything by halves: She was a lusty George Sand in Impromptu (1991), the junkie wife of William Lee in Naked Lunch (1991), a bibulous, self-destructive Hollywood ghostwriter in Barton Fink (1991), an overbearing ex-spouse in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives (1992) (the second of her Oscar-nominated turns), and a hostage from Hell in The Ref (1994). Davis' films during the second half of the '90s were marked by a notably uneven quality, and she could be seen in everything from the wildly idiosyncratic Children of the Revolution (1996) to some other disappointing collaborations with Allen, Deconstructing Harry (1997) and Celebrity (1998). In 1999, Davis received another Emmy nomination for her work in Dash and Lilly, in which she starred as Lillian Hellman opposite Sam Shepard as Dashiell Hammett. Nonetheless, that particular award eluded her grasp.During the first few years of the new millennium, Davis stepped down and maintained a somewhat lower profile than in prior years, placing a much greater emphasis on telemovies than she had in the nineties, and limiting herself to lower-profile theatrical features. She gleaned positive notices - and won a Golden Globe - for her portrayal of the adult Judy Garland in the telemovie Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows (2001), opposite Hugh Laurie and Victor Garber.Two years later, Davis received yet another Golden Globe nomination (her fifth nod, including the Garland win) for her portrayal of Nancy Reagan (opposite James Brolin as Ronald) in the unexpectedly controversial TV biopic The Reagans.A few scattered theatrical features highlighted this period, such as the twin 2001 releases The Man Who Sued God and Susan Seidelman's Gaudi Afternoon. Davis then joined the ensembles of two A-list features in 2006. The Jennifer Aniston-Vince Vaughn vehicle The Break-Up - a comedy about the constant sparring between a couple of live-in lovers - hit cinemas in June 2006 to mixed critical receptions, and struck gold at the box, doubtless riding high on the popularity of its twin leads. In the picture, Davis plays Marilyn Dean, Aniston's slave-driving boss at an art gallery. In that same year's hotly-anticipated but underperforming Marie Antoinette, Davis put her inimitably chilly stamp on the role of La Comtesse de Noailles. She appeared in the miniseries The Starter Wife, and in 2011 she co-starred opposite Geoffrey Rush in the drama The Eye of the Storm and appeared in the well-reviewed spy film Page Eight. In 2012 she reteamed with Woody Allen for the first time in nearly fifteen years, appearing in his Italian comedy To Rome With Love.Judy Davis married Scotch actor Colin Friels (A Good Man in Africa) in 1984.