Trivia: A cultured actress renowned for her elegance and dignity, Deborah Kerr was one of the leading ladies of Hollywood's Golden Age. Born Deborah Kerr-Trimmer in Helensburgh, Scotland, on September 30, 1921, she was first trained as a dancer at her aunt's drama school in Bristol, England. After winning a scholarship to the Sadlers Wells Ballet School, Kerr made her London stage debut at age 17 in Prometheus. Meanwhile, she developed an interest in acting and began getting bit parts and walk-ons in Shakespeare productions. While continuing to appear in various London stage plays, Kerr debuted onscreen in 1940 and went on to roles in a number of British films over the next seven years, often playing cool, reserved, well-bred young ladies. Her portrayal of a nun in Black Narcissus (1947) earned a New York Film Critics Best Actress award and led to an invitation from Hollywood to co-star opposite Clark Gable in The Hucksters. She remained in Hollywood, playing long-suffering, prim, proper, ladylike types until 1953, when she broke her typecast mold by portraying a passionate adulteress in From Here to Eternity, a part for which she had fought. Kerr's range of roles broadened further after that, and she began to appear in British films again. In 1953, Kerr debuted on Broadway to great acclaim in Tea and Sympathy, later reprising her role in the play's 1956 screen version. That same year, she starred as an English governess sent to tutor the children of the King of Siam in one of the most popular films of her career, The King and I. Kerr retired from the screen in 1969, having received six Best Actress Oscar nominations without an award, although she did receive an honorary Oscar in 1994. She had been honored with a special BAFTA award three years earlier in Britain, and, in 1998, she was further honored in her native land with a Companion of the Order of the British Empire. Kerr, who graced the screen one last time in the The Assam Garden (1985), died of complications related to Parkinson's Disease in October 2007. She was 86.

Trivia: The son of British actor Roy Redgrave, Michael Redgrave attended Clifton College and Cambridge University. While teaching high school, Redgrave became involved with amateur theatricals. A professional by 1934, Redgrave made his London debut in Love's Labours Lost in 1936, and that same year appeared in his first film, Hitchcock's The Secret Agent (1936). It was thanks to his leading role in another Hitchcock effort, The Lady Vanishes (1938), that Redgrave achieved stardom. He was excellent in several starring vehicles of the 1940s, and at his very best in his 20-minute turn as a paranoid ventriloquist in Dead of Night (1946). An attempt to become a Hollywood star via Mourning Becomes Electra (1947) was scuttled due to the film's poor box office take, though Redgrave did earn an Oscar nomination for his performance. After starring in The Dam Busters, Britain's most popular 1955 movie release, Redgrave settled into film character roles, continuing all the while to headline on stage. He also wrote and directed several theatrical productions throughout his career, and was the author of four books: the instructional The Actor's Ways and Means, the novel The Mountebank's Tale, and two autobiographies. In 1959, Redgrave was knighted for his achievements in his chosen field. Long married to actress Rachel Kempson, Michael Redgrave was the father of actors Vanessa, Corin and Lynn Redgrave; and the grandfather of actresses Jemma Redgrave, Natasha and Joely Richardson.

Trivia: Fans of the Austin Powers movies take note -- your favorite satirical character had a direct source: master spy Jason King as played by Peter Wyngarde. The stage, television, and movie veteran, whose work goes back to the 1940s, has played a multitude of roles in a vast range of works, but has found only one such part that ever took with the public -- that of the foppish author, investigator, and counter spy Jason King, first in the series Department S and then in his own series, Jason King. The glib, rakish King spent two seasons helping to solve mysteries and save the free world while juggling an array of women. Born Cyril Lewis Goldbert in Marseilles in 1933, Wyngarde had a French mother and an English father who was in the diplomatic service. As the son of a diplomat, Wyngarde spent his childhood moving around the world. The turning point in his early life came in 1941, when he was left in the care of another family in Shanghai just as the Japanese captured the city; he spent four brutal years in the Lung-Hai prison camp and more than a year recovering after the British liberated him. Wyngarde tried to accede to his parents' wishes by attending university, but instead he was drawn to acting. As early as 1946, he had small roles in touring productions, and in the second half of the 1940s, he worked in such plays as Macbeth (with Peggy Mount and Frank Woodfield), Deep Are the Roots, and The Winslow Boy. Wyngarde's movie and television careers were as uneven as his stage career was busy and crowded. After a promising start, much of his work in the Spanish-shot epic Alexander the Great (1956) was cut from the final release print. Wyngarde managed to get a role in the short-lived television series Epilogue to Capricorn at the end of the 1950s, but it was the stage that kept him most busy. His New York stage debut came in 1959, in the award-winning Duel of Angels with Vivien Leigh. Exposure from the play earned him various one-off television appearances. Wyngarde was very circumspect about his movie work after Alexander the Great, but among the films he did do in the 1960s were The Siege of Sidney Street (1960, based on the same incident that inspired the shoot-out at the end of Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much [1934]), produced by Monty Berman; Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961); and Sidney Hayers' Burn, Witch, Burn! (1962). Among the more widely seen of his television appearances from the mid-'60s was his work in The Avengers episode "Epic," in which Wyngarde played an insane silent-era movie director who kidnaps Mrs. Emma Peel. Lightning finally struck for Wyngarde in 1969 when he was cast in the ITC television series Department S, (produced by Monty Berman) in the role of Jason King, a well-spoken, sardonic, randy mystery author who works for a top-secret Interpol investigative unit. Sporting long hair and a flamboyant moustache, and clad in an array of late '60s/Swinging London-style cravats, ruffled shirts, crushed velvet outfits, kaftans, etc., Wyngarde was a veritable peacock. The character's eccentric mannerisms, coupled with his look, soon made Wyngarde the star of the show, eclipsing his two co-stars, Joel Fabiani and Rosemary Nicols; indeed, many viewers felt that Wyngarde's character dressed more flashily than Nicols' character did. When looked at today, Jason King's manner of dress, coupled with his fierce sex drive and even the occasional use of such period terms as "groovy" makes him the very obvious model for Austin Powers. That went double in the series that was spun out of Department S, simply called Jason King, in which he operated solo but worked from bed-to-bed with a succession of women in seemingly every episode, keeping up a pace that even Sean Connery's James Bond would have had a hard time matching. Jason King lasted a single season, but it became something of a pop-culture phenomenon and also an albatross around Wyngarde's neck. He was a heartthrob for lots of women viewers -- especially British housewives -- but he was never able to get another series. He was too closely identified with the role of Jason King; even in the mid-'70s, years after the show aired, his name turned up as part of a gag in a Monty Python sketch, in which lunch with Peter Wyngarde is part of a prize in a contest aimed at housewives. He returned to the stage, where he was as busy as ever, and his work continued to be diverse, including a major success in Butley. He made some film appearances as well, but didn't return to series television until the mid-'80s, when he played the villain in a four-part Doctor Who story, "Planet of Fire." The production of the Austin Powers movies, however, and the reissue of Department S on DVD in England and Australia ensured that the character of Jason King would not soon be forgotten, even as Wyngarde headed toward his seventh decade as an actor.

Trivia: Megs Jenkins began alternating between the British stage and the British screen in 1933. A pleasant-faced lady of motherly demeanor, Jenkins made a good living playing characters well beyond her real age throughout the 1940s. One of her best, and least typical, roles during this period was as the luckless Nurse Woods in the classic murder mystery Green for Danger (1946). Megs Jenkins was just as impressive 20 years later in the role of Mrs. Bedwin in the mammoth musical Oliver (1968).

Trivia: Child actor Martin Stephens was, on surface, your typical polite, cherub-faced British kid. There was nothing to alter this opinion in Martin's first film, Another Time, Another Place (1958), nor in his next few films. Then came Village of the Damned (1960), in which Martin was cast as a coldblooded, steely-eyed telepathic child who, as a result of a scientific experiment gone awry, organizes the other children in his village to overtake the world. Such was the power of this performance that Village of the Damned is one of the very few films in history (outside of The Good Son) where the audience is rooting for a child to be killed off! Martin followed this eerie performance with his portrayal of a young aristocrat guided into deadly behavior by a malevolent ghost in The Innocents (1961). At one point in the early '60s, Martin was the most popular child actor in England, but by the mid '60s he lost all interest in performing. At last report, Martin Stephens was contentedly employed as a London architect.

Trivia: Pamela Franklin was born in Japan, where her British father was a busy importer/exporter. Spending her early years in several Far East ports of call, Franklin was bundled off to England to study at the Elmhurst School of Ballet. At age 11, she made her motion-picture bow as the enigmatic "possessed" child, Flora, in 1961's The Innocents. Her American TV debut occurred in the 1963 Wonderful World of Disney two-parter "The Horse Without a Head." There was nothing Disneyesque about Franklin's portrayals of teen murderesses in both 1964's The Third Secret and 1965's Our Mother's House. Her first grown-up role (near-nude scene and all) was as the kidnap victim in Night of the Following Day (1969), but she was back to adolescents in Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) as the rebellious, sexually inquisitive private-school student Sandy. Though still active in TV, Pamela Franklin made her last film in 1976.