Trivia: Possessing a great dignity tempered by the humorous sparkle in her clear blue eyes, Jessica Tandy was among the grand dames of stage and screen. Like many of her peers, her distinguished acting career stretched back to the early 1930s, though rather than make her name on film, Tandy won much of her fame with her work on the stage.Born in London in 1909, Tandy studied drama at the Ben Greet Academy of Acting. She was sixteen when she made her professional stage debut in London, and just twenty-one when she took her first bow on Broadway. In 1932, Tandy made her first film appearance in Indiscretions of Eve (1932), but due to her extremely busy stage schedule did not appear in her second film, Murder in the Family, until 1938. In 1942, she married Canadian stage and screen actor Hume Cronyn (she had previously been married to actor Jack Hawkins from 1932 until 1940), and they remained professional and personal partners until Tandy's death in 1994.The couple moved to the States shortly after their marriage, and made their Hollywood debut together in Fred Zinnemann's The Seventh Cross (1944). For a long time, Tandy had her greatest success on the stage, beginning with her Tony-winning portrayal of Blanche DuBois in the first production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947. Despite the acclaim she received, she was passed by in favor of Vivien Leigh for the play's screen version. Tandy continued to work on the stage and appeared in a few more films through 1951, after which her film career became sporadic. One of her rare appearances was in Hitchcock's The Birds in 1963.It was after she won her second Tony while appearing with Cronyn in The Gin Game (1978) that Tandy's film career was renewed with a supporting role in John Schlesinger's Honky Tonk Freeway in 1981. The following year she appeared in The World According to Garp, and then starred in Merchant Ivory's The Bostonians in 1984. In the meantime, she won her third Tony for her work in 1983's Foxfire (she would win an Emmy in 1987 for the same role in the play's televised version). Tandy's film career then experienced a complete resuscitation in 1985, when she and Cronyn co-starred in Ron Howard's Cocoon; four years later, the then-80-year-old Tandy won an Oscar for her feisty performance as a Southern lady who befriends her black chauffeur in Driving Miss Daisy. She went on to have notable roles in films like Fried Green Tomatoes in 1991 and 1992's Used People. Before succumbing to ovarian cancer in September of 1994, Tandy completed the made-for-TV movie To Dance With the White Dog, in which she starred with Cronyn, and Nobody's Fool, the latter of which was dedicated to her memory.

Trivia: Following an apprenticeship in regional theater in his native Australia, Murray Matheson first appeared on the London stage in 1935's And on We Go. His first film was 1945's The Way to the Stars. Matheson's brittle acting style was somewhat reminiscent of Noel Coward and Cyril Ritchard (whom Matheson closely resembled); accordingly, most of his film and TV roles were cut from the Coward/Ritchard waspish, epigrammatic cloth. His many roles included an amusing turn as business executive Benjamin Barton David Ovington (BBDO) in the 1967 film version of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and the recurring role of bookstore proprietor Felix Mulholland on the 1972 TV series Banacek. Murray Matheson also played The Clown in the memorable 1961 Twilight Zone episode "Six Characters in Search of an Exit"; ironically, Matheson's last appearance was in the "Kick the Can" segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1985).

Trivia: Though he frequently adopted a British accent, actor Gavin Muir was a Chicago boy. After stage work, Muir went to Hollywood for Mary of Scotland (1936), then spent the next quarter century menacing various stars as sly, slow-speaking villains. His indeterminate nationality made him useful in war films like The Master Race (1945), while his tendency to look as though he was hiding some awful secret enabled him to shine in such melodramas as Nightmare (1942). A more benign but still not altogether above-board Muir appeared in the role of a scientist coerced into inflicting invisibility upon Arthur Franz in Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951). As late as 1959, Muir was throwing roadblocks in the way of sweetness 'n' light as a snooty butler on TV's The Betty Hutton Show. Gavin Muir's last film before slipping into retirement was Night Tide (1963), an appropriately glum ghost story.