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Cobie Smulders was born on April 3, 1982, in Vancouver, British Columbia, to a Dutch father and an English mother. As a girl, Cobie had set her sights on becoming a doctor or a marine biologist. In fact, it wasn't until high school that Cobie started to explore acting after appearing in several school productions. As a teenager, Cobie caught the eye of a modeling agency, which led to several years of world travel to places such as France, Japan, Italy, Greece, and Germany. Yet even as Cobie's modeling career was on the rise, she still managed to attend school, graduating from high school in 2000 with honors.

Once out of high school, Cobie continued modeling internationally until the opportunity arose to audition for film and television. It was not long before Cobie's natural ability as an actress impressed casting directors, landing her guest spots on television series such as Special Unit 2 (2001) and Jeremiah (2002). In addition, Cobie also appeared in the short Candy from Strangers (2001) directed by fellow Canadian rising star Eric Johnson.

Cobie got her big break just months later when she landed the role of Juliet Droil in the ABC program Veritas: The Quest (2003). The series marked her first series role for television.

Matthew William Goode (born 3 April 1978) is an English actor. His films include Chasing Liberty (2004), Match Point (2005), Imagine Me and You (2006), Brideshead Revisited (2008), Watchmen (2009), A Single Man (2009), Leap Year (2010), Stoker (2013) and The Imitation Game (2014). Goode also starred in in the final season of Downton Abbey and in the CBS legal drama The Good Wife as Finley "Finn" Polmar from 2014 to 2015. Goode was born in Exeter, Devon. His father is a geologist and his mother, Jennifer, is a nurse and amateur theatre director. Goode is the youngest of five children with a brother, two half brothers, and a half sister, television presenter Sally Meen, from his mother's previous marriage. He grew up in the village of Clyst St. Mary, near Exeter.

Sofia Boutella is an Algerian actress, dancer and model. She was born in the Bab El Oued district of Algiers in Algeria, the daughter of composer and jazz musician Safy Boutella, and an architect mother. She started classical dance education when she was five years old. In 1992, at age 10, she left Algeria with her family and moved to France, where she started rhythmic gymnastics, joining the French national team at age 18. Sofia started with hip hop and street dance, and was part of a group called the Vagabond Crew. She also participated in a group called Chienne de Vie and Aphrodites. She has been rehearsing since age 17 with choreographer Blanca Li, and danced in several film and television appearances, as well as commercials and concert tours.

In 2007, her breakthrough arrived when she was picked for the Jamie King choreography for Nike as a role model of femininity and hip-hop. This was a major boost to her career and led to more work alongside stars like Madonna in her Confessions Tour, and Rihanna. Sofia successfully auditioned for Michael Jackson's This Is It Tour, but could not attend due to the extension of Madonna's tour, whose dates coincided with Jackson's residency. In February 2011, she was the main character in Michael's last music video Michael Jackson: Hollywood Tonight (2011).

Sofia played the lead character Eva in the drama film StreetDance 2 (2012), she starred as the assassin Gazelle in Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014), an alien warrior named Jaylah in Star Trek Beyond (2016), the main antagonist, Princess Ahmanet, in Universal's Dark Universe film The Mummy (2017), and an undercover French agent in Atomic Blonde (2017) alongside Charlize Theron, and many other great movies since then.

Marlon Brando is widely considered the greatest movie actor of all time, rivaled only by the more theatrically oriented Laurence Olivier in terms of esteem. Unlike Olivier, who preferred the stage to the screen, Brando concentrated his talents on movies after bidding the Broadway stage adieu in 1949, a decision for which he was severely criticized when his star began to dim in the 1960s and he was excoriated for squandering his talents. No actor ever exerted such a profound influence on succeeding generations of actors as did Brando. More than 50 years after he first scorched the screen as Stanley Kowalski in the movie version of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and a quarter-century after his last great performance as Col. Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), all American actors are still being measured by the yardstick that was Brando. It was if the shadow of John Barrymore, the great American actor closest to Brando in terms of talent and stardom, dominated the acting field up until the 1970s. He did not, nor did any other actor so dominate the public's consciousness of what WAS an actor before or since Brando's 1951 on-screen portrayal of Stanley made him a cultural icon. Brando eclipsed the reputation of other great actors circa 1950, such as Paul Muni and Fredric March. Only the luster of Spencer Tracy's reputation hasn't dimmed when seen in the starlight thrown off by Brando. However, neither Tracy nor Olivier created an entire school of acting just by the force of his personality. Brando did.

Marlon Brando, Jr. was born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, to Marlon Brando, Sr., a calcium carbonate salesman, and his artistically inclined wife, the former Dorothy Julia Pennebaker. "Bud" Brando was one of three children. His ancestry included English, Irish, German, Dutch, French Huguenot, Welsh, and Scottish; his surname originated with a distant German immigrant ancestor named "Brandau." His oldest sister Jocelyn Brando was also an actress, taking after their mother, who engaged in amateur theatricals and mentored a then-unknown Henry Fonda, another Nebraska native, in her role as director of the Omaha Community Playhouse. Frannie, Brando's other sibling, was a visual artist. Both Brando sisters contrived to leave the Midwest for New York City, Jocelyn to study acting and Frannie to study art. Marlon managed to escape the vocational doldrums forecast for him by his cold, distant father and his disapproving schoolteachers by striking out for The Big Apple in 1943, following Jocelyn into the acting profession. Acting was the only thing he was good at, for which he received praise, so he was determined to make it his career - a high-school dropout, he had nothing else to fall back on, having been rejected by the military due to a knee injury he incurred playing football at Shattuck Military Academy, Brando Sr.'s alma mater. The school booted Marlon out as incorrigible before graduation.

Acting was a skill he honed as a child, the lonely son of alcoholic parents. With his father away on the road, and his mother frequently intoxicated to the point of stupefaction, the young Bud would play-act for her to draw her out of her stupor and to attract her attention and love. His mother was exceedingly neglectful, but he loved her, particularly for instilling in him a love of nature, a feeling which informed his character Paul in Last Tango in Paris (1972) ("Last Tango in Paris") when he is recalling his childhood for his young lover Jeanne. "I don't have many good memories," Paul confesses, and neither did Brando of his childhood. Sometimes he had to go down to the town jail to pick up his mother after she had spent the night in the drunk tank and bring her home, events that traumatized the young boy but may have been the grain that irritated the oyster of his talent, producing the pearls of his performances. Anthony Quinn, his Oscar-winning co-star in Viva Zapata! (1952) told Brando's first wife Anna Kashfi, "I admire Marlon's talent, but I don't envy the pain that created it."

Brando enrolled in Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at New York's New School, and was mentored by Stella Adler, a member of a famous Yiddish Theatre acting family. Adler helped introduce to the New York stage the "emotional memory" technique of Russian theatrical actor, director and impresario Konstantin Stanislavski, whose motto was "Think of your own experiences and use them truthfully." The results of this meeting between an actor and the teacher preparing him for a life in the theater would mark a watershed in American acting and culture.

Brando made his debut on the boards of Broadway on October 19, 1944, in "I Remember Mama," a great success. As a young Broadway actor, Brando was invited by talent scouts from several different studios to screen-test for them, but he turned them down because he would not let himself be bound by the then-standard seven-year contract. Brando would make his film debut quite some time later in Fred Zinnemann's The Men (1950) for producer Stanley Kramer. Playing a paraplegic soldier, Brando brought new levels of realism to the screen, expanding on the verisimilitude brought to movies by Group Theatre alumni John Garfield, the predecessor closest to him in the raw power he projected on-screen. Ironically, it was Garfield whom producer Irene Mayer Selznick had chosen to play the lead in a new Tennessee Williams play she was about to produce, but negotiations broke down when Garfield demanded an ownership stake in "A Streetcar Named Desire." Burt Lancaster was next approached, but couldn't get out of a prior film commitment. Then director Elia Kazan suggested Brando, whom he had directed to great effect in Maxwell Anderson's play "Truckline Café," in which Brando co-starred with Karl Malden, who was to remain a close friend for the next 60 years.

During the production of "Truckline Café," Kazan had found that Brando's presence was so magnetic, he had to re-block the play to keep Marlon near other major characters' stage business, as the audience could not take its eyes off of him. For the scene where Brando's character re-enters the stage after killing his wife, Kazan placed him upstage-center, partially obscured by scenery, but where the audience could still see him as Karl Malden and others played out their scene within the café set. When he eventually entered the scene, crying, the effect was electric. A young Pauline Kael, arriving late to the play, had to avert her eyes when Brando made this entrance as she believed the young actor on stage was having a real-life conniption. She did not look back until her escort commented that the young man was a great actor.

The problem with casting Brando as Stanley was that he was much younger than the character as written by Williams. However, after a meeting between Brando and Williams, the playwright eagerly agreed that Brando would make an ideal Stanley. Williams believed that by casting a younger actor, the Neanderthalish Kowalski would evolve from being a vicious older man to someone whose unintentional cruelty can be attributed to his youthful ignorance. Brando ultimately was dissatisfied with his performance, though, saying he never was able to bring out the humor of the character, which was ironic as his characterization often drew laughs from the audience at the expense of Jessica Tandy's Blanche Dubois. During the out-of-town tryouts, Kazan realized that Brando's magnetism was attracting attention and audience sympathy away from Blanche to Stanley, which was not what the playwright intended. The audience's sympathy should be solely with Blanche, but many spectators were identifying with Stanley. Kazan queried Williams on the matter, broaching the idea of a slight rewrite to tip the scales back to more of a balance between Stanley and Blanche, but Williams demurred, smitten as he was by Brando, just like the preview audiences.

For his part, Brando believed that the audience sided with his Stanley because Jessica Tandy was too shrill. He thought Vivien Leigh, who played the part in the movie, was ideal, as she was not only a great beauty but she WAS Blanche Dubois, troubled as she was in her real life by mental illness and nymphomania. Brando's appearance as Stanley on stage and on screen revolutionized American acting by introducing "The Method" into American consciousness and culture. Method acting, rooted in Adler's study at the Moscow Art Theatre of Stanislavsky's theories that she subsequently introduced to the Group Theatre, was a more naturalistic style of performing, as it engendered a close identification of the actor with the character's emotions. Adler took first place among Brando's acting teachers, and socially she helped turn him from an unsophisticated Midwestern farm boy into a knowledgeable and cosmopolitan artist who one day would socialize with presidents.

Brando didn't like the term "The Method," which quickly became the prominent paradigm taught by such acting gurus as Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Brando denounced Strasberg in his autobiography "Songs My Mother Taught Me" (1994), saying that he was a talentless exploiter who claimed he had been Brando's mentor. The Actors Studio had been founded by Strasberg along with Kazan and Stella Adler's husband, Harold Clurman, all Group Theatre alumni, all political progressives deeply committed to the didactic function of the stage. Brando credits his knowledge of the craft to Adler and Kazan, while Kazan in his autobiography "A Life" claimed that Brando's genius thrived due to the thorough training Adler had given him. Adler's method emphasized that authenticity in acting is achieved by drawing on inner reality to expose deep emotional experience

Interestingly, Elia Kazan believed that Brando had ruined two generations of actors, his contemporaries and those who came after him, all wanting to emulate the great Brando by employing The Method. Kazan felt that Brando was never a Method actor, that he had been highly trained by Adler and did not rely on gut instincts for his performances, as was commonly believed. Many a young actor, mistaken about the true roots of Brando's genius, thought that all it took was to find a character's motivation, empathize with the character through sense and memory association, and regurgitate it all on stage to become the character. That's not how the superbly trained Brando did it; he could, for example, play accents, whereas your average American Method actor could not. There was a method to Brando's art, Kazan felt, but it was not The Method.

After A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), for which he received the first of his eight Academy Award nominations, Brando appeared in a string of Academy Award-nominated performances - in Viva Zapata! (1952), Julius Caesar (1953) and the summit of his early career, Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954). For his "Waterfront" portrayal of meat-headed longshoreman Terry Malloy, the washed-up pug who "coulda been a contender," Brando won his first Oscar. Along with his iconic performance as the rebel-without-a-cause Johnny in The Wild One (1953) ("What are you rebelling against?" Johnny is asked. "What have ya got?" is his reply), the first wave of his career was, according to Jon Voight, unprecedented in its audacious presentation of such a wide range of great acting. Director John Huston said his performance of Marc Antony was like seeing the door of a furnace opened in a dark room, and co-star John Gielgud, the premier Shakespearean actor of the 20th century, invited Brando to join his repertory company.

It was this period of 1951-54 that revolutionized American acting, spawning such imitators as James Dean - who modeled his acting and even his lifestyle on his hero Brando - the young Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. After Brando, every up-and-coming star with true acting talent and a brooding, alienated quality would be hailed as the "New Brando," such as Warren Beatty in Kazan's Splendor in the Grass (1961). "We are all Brando's children," Jack Nicholson pointed out in 1972. "He gave us our freedom." He was truly "The Godfather" of American acting - and he was just 30 years old. Though he had a couple of failures, like Désirée (1954) and The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), he was clearly miscast in them and hadn't sought out the parts so largely escaped blame.

In the second period of his career, 1955-62, Brando managed to uniquely establish himself as a great actor who also was a Top 10 movie star, although that star began to dim after the box-office high point of his early career, Sayonara (1957) (for which he received his fifth Best Actor Oscar nomination). Brando tried his hand at directing a film, the well-reviewed One-Eyed Jacks (1961) that he made for his own production company, Pennebaker Productions (after his mother's maiden name). Stanley Kubrick had been hired to direct the film, but after months of script rewrites in which Brando participated, Kubrick and Brando had a falling out and Kubrick was sacked. According to his widow Christiane Kubrick, Stanley believed that Brando had wanted to direct the film himself all along.

Tales proliferated about the profligacy of Brando the director, burning up a million and a half feet of expensive VistaVision film at 50 cents a foot, fully ten times the normal amount of raw stock expended during production of an equivalent motion picture. Brando took so long editing the film that he was never able to present the studio with a cut. Paramount took it away from him and tacked on a re-shot ending that Brando was dissatisfied with, as it made the Oedipal figure of Dad Longworth into a villain. In any normal film Dad would have been the heavy, but Brando believed that no one was innately evil, that it was a matter of an individual responding to, and being molded by, one's environment. It was not a black-and-white world, Brando felt, but a gray world in which once-decent people could do horrible things. This attitude explains his sympathetic portrayal of Nazi officer Christian Diestl in the film he made before shooting One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Edward Dmytryk's filming of Irwin Shaw's novel The Young Lions (1958). Shaw denounced Brando's performance, but audiences obviously disagreed, as the film was a major hit. It would be the last hit movie Brando would have for more than a decade.

One-Eyed Jacks (1961) generated respectable numbers at the box office, but the production costs were exorbitant - a then-staggering $6 million - which made it run a deficit. A film essentially is "made" in the editing room, and Brando found cutting to be a terribly boring process, which was why the studio eventually took the film away from him. Despite his proved talent in handling actors and a large production, Brando never again directed another film, though he would claim that all actors essentially direct themselves during the shooting of a picture.

Between the production and release of One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Brando appeared in Sidney Lumet's film version of Tennessee Williams' play "Orpheus Descending," The Fugitive Kind (1960) which teamed him with fellow Oscar winners Anna Magnani and Joanne Woodward. Following in Elizabeth Taylor's trailblazing footsteps, Brando became the second performer to receive a $1-million salary for a motion picture, so high were the expectations for this re-teaming of Kowalski and his creator (in 1961 critic Hollis Alpert had published a book "Brando and the Shadow of Stanley Kowalski"). Critics and audiences waiting for another incendiary display from Brando in a Williams work were disappointed when the renamed The Fugitive Kind (1960) finally released. Though Tennessee was hot, with movie versions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) burning up the box office and receiving kudos from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, The Fugitive Kind (1960) was a failure. This was followed by the so-so box-office reception of One-Eyed Jacks (1961) in 1961 and then by a failure of a more monumental kind: Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), a remake of the famed 1935 film.

Brando signed on to Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) after turning down the lead in the David Lean classic Lawrence of Arabia (1962) because he didn't want to spend a year in the desert riding around on a camel. He received another $1-million salary, plus $200,000 in overages as the shoot went overtime and over budget. During principal photography, highly respected director Carol Reed (an eventual Academy Award winner) was fired, and his replacement, two-time Oscar winner Lewis Milestone, was shunted aside by Brando as Marlon basically took over the direction of the film himself. The long shoot became so notorious that President John F. Kennedy asked director Billy Wilder at a cocktail party not "when" but "if" the "Bounty" shoot would ever be over. The MGM remake of one of its classic Golden Age films garnered a Best Picture Oscar nomination and was one of the top grossing films of 1962, yet failed to go into the black due to its Brobdingnagian budget estimated at $20 million, which is equivalent to $120 million when adjusted for inflation.

Brando and Taylor, whose Cleopatra (1963) nearly bankrupted 20th Century-Fox due to its huge cost overruns (its final budget was more than twice that of Brando's Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)), were pilloried by the show business press for being the epitome of the pampered, self-indulgent stars who were ruining the industry. Seeking scapegoats, the Hollywood press conveniently ignored the financial pressures on the studios. The studios had been hurt by television and by the antitrust-mandated divestiture of their movie theater chains, causing a large outflow of production to Italy and other countries in the 1950s and 1960s in order to lower costs. The studio bosses, seeking to replicate such blockbuster hits as the remakes of The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959), were the real culprits behind the losses generated by large-budgeted films that found it impossible to recoup their costs despite long lines at the box office.

While Elizabeth Taylor, receiving the unwanted gift of reams of publicity from her adulterous romance with Cleopatra (1963) co-star Richard Burton, remained hot until the tanking of her own Tennessee Williams-renamed debacle Boom! (1968), Brando from 1963 until the end of the decade appeared in one box-office failure after another as he worked out a contract he had signed with Universal Pictures. The industry had grown tired of Brando and his idiosyncrasies, though he continued to be offered prestige projects up through 1968.

Some of the films Brando made in the 1960s were noble failures, such as The Ugly American (1963), The Appaloosa (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). For every "Reflections," though, there seemed to be two or three outright debacles, such as Bedtime Story (1964), Morituri (1965), The Chase (1966), A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), Candy (1968), The Night of the Following Day (1969). By the time Brando began making the anti-colonialist picture Burn! (1969) in Colombia with Gillo Pontecorvo in the director's chair, he was box-office poison, despite having worked in the previous five years with such top directors as Arthur Penn, John Huston and the legendary Charles Chaplin, and with such top-drawer co-stars as David Niven, Yul Brynner, Sophia Loren and Taylor.

The rap on Brando in the 1960s was that a great talent had ruined his potential to be America's answer to Laurence Olivier, as his friend William Redfield limned the dilemma in his book "Letters from an Actor" (1967), a memoir about Redfield's appearance in Burton's 1964 theatrical production of "Hamlet." By failing to go back on stage and recharge his artistic batteries, something British actors such as Burton were not afraid to do, Brando had stifled his great talent, by refusing to tackle the classical repertoire and contemporary drama. Actors and critics had yearned for an American response to the high-acting style of the Brits, and while Method actors such as Rod Steiger tried to create an American style, they were hampered in their quest, as their king was lost in a wasteland of Hollywood movies that were beneath his talent. Many of his early supporters now turned on him, claiming he was a crass sellout.

Despite evidence in such films as The Appaloosa (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) that Brando was in fact doing some of the best acting of his life, critics, perhaps with an eye on the box office, slammed him for failing to live up to, and nurture, his great gift. Brando's political activism, starting in the early 1960s with his championing of Native Americans' rights, followed by his participation in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's March on Washington in 1963, and followed by his appearance at a Black Panther rally in 1968, did not win him many admirers in the establishment. In fact, there was a de facto embargo on Brando films in the recently segregated (officially, at least) southeastern US in the 1960s. Southern exhibitors simply would not book his films, and producers took notice. After 1968, Brando would not work for three years.

Pauline Kael wrote of Brando that he was Fortune's fool. She drew a parallel with the latter career of John Barrymore, a similarly gifted thespian with talents as prodigious, who seemingly threw them away. Brando, like the late-career Barrymore, had become a great ham, evidenced by his turn as the faux Indian guru in the egregious Candy (1968), seemingly because the material was so beneath his talent. Most observers of Brando in the 1960s believed that he needed to be reunited with his old mentor Elia Kazan, a relationship that had soured due to Kazan's friendly testimony naming names before the notorious House un-American Activities Committee. Perhaps Brando believed this, too, as he originally accepted an offer to appear as the star of Kazan's film adaptation of his own novel, The Arrangement (1969). However, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Brando backed out of the film, telling Kazan that he could not appear in a Hollywood film after this tragedy. Also reportedly turning down a role opposite box-office king Paul Newman in a surefire script, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Brando decided to make Burn! (1969) with Pontecorvo. The film, a searing indictment of racism and colonialism, flopped at the box office but won the esteem of progressive critics and cultural arbiters such as Howard Zinn. He subsequently appeared in the British film The Nightcomers (1971), a prequel to "Turn of the Screw" and another critical and box office failure.

Kazan, after a life in film and the theater, said that, aside from Orson Welles, whose greatness lay in film making, he only met one actor who was a genius: Brando. Richard Burton, an intellectual with a keen eye for observation if not for his own film projects, said that he found Brando to be very bright, unlike the public perception of him as a Terry Malloy-type character that he himself inadvertently promoted through his boorish behavior. Brando's problem, Burton felt, was that he was unique, and that he had gotten too much fame too soon at too early an age. Cut off from being nurtured by normal contact with society, fame had distorted Brando's personality and his ability to cope with the world, as he had not had time to grow up outside the limelight.

Truman Capote, who eviscerated Brando in print in the mid-'50s and had as much to do with the public perception of the dyslexic Brando as a dumbbell, always said that the best actors were ignorant, and that an intelligent person could not be a good actor. However, Brando was highly intelligent, and possessed of a rare genius in a then-deprecated art, acting. The problem that an intelligent performer has in movies is that it is the director, and not the actor, who has the power in his chosen field. Greatness in the other arts is defined by how much control the artist is able to exert over his chosen medium, but in movie acting, the medium is controlled by a person outside the individual artist. It is an axiom of the cinema that a performance, as is a film, is "created" in the cutting room, thus further removing the actor from control over his art. Brando had tried his hand at directing, in controlling the whole artistic enterprise, but he could not abide the cutting room, where a film and the film's performances are made. This lack of control over his art was the root of Brando's discontent with acting, with movies, and, eventually, with the whole wide world that invested so much cachet in movie actors, as long as "they" were at the top of the box-office charts. Hollywood was a matter of "they" and not the work, and Brando became disgusted.

Charlton Heston, who participated in Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington with Brando, believes that Marlon was the great actor of his generation. However, noting a story that Brando had once refused a role in the early 1960s with the excuse "How can I act when people are starving in India?," Heston believes that it was this attitude, the inability to separate one's idealism from one's work, that prevented Brando from reaching his potential. As Rod Steiger once said, Brando had it all, great stardom and a great talent. He could have taken his audience on a trip to the stars, but he simply would not. Steiger, one of Brando's children even though a contemporary, could not understand it. When James Mason' was asked in 1971 who was the best American actor, he had replied that since Brando had let his career go belly-up, it had to be George C. Scott, by default.

Paramount thought that only Laurence Olivier would suffice, but Lord Olivier was ill. The young director believed there was only one actor who could play godfather to the group of Young Turk actors he had assembled for his film, The Godfather of method acting himself - Marlon Brando. Francis Ford Coppola won the fight for Brando, Brando won - and refused - his second Oscar, and Paramount won a pot of gold by producing the then top-grossing film of all-time, The Godfather (1972), a gangster movie most critics now judge one of the greatest American films of all time. Brando followed his iconic portrayal of Don Corleone with his Oscar-nominated turn in the high-grossing and highly scandalous Last Tango in Paris (1972) ("Last Tango in Paris"), the first film dealing explicitly with sexuality in which an actor of Brando's stature had participated. He was now again a top ten box office star and once again heralded as the greatest actor of his generation, an unprecedented comeback that put him on the cover of "Time" magazine and would make him the highest-paid actor in the history of motion pictures by the end of the decade. Little did the world know that Brando, who had struggled through many projects in good faith during the 1960s, delivering some of his best acting, only to be excoriated and ignored as the films did not do well at the box office, essentially was through with the movies.

After reaching the summit of his career, a rarefied atmosphere never reached before or since by any actor, Brando essentially walked away. He would give no more of himself after giving everything as he had done in Last Tango in Paris (1972)," a performance that embarrassed him, according to his autobiography. Brando had come as close to any actor to being the "auteur," or author, of a film, as the English-language scenes of "Tango" were created by encouraging Brando to improvise. The improvisations were written down and turned into a shooting script, and the scripted improvisations were shot the next day. Pauline Kael, the Brando of movie critics in that she was the most influential arbiter of cinematic quality of her generation and spawned a whole legion of Kael wannabes, said Brando's performance in Last Tango in Paris (1972) had revolutionized the art of film. Brando, who had to act to gain his mother's attention; Brando, who believed acting at best was nothing special as everyone in the world engaged in it every day of their lives to get what they wanted from other people; Brando, who believed acting at its worst was a childish charade and that movie stardom was a whorish fraud, would have agreed with Sam Peckinpah's summation of Pauline Kael: "Pauline's a brilliant critic but sometimes she's just cracking walnuts with her ass." He probably would have done so in a simulacrum of those words, too.

After another three-year hiatus, Brando took on just one more major role for the next 20 years, as the bounty hunter after Jack Nicholson in Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks (1976), a western that succeeded neither with the critics or at the box office. Following The Godfather and Tango, Brando's performance was disappointing for some reviewers, who accused him of giving an erratic and inconsistent performance. In 1977, Brando made a rare appearance on television in the miniseries Roots: The Next Generations (1979), portraying George Lincoln Rockwell; he won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie for his performance. In 1978, he narrated the English version of Raoni (1978), a French-Belgian documentary film directed by Jean-Pierre Dutilleux and Luiz Carlos Saldanha that focused on the life of Raoni Metuktire and issues surrounding the survival of the indigenous Indian tribes of north central Brazil.

Later in his career, Brando concentrated on extracting the maximum amount of capital for the least amount of work from producers, as when he got the Salkind brothers to pony up a then-record $3.7 million against 10% of the gross for 13 days work on Superman (1978). Factoring in inflation, the straight salary for "Superman" equals or exceeds the new record of $1 million a day Harrison Ford set with K-19: The Widowmaker (2002). He agreed to the role only on assurance that he would be paid a large sum for what amounted to a small part, that he would not have to read the script beforehand, and his lines would be displayed somewhere off-camera. Brando also filmed scenes for the movie's sequel, Superman II, but after producers refused to pay him the same percentage he received for the first movie, he denied them permission to use the footage.

Before cashing his first paycheck for Superman (1978), Brando had picked up $2 million for his extended cameo in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) in a role, that of Col. Kurtz, that he authored on-camera through improvisation while Coppola shot take after take. It was Brando's last bravura star performance. He co-starred with George C. Scott and John Gielgud in The Formula (1980), but the film was another critical and financial failure. Years later though, he did receive an eighth and final Oscar nomination for his supporting role in A Dry White Season (1989) after coming out of a near-decade-long retirement. Contrary to those who claimed he now only was in it for the money, Brando donated his entire seven-figure salary to an anti-apartheid charity. He then did an amusing performance in the comedy The Freshman (1990), winning rave reviews. He portrayed Tomas de Torquemada in the historical drama 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), but his performance was denounced and the film was another box office failure. He made another comeback in the Johnny Depp romantic drama Don Juan DeMarco (1994), which co-starred Faye Dunaway as his wife. He then appeared in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), co-starring Val Kilmer, who he didn't get along with. The filming was an unpleasant experience for Brando, as well as another critical and box office failure.

Brando had first attracted media attention at the age of 24, when "Life" magazine ran a photo of himself and his sister Jocelyn, who were both then appearing on Broadway. The curiosity continued, and snowballed. Playing the paraplegic soldier of The Men (1950), Brando had gone to live at a Veterans Administration hospital with actual disabled veterans, and confined himself to a wheelchair for weeks. It was an acting method, research, that no one in Hollywood had ever heard of before, and that willingness to experience life.

Edward Regan Murphy was born April 3, 1961 in Brooklyn, New York, to Lillian Lynch (born: Lillian Laney), a telephone operator, and Charles Edward Murphy, a transit police officer who was also an amateur comedian and actor. After his father died, his mother married Vernon Lynch, a foreman at a Breyer's Ice Cream plant. His brothers are Charlie Murphy & Vernon Lynch Jr. Eddie had aspirations of being in show business since he was a child. A bright kid growing up in the streets of New York, Murphy spent a great deal of time on impressions and comedy stand-up routines rather than academics. His sense of humor and wit made him a stand out amongst his classmates at Roosevelt Junior-Senior High School. By the time he was fifteen, Murphy worked as a stand-up comic on the lower part of New York, wooing audiences with his dead-on impressions of celebrities and outlooks on life.

In the early 1980s, at the age of 19, Murphy was offered a contract for the Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time Players of Saturday Night Live (1975), where Murphy exercised his comedic abilities in impersonating African American figures and originating some of the show's most memorable characters: Velvet Jones, Mr. Robinson, and a disgruntled and angry Gumby. Murphy made his feature film debut in 48 Hrs. (1982), alongside Nick Nolte. The two's comedic and antagonistic chemistry, alongside Murphy's believable performance as a streetwise convict aiding a bitter, aging cop, won over critics and audiences. The next year, Murphy went two for two, with another hit, pairing him with John Landis, who later became a frequent collaborator with Murphy in Coming to America (1988) and Beverly Hills Cop III (1994). Beverly Hills Cop (1984) was the film that made Murphy a box-office superstar and most notably made him a celebrity worldwide, and it remains one of the all-time biggest domestic blockbusters in motion-picture history. Murphy's performance as a young Detroit cop in pursuit of his friend's murderers earned him a third consecutive Golden Globe nomination. Axel Foley became one of Murphy's signature characters. On top of his game, Murphy was unfazed by his success, that is until his box office appeal and choices in scripts resulted into a spotty mix of hits and misses into the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Films like The Golden Child (1986) and Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) were critically panned but were still massive draws at the box office. In 1989, Murphy, coming off another hit, Coming to America (1988), found failure with his directorial debut, Harlem Nights (1989). Another 48 Hrs. (1990), his turn as a hopeless romantic in Boomerang (1992) and as a suave vampire in Vampire In Brooklyn did little to resuscitate his career. However, his remake of Jerry Lewis's The Nutty Professor (1996) brought Murphy's drawing power back into fruition. From there, Murphy rebounded with occasional hits and misses but has long proven himself as a skilled comedic actor with laudable range pertaining to characterizations and mannerisms. Though he has grown up a lot since his fast-lane rise as a superstar in the 1980s, Murphy has lived the Hollywood lifestyle with controversy, criticism, scandal, and the admiration of millions worldwide for his talents. As Murphy had matured throughout the years, learning many lessons about the Hollywood game in the process, he settled down with more family-oriented humor with Doctor Dolittle (1998), Mulan (1998), Bowfinger (1999), and the animated smash Shrek (2001), in a supporting role that showcased Murphy's comedic personality and charm. Throughout the 2000s, he further starred in the hits The Haunted Mansion (2003), Shrek 2 (2004), Dreamgirls (2006) (for which he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar), Norbit (2007), Shrek the Third (2007), and Shrek Forever After (2010).

Murphy was married to Nicole Mitchell Murphy from 1993 to 2006. Murphy has ten children.

Adam Scott was born in Santa Cruz, California, the son of Anne and Dougald Scott. He has two older siblings, Shannon and David. Scott has said that his brother David "looks like me but is far more cerebral and inherited the intellect of our parents," both of whom are retired teachers. He graduated from Harbor High School and he is an alumnus of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles, California, class of 1993.

Catherine McCormack was born on 3 April 1972 in Epsom, Surrey, England, UK. She is an actress and director, known for Braveheart (1995), Spy Game (2001) and A Sound of Thunder (2005).

Despite his prominence in Hollywood as a character actor known for playing villains and criminals, Ben Mendelsohn has been a leading man in Australia since starting acting as a teenager.

Paul Benjamin Mendelsohn was born in Melbourne, Australia, to Carole Ann (Ferguson), a nurse, and Frederick Arthur Oscar Mendelsohn, a medical researcher. Getting his start in television, including The Henderson Kids (1985) and the long running soap opera Neighbours (1985), Mendelsohn broke out with his performance as an ill-fated juvenile delinquent in the acclaimed coming of age film The Year My Voice Broke (1987). Mendelsohn won the best supporting actor award from the Australian Film Institute, his first of eight nominations.

Mendelsohn went onto to become one of the most popular teen/young adult stars in Australia cinema, often rivaling other emerging talents of his generation, including Russell Crowe, Noah Taylor, and Guy Pearce, leading the Australian tabloid to nickname them "the Mouse Pack" in reference to the Rat Pack in America and Brit Pack in the UK, emerging at the same time. Among his peers, Mendelsohn seemed to corner the market on troubled, angry young men, thanks to his roles in Idiot Box (1996), Metal Skin (1994), and Nirvana Street Murder (1990). But Mendelsohn also proved he was capable of being a romantic lead, starring in the comedies The Big Steal (1990), Cosi (1996), and Amy (1997).

In the 1990s, Mendelsohn appeared in just one "Hollywood" film, the action film Vertical Limit (2000), as one of two daredevil climbers on a rescue mission, often providing the film's comic relief. The film failed to find an audience and Mendelsohn returned to Australia, where he primarily worked in theater and television, despite earning best actor nominations from the Australian Film Institute and Australian Film Critics Circle for the drama Mullet, as a prodigal son returning to his small town. He also took steps to work in more international films such as The New World (2005), Knowing (2009) and Australia (2008). Mendelsohn has acknowledged that there was a period of almost two years that he had so little work, he considered leaving the acting profession entirely.

In 2009, Mendelsohn experienced a bit of a comeback with the role in the independent Australian films Beautiful Kate (2009), as troubled man forced to reunite with his dying father and come to terms with the death of his twin sister, with whom he had a complicated relationship. He was nominated for Australian Film Institute and Australian Film Critics Circle Best Actor in 2009. A year later, he appeared as Pope in Animal Kingdom (2010), the most terrifying and violent member of a crime family. In 2010, he won Best Actor from the Australian Film Institute, Independent Film Award, and Australian Film Critics Circle.

Since 2010, Mendelsohn has become a major player in Hollywood as a character actor in both blockbuster films (The Dark Knight Rises (2012)) and critically acclaimed films such as Killing Them Softly (2012) and The Place Beyond the Pines (2012). In 2013 he appeared in the UK Starred Up (2013), which earned him a Best Supporting Actor Award from the British Independent Film Awards. He received high praise for his performance as gambling addict in 2015's Mississippi Grind (2015) (earning an independent spirit award nomination for best actor). The same year he began a two season run on Netflix's Bloodline (2015) as Danny Rayburn, the black sheep in a well respected family in the Florida Keys (he was considered a guest actor in the third and final season). In 2016 his career took another leap forward, appearing as the main villain in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), and winning the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. He missed the ceremony, as he was filming Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One (2018).

Amanda Laura Bynes was born on April 3, 1986, in Thousand Oaks, California, the youngest of three children of Lynn (Organ), a dental assistant, and Richard Bynes, a dentist. Her father is of Lithuanian, Irish, and Polish descent, and her mother is from an Ashkenazi Jewish family from Toronto. Amanda became interested in acting and performing from the age of three, when she would say her older sister Jillian's lines with her while she performed in plays. It was from then on that her family and friends knew that she would be a star someday.

Her acting debut was in 1996, when she auditioned for and got the role as a newcomer on All That (1994). Right away, she became very popular as people enjoyed her acting in skits, especially Ask Ashley, where she played a little girl running an advice column who would get very angry every time she read a letter.

In 1999, 13-year-old Amanda was given her own variety show, The Amanda Show (1999), in which she starred in all of the skits except Totally Kyle. In 2001, she co-starred with Frankie Muniz in Big Fat Liar (2002) as Kaylee, Jason's friend who helps him prove that he really did write the essay "Big Fat Liar" and regain his father's trust. It was also in 2001 that she began dating Taran Killam from The Amanda Show (1999) and Big Fat Liar (2002), who is four years and two days older than she is. She also won a Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Award and, at age 15, The Amanda Show (1999) ended its run.

In 2002, she began co-starring with Jennie Garth in What I Like About You (2002) as Holly, a 16-year-old girl who moves in with her sister after their father decides to move to Japan. She also celebrated her Sweet 16th birthday and got her driver's license on April 3, 2002.

In 2003, Amanda won two KCA Awards and starred as Daphne, a girl searching for her father, in What a Girl Wants (2003) with Colin Firth and Kelly Preston as her parents. She continued acting in What I Like About You (2002) and broke up with Taran.

A prodigiously talented comedienne, on April 3, 2004, Amanda celebrated her 18th birthday on the 17th Annual KCA Awards, where she won an award for best actress for her role in What a Girl Wants (2003). She graduated from Thousand Oaks High School's independent study program on June 10, 2004, and filmed Lovewrecked (2005) in 2004.

Alec Baldwin is the oldest, and best-known, of the four Baldwin brothers in the acting business (the others are Stephen Baldwin, William Baldwin and Daniel Baldwin). Alexander Rae Baldwin III was born on April 3, 1958 in Massapequa, New York, the son of Carol Newcomb (Martineau) and Alexander Rae Baldwin Jr., a high school teacher and football coach at Massapequa High School. He is of Irish, as well as English, French, Scottish, and German, descent.

Alec Baldwin burst onto the TV scene in the early 1980s with appearances on several series, including The Doctors (1963) and Knots Landing (1979), before scoring feature film roles in Forever, Lulu (1986), Beetlejuice (1988), Working Girl (1988), Married to the Mob (1988) and Talk Radio (1988). In 1990, Baldwin appeared in the first on-screen adaptation of the "Jack Ryan" character created by mega-selling espionage author, Tom Clancy. The film, The Hunt for Red October (1990), was a box office and critical success, with Baldwin appearing alongside icy Sean Connery. Unfortunately, Baldwin fell out with Paramount Studios over future scripts for "Jack Ryan", and subsequent Ryan roles went to Harrison Ford.

Baldwin instead went to Broadway to perform "A Streetcar Named Desire", garnering a Tony nomination for his portrayal of "Stanley Kowalski" (he would reprise the role in a 1995 TV adaptation). Baldwin won over critics as a lowlife thief pursued by dogged cop Fred Ward in Miami Blues (1990), met his future wife Kim Basinger while filming the Neil Simon comedy, The Marrying Man (1991), starred in the film adaptation of the play, Prelude to a Kiss (1992) (in which he starred off-Broadway), and made an indelible ten-minute cameo as a hard-nosed real estate executive laying down the law in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). He also made a similar tour-de-force monologue in the thriller, Malice (1993), as a doctor defending his practices, in which he stated, "Let me tell you something: I am God".

Demand for Baldwin's talents in the 1990s saw more scripts swiftly come his way, and he starred alongside his then-wife, Kim Basinger, in a remake of the Steve McQueen action flick, The Getaway (1994), brought to life the famous comic strip character, The Shadow (1994), and starred as an assistant district attorney in the civil rights drama, Ghosts of Mississippi (1996). Baldwin's distinctive vocal talents then saw him voice US-aired episodes of the highly popular UK children's show, Thomas & Friends (1984), plus later voice-only contributions to other animated/children's shows, including Clerks (2000), Cats & Dogs (2001), Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) and The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004).

In the early 2000s, Baldwin and Basinger endured an acrimonious break-up that quickly became tabloid fodder but, while his divorce was high-profile, Baldwin excelled in a number of lower-profile supporting roles in a variety of films, including State and Main (2000), Pearl Harbor (2001), The Cooler (2003) (for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor), The Aviator (2004), Along Came Polly (2004) and The Departed (2006). As he was excelling as a consummate character actor, Baldwin found a second career in television comedy. Already known for his comedic turns hosting Saturday Night Live (1975), he essayed an extended guest role on Will & Grace (1998) in 2005 before taking on what would arguably become his most famous role, that of network executive "Jack Donaghy", opposite Tina Fey in the highly-acclaimed sitcom, 30 Rock (2006). The role brought Baldwin two Emmy Awards, three Golden Globes, and an unprecedented six Screen Actors Guild Awards (not including cast wins).

Continuing to appear in films as 30 Rock (2006) wrapped up its final season, Baldwin was engaged in 2012 to wed Hilaria Baldwin (aka Hilaria Lynn Thomas); the couple married on June 30, 2012.

David Hyde Pierce was born in Saratoga Springs, New York, USA. He is the youngest child of George and Laura Pierce (both deceased) and has two older sisters (Barbara and Nancy) and an older brother (Thomas). As a child, he was very interested in music (particularly piano) and regularly played the organ at his local church (Bethesda Episcopal Church). David discovered a love of drama in high school and, upon his graduation in 1977, he received the Yaddo Medal which is to honor academic achievement and personal character. However, his love of music was still strong so he decided to study classical piano at Yale University.

Unfortunately, he soon grew bored with music history lessons and found that he wasn't dedicated enough to practice the required amount of hours to become a successful concert pianist. Instead, he returned to his love of drama and graduated in 1981 with a double major in English and Theatre Arts. He then moved to New York where he worked several menial jobs (including selling ties at Bloomingdales and working as a security guard) while acting in the theater during the late 80s and early 90s. He appeared in small roles in films such as Bright Lights, Big City (1988) before his life and career changed forever when he landed the role of "Dr. Niles Crane" in the television series Frasier (1993). Throughout the show's eleven year run (1993-2004), David was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series each year (he won four times: 1995, 1998-1999 and 2004). David resides in Los Angeles with his romantic partner, Brian Hargrove, and their two Wheaton Terriers, Maude and Mabel. He remains very close to his three siblings.

TOMAS ARANA He has multiple films opening in the fall of 2024; NAPOLI - NEW YORK, directed by Oscar winner Gabriele Salvatores, where he co-stars with Pierfrancesco Favino. This film is based on a 1947 project by Federico Fellini & Tullio Pinelli. MIKE, a Raiuno project on Mike Bongiorno directed by Giuseppe Bonito & starring Claudio Gioe' & Elia Nuzzolo. Arana plays his father Phillip Bongiorno. He is also co-starring in the film LIMONOV, based on the Emanuele Carrere book, directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, starring Ben Whishaw, which premiered in the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Other recent films include INFERNO by the artist Mimmo Paladino and QUEL POSTO NEL TEMPO by Giuseppe Alessio Nuzzo and GLOBAL HARMONY, by Fabio Massa and he also was in two episodes of the HBO show SUCCESSION, winner of multiple Emmy Awards and a worldwide success. He was in 6 episodes of the HBO-SKY-Canal Plus miniseries THE NEW POPE, by Oscar winner Paolo Sorrentino, starring Jude Law, John Malkovich and Silvio Orlando. in 2021 was the film ECHOES OF THE PAST, a WW2 drama starring Max Von Sydow. He also co-starred in 2019 in the Italian box office smash hit MA COSA CI DICE IL CERVELLO , starring Paola Cortellesi.

He co-starred as Quintus in Ridley Scott's GLADIATOR, the Dreamworks-Universal movie and winner of five Oscars, including Best Picture, starring Russell Crowe & Joaquin Phoenix. He has appeared in more than 80 films, ranging from large budget Hollywood Studio pictures to Independent films in both the U.S. and Europe. His studio pictures include THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, LIMITLESS, THE BOURNE SUPREMACY, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, LA CONFIDENTIAL, THE BODYGUARD (as Portman, Kevin Costner's antagonist), HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER (as Loginov, the Russian Saboteur), among others. He played Lazarus in Martin Scorsese's controversial LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, starring Willem Dafoe & Harvey Keitel.

In Television he was a regular in the Michael Seitzman ABC/CBS Network show INTELLIGENCE, starring Josh Holloway & Marg Helgenberger as well as appearing as a guest star on more than 30 Network TV shows. In Europe, he was also a regular on the smash hit Italian RAI TV series TUTTI PAZZI PER AMORE and the outstanding German ZDF TV drama VERBRECHEN.

Arana has played leading and supporting roles in over 30 European movie productions including films by directors such as Lina Wertmuller, Liliana Cavani, Sergio Corbucci, Riccardo Milani, Lamberto Bava, Carlo Verdone, Michele Soavi and with one of Japan's most successful directors: Koreyoshi Kurahara , in the Toho production SEE YOU, about the Paris-Dakar Race. He also was in the Madonna video BAD GIRLS, with Christopher Walken, directed by David Fincher.

In Theatre, Arana was the producer as well as one of the three leading actors in the internationally acclaimed theatre company Falso Movimento, based in Naples, Italy. Their shows included TANGO GLACIALE, OTELLO & RETURN TO ALPHAVILLE. Under Arana and the artistic director Mario Martone (now also a major Italian Film & Opera Director), Falso Movimento won many awards including Best Play of the Year, Best Set Design and the prestigious Mondello Prize. The company toured worldwide for more than nine years at International Festivals including London, Frankfurt, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Madrid, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Jerusalem, and many others. The company evolved into TEATRI UNITI, produced now by Angelo Curti and its Artistic Director is Toni Servillo (2 European Film Awards for Best Actor and the star of THE GREAT BEAUTY, the Oscar winning film by Paolo Sorrentino). Arana was also the creator and first Artistic Director of the MILANO OLTRE Theatre & Dance Festival in Milan, now in its 38th year. He was also the producer of the Italian Avantgarde Theatre Festival, BENVENUTO, at the La MaMa Theatre in NYC, under Ellen Stewart.

Tomas Arana grew up in San Francisco and studied classical theatre at its prestigious American Conservatory Theatre, afterwards relocating to New York and acting in off-Broadway productions. He then hitchhiked throughout Europe and ended up living in Naples, Italy, where he worked for five years in the famous Lucio Amelio Art Gallery, working with such artists as Warhol, Rauschenberg, Beuys, Richter, Longobardi, Paladino, Kounellis, Clemente, Twombly, Pistoletto, Keith Haring, Gilbert & George, etc. Andy Warhol painted his portrait, which is now part of his extensive art collection.

He was an award winning athlete as a youth in San Francisco and has practiced for many years Aikido, Judo, Japanese Sword, Fencing as well as advanced dance and movement techniques.

He has both U.S. and Italian citizenship. He has three sons and a stepson.

Rachel Bloom is an American actress, comedian, writer, singer, songwriter and producer, best known for co-creating and starring in the tv series "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" for which she has won an Emmy, a Golden Globe, a Critics' Choice and a TCA Award.

She was born in 1987 and hails from Manhattan Beach, California. Rachel attended NYU, Tisch School of the Arts in New York City for theater. After graduating from NYU in 2009 with a B.F.A. in drama, Rachel continued to study improv and sketch at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in NY.

In 2010, Rachel released her first Internet music video, "F*ck Me, Ray Bradbury", which went viral and was nominated for a Hugo Award for "Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form." While working as a tv writer in Los Angeles she continued to make Internet music videos which eventually caught the eye of Rachel's "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" co-creator, Aline Brosh McKenna.

On May 13, 2013, Bloom released her first album of musical comedy, Please Love Me, which included the viral songs "Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury" and "You Can Touch My Boobies".

On November 19, 2013, she released her second album Suck It, Christmas, which featured a comedic look at Chanukah and included the song "Chanukah Honey".

On December 17, 2013, Bloom was the voice of Princess Peach in the song "Luigi's Ballad" on Starbomb's self-titled debut album. Bloom co-wrote "Super Friend" performed by Melissa Benoist and Grant Gustin, featured on the musical crossover episode of Supergirl and The Flash titled "Duet" and the soundtrack released from the episode.

On April 25, 2016, Bloom was awarded the "Visionary Award" at the annual gala held by East West Players, the longest-running professional theatre of color[clarification needed] in the United States. The award seeks to honor "individuals who have raised the visibility of the Asian Pacific American (APA) community through their craft"; her show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was lauded for its decision to cast an Asian-American male in a trope and stereotype-subverting lead role.

Bloom has worked as a television writer on Allen Gregory and Robot Chicken.

Rachel Bloom co-starred in the film Most Likely to Murder, opposite Adam Pally and Vincent Kartheiser. The film was directed by Dan Gregor, Bloom's husband. It premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in March 2018, and was released on Digital and on Demand in May 2018.

On November 18, 2020, Bloom was awarded the Lifesaver Award from ELEM/Youth in Distress in Israel, a nonprofit aiding youth in distress in Israel, at its Hats off to Heroes virtual gala.

One of America's most loved actresses was born Doris Mary Kappelhoff on April 3, 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Alma Sophia (Welz), a housewife, and William Joseph Kappelhoff, a music teacher and choir master. Her grandparents were all German immigrants. She had two brothers, Richard, who died before she was born and Paul, a few years older.

Her parents divorced while she was still a child, and she lived with her mother. Like most little girls, Doris liked to dance. At fourteen, she formed a dance act with a boy, Jerry Doherty, and they won $500 in a local talent contest. She and Jerry took a brief trip to Hollywood to test the waters. They felt they could succeed, so she and Jerry returned to Cincinnati with the intention of packing and making a permanent move to Hollywood. Tragically, the night before she was to move to Hollywood, she was injured riding in a car hit by a train, ending the possibility of a dancing career.

It was a terrible setback, but after taking singing lessons she found a new vocation, and at age 17, she began touring with the Les Brown Band. She met trombonist Al Jorden, whom she married in 1941. Jorden was prone to violence and they divorced after two years, not long after the birth of their son Terry. In 1946, Doris married George Weidler, but this union lasted less than a year. Day's agent talked her into taking a screen test at Warner Bros. The executives there liked what they saw and signed her to a contract (her early credits are often confused with those of another actress named Doris Day, who appeared mainly in B westerns in the 1930s and 1940s).

Her first starring movie role was in Romance on the High Seas (1948). The next year, she made two more films, My Dream Is Yours (1949) and It's a Great Feeling (1949). Audiences took to her beauty, terrific singing voice and bubbly personality, and she turned in fine performances in the movies she made (in addition to several hit records). She made three films for Warner Bros. in 1950 and five more in 1951. In that year, she met and married Martin Melcher, who adopted her young son Terry, who later grew up to become Terry Melcher, a successful record producer.

In 1953, Doris starred in Calamity Jane (1953), which was a major hit, and several more followed: Lucky Me (1954), Love Me or Leave Me (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and what is probably her best-known film, Pillow Talk (1959). She began to slow down her filmmaking pace in the 1960s, even though she started out the decade with a hit, Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1960).

In 1958, her brother Paul died. Around this time, her husband, who had also taken charge of her career, had made deals for her to star in films she didn't really care about, which led to a bout with exhaustion. The 1960s weren't to be a repeat of the previous busy decade. She didn't make as many films as she had in that decade, but the ones she did make were successful: Do Not Disturb (1965), The Glass Bottom Boat (1966), Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? (1968) and With Six You Get Eggroll (1968). Martin Melcher died in 1968, and Doris never made another film, but she had been signed by Melcher to do her own TV series, The Doris Day Show (1968). That show, like her movies, was successful, lasting until 1973. After her series went off the air, she made only occasional TV appearances.

By the time Martin Melcher died, Doris discovered she was millions of dollars in debt. She learned that Melcher had squandered virtually all of her considerable earnings, but she was eventually awarded $22 million by the courts in a case against a man that Melcher had unwisely let invest her money. She married for the fourth time in 1976 and since her divorce in 1980 has devoted her life to animals.

Doris was a passionate animal rights activist. She ran Doris Day Animal League in Carmel, California, which advocates homes and proper care of household pets.

Doris died on May 13, 2019, in Carmel Valley Village, California. She was 97.

Marsha Mason has a wonderful, extremely engaging "feel good" quality about her, an innate warmth that makes you root for her whether she's playing a stubborn single mom, brittle prostitute, or strung-out alcoholic. She was a resoundingly respected and popular film actress of the 1970s and 1980s whose career skyrocketed in the bittersweet comedies/dramas of award-winning Neil Simon. Earning a string of leading lady Oscar nominations within a short span of time (three of them, courtesy of husband Simon), Marsha's movie career suffered a major fall-out when the famed couple parted ways in 1983 -- most probably due to her almost exclusive, amazingly successful association with him.

The elder of two sisters born to James Joseph Mason and Jacqueline Helena (Rachowsky) Mason in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 3, 1942, Marsha was raised, for a time, in Crestwood, Missouri, before moving to Webster Groves (a suburb of St. Louis) and graduating from Nerinx Hall High School. There, she attended Webster University and, after receiving her degree, moved to New York where she began taking acting classes and finding some work in TV commercials in-between regular job-hunting.

Marrying fellow struggling actor Gary Campbell in 1965, Marsha made an inauspicious movie debut with the forgettable Hot Rod Hullabaloo (1966). Focusing intently on stage work, she made her professional debut in 1967 with "The Deer Park" at the Theatre de Lys and, the next year, joined the cast as a replacement in the established hit comedy, "Cactus Flower", at the Royale Theatre. Subsequent work came her way both on- and off-Broadway ("It's Called the Sugar Plum", "The Indian Wants the Bronx", "Happy Birthday, Wanda June", "Richard III"). She later hooked up with San Francisco's prestigious American Conservatory Theatre and appeared in an enviable number of their productions ("The Merchant of Venice", "Private Lives", "You Can't Take It With You", "A Doll's House", "Cyrano de Bergerac", "The Crucible").

Daytime soaps played a vital part during this period of time (1969-1972), playing a hooker-turned-vampire on the popular Dark Shadows (1966) series and winning regular roles on Where the Heart Is (1969) and Love of Life (1951). Divorced after five years from actor Gary Campbell in 1970, the pert-nosed, dark-haired beauty met Neil Simon, a recent widower, when he cast her in his 1973 original Broadway production of "The Good Doctor". They had a whirlwind romance and married with a few weeks.

1973 was an excellent year in other ways in that Marsha won the second femme lead in Blume in Love (1973), starring George Segal and Susan Anspach, and then beat out such stars as Barbra Streisand for the coveted role of the hooker opposite James Caan's sailor in the realistic drama Cinderella Liberty (1973). The chemistry was electric between the two and Mason earned her first Oscar nod. Following a leading stage role in "The Heiress" (1975) and playing "Roxane" in a TV version of Cyrano de Bergerac (1975), Marsha earned two more Neil Simon-driven Oscar nominations with The Goodbye Girl (1977), opposite Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss, and Chapter Two (1979), which reunited her with James Caan and was based on Mason and Simon's own relationship.

Simon would offer his wife Oscar-worthy material one more time with Only When I Laugh (1981), as an alcoholic trying to stay on the wagon for daughter Kristy McNichol. This would be Marsha's fourth Academy Award nod. The couple's last film project together came in the form of Max Dugan Returns (1983), which was a major misfire.

Following Marsha's divorce from Simon, her film product decreased rapidly in quantity as well as quality. With the exception of the Clint Eastwood vehicle, Heartbreak Ridge (1986), she made no other films in the 1980s. While her film output did increase in the 1990s, none of them -- Stella (1990), Drop Dead Fred (1991), I Love Trouble (1994), Nick of Time (1995) and 2 Days in the Valley (1996) -- did anything to jump-start her waning cinematic career.

Over the years, Marsha maintained by focusing on TV and stage work. More recent theatre credits have included "The Night of the Iguana", "The Prisoner of Second Avenue" (another popular Simon work in which she appeared opposite Richard Dreyfuss in London), "Wintertime", "Steel Magnolias", "I Never Sang for My Father", "All's Well that Ends Well" and the Simon play "California Suite", some of which played Broadway.

On the small screen, Marsha starred in her own short-lived series Sibs (1991) and appeared in an Emmy-nominated recurring role on the series, Frasier (1993), as a love interest for Martin Crane. She has also appeared in a number of TV-movies, including one as Judy Garland's mother, "Ethel Gumm", in Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows (2001), and has guest-starred on such series as "Seinfeld," "The Education of Max Bickford," "Lipstick Jungle," "Army Wives," "The Good Wife," "Madame Secretary." Her more recent recurring parts have been on the comedy series The Middle (2009) and Grace and Frankie (2015).

On a rare occasion, the veteran actress has directed both on film and TV. Feeling out of sorts in Hollywood at one stage, Marsha strongly pursued her spiritual side, primarily as a disciple of Swami Muktananda. She later moved to New Mexico in 1993 and she became an owner of an organic farm where she raised herbs and operated a wellness line of bath and body products. She also enjoyed professional race car driving at one point. An insightful, highly revealing autobiography came out in the form of "Journal: A Personal Odyssey" in 2000.

Jamie Saint John Bamber Griffith known professionally as Jamie Bamber, is a British actor, known for his roles as Lee Adama in Battlestar Galactica and Detective Sergeant Matt Devlin in the ITV series Law & Order: UK. He also had a supporting role as 2nd Lt. Jack Foley in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, as Lieutenant Archie Kennedy in the Hornblower series and was a regular on the British series Ultimate Force and Peak Practice. In 2013, Bamber starred in the TNT medical drama Monday Mornings, and in 2014, in the Sky 1 drama The Smoke.

Natacha Karam was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to mother Bernadette Devlin and father Marc Karam. Karam is of Lebanese and Northern Irish heritage. She spent most of her younger years in the middle east in Jordan,Jeddah, Bahrain, Dubai and Ireland. She moved to London shortly after turning eighteen to pursue a career in acting and attend art school. Karam believes that her inter-sectional cultures and her many 'homes' uniquely equip her to bring texture and humanity to the characters she portrays. She speaks French fluently and some Arabic.

Karam is so far known for embodying physically capable and tenacious characters. She starred as series regular in the NBC military drama "THE BRAVE" as elite sniper Jaz Khan. She then went on to star as firefighter Marjan Marwani, a series regular in the Ryan Murphy hit series "9-1-1: LONE STAR." now in its third season on Fox. Karam attributes her physical capabilities to her passion for boxing and the years she has spent training.

Karam also appeared in the feature film "The Old Guard" with Charlize Theron on Netflix and had an arc in season six of the Emmy Award-winning series "Homeland" on Showtime.

Jennifer Eve Garth was born on April 3rd, 1972 in Urbana, Illinois, USA to John and Carolyn Garth, who both had 3 children each from different marriages, before they had Jennie. She grew up on a 25-acre horse ranch outside Urbana, Illinois with her 6 older siblings: Johnny, Chuck, Lisa, Cammie, Wendy and Lynn. When Jennie was 13, she and her family moved to Phoenix, Arizona. She took dancing lessons and did a little modeling while living in Arizona, and she dreamed of going to college and later start her own dance studio. At age 15, Jennie was discovered and encouraged to pursue an acting career by a talent scout, who had seen her win a talent competition. Therefore, she dropped out of high school during her junior year, and she and her mom moved to Los Angeles, California so she could become an actress. She later obtained her diploma in California. There, she started taking acting classes and went to auditions almost every day. After living in LA for about four months, she landed the role of 'Ericka McCray' on the NBC series A Brand New Life (1989). Within a year, she was cast as 'Kelly Taylor' on the long-running hit teen drama-series Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990) on FOX television. Ever since, she has starred in several movies made for TV, a number of which she has produced and directed herself. On January 20th, 2001, she married actor Peter Facinelli, the father of her first daughter, Luca Bella (born June 29th, 1997), on her ranch in Santa Barbara, California. On December 6th, 2002, Jennie and Peter welcomed their second daughter, Lola Ray and their third daughter Fiona Facinelli on September 30th, 2006. Jennie most recently starred in the WB network sitcom What I Like About You (2002) as 'Valerie Tyler' until its cancellation in 2006.

Within a year of emancipating herself from foster care at 17, Angela Featherstone became Canada's top model when her September, Flare magazine cover broke all prior sales records. She quickly expanded upon her success and left for New York, where she signed with NEXT modeling agency. Angela traveled the world as a top fashion model, but for her life's work of acting, she downplayed her striking features to play unlikely roles, emerging as an actress with exceptional versatility. She is best known for playing Chloe in Friends, The Maid on Seinfeld, and the fiancé (Linda), who left Adam Sandler's character (Robbie) at the altar in The Wedding Singer. Most recently, she played the role of Maggie on Showtime's Ray Donovan and Jame on Girls for HBO. She has created sitcoms for Sony, DreamWorks, and NBC television and wrote nonfiction for Time, Jane, Flare, The Huffington Post, Dame, and Zoomer. Her essay about childhood trauma, God Said No, was published in the 2014 edition of Gargoyle Magazine and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Angela, a committed advocate for children in foster care, volunteers with the Children's Action Network curating their Heart Gallery from 2011- 2019 and serving on their Winter Wonderland committee 2014 & 2015. She mentored a child in foster care through Kidsave from 2011-2020 and has lectured at the ICAN Nexus Conference; Violence Within the Home and its Effects on Children. Her 2015 essay on child sex trafficking for DAME was picked up by Salon.org and MSN and exposed to over 7 million viewers. Angela also served as a consultant on the important Netflix documentary about the effects and healing of trauma, Cracked Up. In 2011, she curated Fuck Pretty at the Robert Berman Gallery, featuring important and emerging female photographers. In addition, she recorded "Coattail Glide" with Raymond Pettibon and The Niche Makers and was an adjunct lecturer at the UCLA Professional Producing Program.

With her 2022 debut 7-minute film, L'Étranger, Angela Featherstone turns her gaze to directing. As a director, Angela combines her years of experience in fashion as a model; working with important photographers and magazines such as; Italian, French, and American Vogue, Mademoiselle, Seventeen, Sassy, Harpers Bazaar Italia, Grazia, Harpers & Queens, Albert Watson, Bruce Weber, Oliviero Toscani, Irving Penn, & Piero Gemelli; her decades in the film industry; Friends, Seinfeld, ConAir, Wedding Singer, & Girls; a refined sense of story as an oft published essayist; her passion for philosophy; and a love of creating safe spaces for collaboration, into a movement of aesthetic bliss.

Eric Braeden is a German actor in America who began his career playing Nazis and eventually became a star of daytime soap operas. Born Hans Gudegast in Kiel, Germany, during the Second World War, he was a superb athlete who excelled in track-and-field events. As a teenager, he immigrated to the United States and worked in Texas and Montana as a translator, a cowhand, and a lumber millhand. His athleticism won him a scholarship to Montana State University. While attending college, he and friend Bob McKinnon made a film, The Riverbusters, about their successful attempt to be the first men to take a boat from the source to the mouth of the Salmon river and back again. He traveled to Los Angeles in hopes of finding a distributor for the documentary, but instead found that his handsome visage and accented English made him a valuable commodity as an actor. He appeared in small parts under his real name before landing the leading role of the antagonist, Captain Hans Dietrich, on the World War II television series The Rat Patrol (1966).

The series was a hit, and Gudegast's sympathetic German officer was very popular. He appeared in a few movies and television films thereafter in supporting roles, then was given the lead in Universal's science-fiction computer thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970). His delight at this huge career boost was muted by the studio's insistence that he change his name. With extreme reluctance, he agreed and became known subsequently as Eric Braeden. Braeden worked continuously in television movies for the next decade. He also worked on Broadway and in Los Angeles area theatre. In 1980, he reluctantly accepted a role in a daytime drama, The Young and the Restless (1973), and gained a stardom in this medium that had just eluded him in film and prime time television. As lead Victor Newman, Braeden brought a gravity and a strong center to the program. Amazingly handsome and athletic into his sixties, Braeden maintained the charisma that first brought him notice in "The Rat Patrol".

His infrequent film work during his nearly quarter century on "The Young and the Restless" included a prominent role as John Jacob Astor in Titanic (1997). A five-time Emmy nominee for his "The Young and the Restless" role (he won in 1998), he was also nominated eleven times for the Soap Opera Digest Outstanding Leading Actor Award, winning three times. In 1987, he was appointed, along with Henry Kissinger, Paul Volker, Steffi Graf, Alexander Haig, and Katherine Graham, to the German-American Advisory Board, and in 1991 received the Federal Medal of Honor from the president of his native land, Germany. He married his college sweetheart Dale Russell in 1966. Their son, Christian Gudegast is a screenwriter.

Elsie Kate Fisher is an American actor. They began their career in 2009 with a role in the television series Medium at age 6, before voicing Agnes in the first two Despicable Me films. In 2018, they received critical acclaim for their performance as the socially-struggling teenager Kayla Day in the comedy-drama film Eighth Grade; they earned many accolades and nominations for their performance, including a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actress - Motion Picture Comedy or Musical.

Most well known for voicing Agnes in the Despicable Me films. They are also notable for their voice role as Masha in the English version of the animated television series Masha and the Bear. As a live action actor, they were cast as Kevin Costner's character's daughter in the 2015 feature film McFarland, USA.

Fisher portrayed Parker Needler in the animated adaptation of The Addams Family (2019). They will also star in Ken Kwapis' musical film The Shaggs, based on the rock band of the same name.

Sarah Jeffery is an actress who has quietly amassed a body of work that encompasses both television and film. Growing up in Vancouver, British Columbia, Sarah has been performing on stage in musicals and theater productions since the age of three, but it was when she became a teen that she decided to expand her horizons and enter the world of film and television. Sarah booked her first television role on the Cartoon Network pilot "Aliens in the House." Months later, while attending the Langley Fine Arts School, she landed a series regular role on DirecTV's Rogue (2013), portraying the teenage daughter to Thandiwe Newton. While shooting Rogue (2013), Jeffery was cast in the M. Night Shyamalan event series for the FOX network Wayward Pines (2015) and worked with industry heavyweights such as Matt Dillon, Melissa Leo and Terrence Howard.

Following the completion of "Rogue" and "Wayward Pines", Sarah moved away from dark and edgy characters when she was cast in the Disney Channel movie Descendants (2015) directed and choreographed by Kenny Ortega. "Descendants" premiered to 12.2 million total viewers, including a record-breaking 3.3 million viewers on the Disney Channel app. Jeffery would get her first taste of independent film when she was cast in the feature Across the Line (2015) portraying a teen straddling the line between black and white students at a school dealing with racial tensions. Directed by famed music video director Director X, the film won the Best Atlantic Feature Award at the 2015 Atlantic Film Festival. On the NBC series Shades of Blue (2016), Sarah is a series regular as "Cristina", Jennifer Lopez's daughter. She divides her time between Los Angeles and Vancouver.

Sebastian Bach was born on 3 April 1968 in Freeport, Bahamas. He is a music artist and actor, known for Rock of Ages (2012), Gilmore Girls (2000) and Swearnet (2014). He has been married to Suzanne T. Le since 22 August 2015. He was previously married to Maria Bierk.

Milena Tscharntke was born on 3 April 1996 in Hamburg, Germany. She is an actress, known for The New End (2018), Druck (2018) and Isy Way Out (2018).

Hayley first appeared in national commercials for GM, On Star, K-Mart, and Slim Jim, and became the TV spokesperson for Cinnamon Toast Crunch. In addition, she had a couple of guest star roles on Nickelodeon's Unfabulous (2004). As a dancer, she studied with Scotty Nyugen. She is a prolific songwriter and she plays the drums, keyboards, and guitar. She was a member of a five girl-singing group, the Stunners up until their disbandment in 2011. The Stunners have released their first five-song EP with the video "Dancing Around the Truth." Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins (2009) debuted on Cartoon Network in 2009 with Hayley in the iconic role of Velma Dinkley. She appeared in the role of Stevie on Disney Channel's Wizards of Waverly Place (2007). Hayley, with the Stunners, toured as Justin Bieber's opening act in the summer of 2010.

Hayley recently joined the cast of the new CBS mid-season drama CSI: Cyber (2015). The series revolves around Special Agent Avery Ryan (Patricia Arquette), who is in charge of the Cyber Crime Division at Quantico, Virginia. Hayley plays Raven, a rookie techie working in the division who is an expert in social media, cyber trends, and international relations.

This past summer, Hayley filmed the Universal feature Jem and the Holograms (2015), in which she plays Aja. This Jon M. Chu-helmed film is set to be released on October 23, 2015. She followed that with Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015), the third installment in the successful franchise. Hayley can also be seen in the recurring role of Gabi, an ex-cyberbully in an all-girl group home on the breakout ABC Family show The Fosters (2013). Prior to this, she guest-starred on the hit CW series The Vampire Diaries (2009) and also appeared in the Disney Channel original movie Lemonade Mouth (2011).

In addition to a successful acting career, Hayley is a prolific songwriter and gifted musician. To follow up her solo artist debut in 2013, she is scheduled to release her new EP, "This Side of Paradise," in 2015. Working in collaboration with producer James Flannigan, she recorded the new album in London as well as in a makeshift studio in the garage of her Los Angeles home. Her music has garnered praise in multiple online publications including Nylon, Just Jared, Earmilk, and Hype Machine.