Catch Me a Spy

Kirk Douglas (born Issur Danielovitch; December 9, 1916 – February 5, 2020) was an American actor, producer, director and author. He grew up as Izzy Demsky and legally changed his name to Kirk Douglas before entering the United States Navy during World War II. During his career, Douglas appeared in more than 90 movies and was known for his explosive acting style. He became an international star for his leading role as an unscrupulous boxing hero in Champion (1949), which brought him his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Other early films include Young Man with a Horn (1950), Ace in the Hole (1951), and Detective Story (1951), a film for which he received a Golden Globe nomination as Best Actor in a Drama. He received a second Oscar nomination for his role in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), and his third nomination for portraying Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956), which landed him a second Golden Globe nomination. In 1955, Douglas established Bryna Productions, which produced films as varied as Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus (1960). He took the lead roles in both films. Douglas has been praised for helping to break the Hollywood blacklist by having Dalton Trumbo write Spartacus with an official on-screen credit. In 1963 Douglas starred in the Broadway play One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a story that he purchased and later gave to his son Michael Douglas, who turned it into an Oscar-winning film. As an actor and philanthropist, Douglas received an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. As an author, he wrote ten novels and memoirs. He is No. 17 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male screen legends of classic Hollywood cinema. Kirk Douglas died at age 103.

Marlène Jobert (born 4 November 1943) is a French Pied-Noir actress and author. Jobert was born in Algiers, Algeria (then French territory), the daughter of Andrée (née Azoulay) and a father who flew for the French Air Force. She came to Metropolitan France when aged 8. Besides acting, she has been the author and/or narrator of (mainly children's) audio books. She also has written a series of books which cautiously lead on to the appreciation of classical music, e.g. of Mozart, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky. Her daughter, Eva Green, by Swedish dentist Walter Green, is also an actress. Her other daughter Joy Green is in business school. Description above from the Wikipedia article Marlène Jobert, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Howard was born in Cliftonville, Kent, England, the son of Mabel Grey (Wallace) and Arthur John Howard. He was educated at Clifton College (to which he left in his will a substantial legacy for a drama scholarship) and at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), acting on the London stage for several years before World War II. His first paid work was in the play Revolt in a Reformatory (1934), before he left RADA in 1935 to take small roles. Although stories of his courageous wartime service in the British Army's Royal Corps of Signals earned him much respect among fellow actors and fans alike, files held in the Public Record Office reveal that he had actually been discharged from the British Army in 1943 for mental instability and having a "psychopathic personality". The story, which surfaced in Terence Pettigrew's biography of the actor, published by Peter Owen in 2001, was initially denied by Howard's widow, actress Helen Cherry. Later, confronted with official records, she told the Daily Telegraph (24 June 2001) that his mother had claimed he was a holder of the Military Cross. She added that Howard had an honourable military record and "had nothing to be ashamed of".

An English actor who came to prominence in the early 1960s with a succession of films including The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), Billy Liar (1963), and Dr. Zhivago (1965). Since the mid-1960s he has been known primarily for his work in the theatre. Courtenay received a knighthood in February 2001 for forty years' service to cinema and theatre. Courtenay is the President of Hull City A.F.C.'s Official Supporters Club. In 1999, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Hull University. Description above from the Wikipedia article Tom Courtenay, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Bernadette Lafont was a French actress who appeared in more than 150 feature films. She has been considered "the face of French New Wave".

Bernard Blier (11 January 1916 – 29 March 1989) was a French character actor. His rotund features and premature baldness allowed him to often play cuckolded husbands in his early career. He proved to be one of France's most versatile and sought-after character actors, performing interchangeably in comedies and dramas. He often worked in Italian films, particularly in the last decade of his life. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where his father, a researcher at the Institut Pasteur, was posted at the time. He is the father of director Bertrand Blier, and appeared in a number of his son's films, most notably Buffet froid (1979). He was awarded an Honorary César (the French Oscar) in 1989, a month before he died. Description above from the Wikipedia article Bernard Blier, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Angharad Rees was a London-born Welsh actress and, later, jewellery designer, best known for her British television roles during the 1970s and in particular her leading role as Demelza in the 1970s BBC TV costume drama "Poldark". Her father was a prominent Welsh psychiatrist Linford Rees (William Linford Llewellyn Rees) and mother Catherine Thomas. When she was two, in 1946, her family returned to Wales to live into Cardiff. Rees studied at the Sorbonne in Paris for two terms and the Rose Bruford Drama College in Kent, England. She also studied at the University of Madrid and taught English in Spain before acting in repertory theatre in England. On 18 September 1973, Rees married the actor Christopher Cazenove. They had two sons: Linford James and Rhys William. Linford was killed in a car accident on the M11 motorway in Essex while driving to pick up books from Cambridge University, where he had been awarded the degree of Master of Philosophy. Cazenove and Rees divorced in 1994 but remained close. Cazenove died from the effects of septicaemia in 2010. Rees later married David McAlpine, a member of the McAlpine construction company, at The Royal Hospital Chelsea, London. She remained married to McAlpine until her death. Rees founded a jewellery design company, Angharad, based in Knightsbridge, London, England.

Sacha Pitoëff (born Alexandre Pitoëff; 11 March 1920 – 21 July 1990) was a Swiss-born French actor and stage director. Pitoëff was born in Geneva, Switzerland, on 11 March 1920, the son of Russian-born parents Ludmilla (née Smanova) and Georges Pitoëff. Both of his parents were born in the city of Tbilisi (in modern-day Georgia), then a part of the Russian Empire. The Pitoëffs were prominent actors in France, Georges was a founding member of the Cartel des Quatre (Group of Four), a group including Louis Jouvet, Charles Dullin, and Gaston Baty, dedicated to rejuvenating the French theatre. Sacha graduated from Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly-sur-Seine, outside Paris. He studied acting and stage direction under Jouvet at the Théâtre de l'Athénée. During World War II, the younger Pitoëff followed his mother back to Switzerland, where he played his earliest roles. After the war he returned to Paris, becoming general manager at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. He made his directorial debut with a 1950 staging of Uncle Vanya, which proved both a critical and commercial success. He became a fixture of Parisian theatre in the 1960s, becoming the director of his own troupe. His repertoire included works by Jean Genet, Eugène Ionesco, Hugo Claus, Robert Musil, Anna Langfus and Anton Chekhov. With Romy Schneider, he staged The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters at Théâtre de l'Œuvre. In 1967, he achieved his greatest success with a well-regarded production of Luigi Pirandello's Henry IV, which he directed and starred in, with Claude Jade. Pitoëff played his first film role in 1952, in the omnibus film The Seven Deadly Sins. Appearing in over 50 films, he is probably best known for his performance in Alain Resnais's enigmatic Last Year at Marienbad (1960), as the unnamed man who may or may not be Delphine Seyrig's husband. He was featured in roles of various sizes in such films as Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Espions (1957), Peter Ustinov's Lady L (1965), René Clément's Is Paris Burning? (1966), and Jacques Demy's Donkey Skin (1970). He also appeared in several Hollywood productions, including Anatole Litvak's Anastasia (1956) and The Night of the Generals (1967), Mark Robson's The Prize (1963) and Dick Clement's To Catch a Spy (1971). Toward the end of his acting career, he began appearing in horror films. His final role was as the bookseller Kazanian in Dario Argento's Inferno (1980). For the last ten years of his life, Pitoëff was a professor at the National School of Theatre Arts and Techniques (ENSATT) in Lyon, where his students included Gérard Depardieu, Jean-Roger Milo and Niels Arestrup. Pitoëff was married to French actress Luce Garcia-Ville, until her death by suicide in 1975. He had two siblings, actress Svetlana Pitoëff and writer Aniouta Pitoeff. His height and distinctively-gaunt, lanky appearance may have been a consequence of Marfan syndrome. Having suffered from depression in the final years of his life, he died in Paris at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital on 21 July 1990, at the age of 70. Source: Article "Sacha Pitoëff" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Richard de Pearsall Pearson (1 August 1918 – 2 August 2011) was an English character actor, who appeared in numerous film, television and stage productions over a period of 65 years. He played leading roles in several London West End plays and also supported Maggie Smith, Robert Morley and others in long-running West End stage productions. His many screen appearances included character parts in three Polanski films.

His television career began in the mid-fifties and although initially playing small parts, during the sixties he began to take on bigger roles, including the part of Detective Chief Inspector Lewis in the BBC's long-running Softly Softly (1966) series. He often played policemen but none more famous than DCI Frank Haskins in The Sweeney (1974), opposite John Thaw and Dennis Waterman, during the seventies, where he was an admirable foil to Thaw's brash, renegade Inspector Jack Regan. He was also a regular in other TV series such as The Nineteenth Hole (1989), You Must Be the Husband (1987) and Shelley (1979), all during the eighties, and No Job for a Lady (1990) opposite Penelope Keith in the nineties.

Trevor Edward Peacock was an English actor, screenwriter, and songwriter, best known for playing Jim Trott in the BBC comedy series The Vicar of Dibley.

Bernice Mary Stegers is an English actress, known for Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), My Life in Ruins (2009), Final Fantasy XII (2006), and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018).

Henry Wilfrid Brambell (22 March 1912 – 18 January 1985) was an Irish television and film actor and comedian, best remembered for his role in the television series Steptoe and Son. He also performed alongside The Beatles in their debut film A Hard Day's Night, playing the fictional grandfather of Paul McCartney.

Cheryl Hall (born 23 July 1950, London) is a British actress. She is best known for playing the role of Shirley, the girlfriend of Wolfie Smith in the British sitcom Citizen Smith. She also appeared in Dear Mother...Love Albert playing Rodney Bewes' screen girlfriend and as a clippy in the On the Buses episode The Epidemic. She appeared in the Doctor Who story Carnival of Monsters (1973)[2] (and had, a couple of years earlier, been shortlisted for the part of the Doctor's companion Jo Grant before the part went to actress Katy Manning), and as an inmate in one episode of Within These Walls (1974) and was David Jason's love interest in the ITV sitcom Lucky Feller. She also had a small role in EastEnders. Film appearances included the Avarice segment of The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins and the all-star pop comedy Three for All(1975). Hall was the Labour Party parliamentary candidate for Canterbury in the 1997 General Election. She also served as a member of Kent County Council, holding the position of Leader of the Labour group for a period. She still acts occasionally, most recently in The Bill (2005). She was married to the actor Robert Lindsay (who played Wolfie Smith in Citizen Smith) from 1974 to 1980

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. John Edward Thaw, CBE (3 January 1942 – 21 February 2002) was an English actor who appeared in a range of television, stage, and cinema roles. He starred in the television series Inspector Morse as title character Detective Chief Inspector Endeavour Morse, Redcap as Sergeant John Mann, The Sweeney as Detective Inspector Jack Regan, Home to Roost as Henry Willows, and Kavanagh QC as title character James Kavanagh. Description above from the Wikipedia article John Thaw, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.​