Richard Burton, 1925 - 1984, was a Welsh actor noted for his mellifluous baritone voice, Burton established himself as a formidable Shakespearean actor in the 1950s, and he gave a memorable performance of Hamlet in 1964.

He was called "the natural successor to Olivier" by critic Kenneth Tynan. A heavy drinker, Burton's purported failure to live up to those expectations disappointed some critics and colleagues and added to his image as a great performer who had wasted his talent. Nevertheless, he is widely regarded as one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation.

Burton was nominated for an Academy Award seven times, but never won an Oscar. By the late 1960s, Burton was one of the highest-paid actors in the world, receiving fees of $1 million or more plus a share of the gross receipts.[ He remained closely associated in the public consciousness with his second wife, actress Elizabeth Taylor. The couple's turbulent relationship was rarely out of the news.

Two-time Oscar-winner Jack Lemmon starred in dozens of films, working until his death in 2001 at the age of 76. But how many of those titles are classics? Let's take a look back at some of his greatest movies.

Lemmon won his first Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for "Mister Roberts" (1955). A second Oscar for Best Actor followed for "Save the Tiger" (1973), making him the first person to pull off victories in both categories. He competed six more times for Best Actor throughout his career ("Some Like It Hot" in 1959, "The Apartment" in 1960, "Days of Wine and Roses" in 1962, "The China Syndrome" in 1979, "Tribute" in 1980, and "Missing" in 1982).

He is perhaps best known for his long collaboration with Walter Matthau, with whom he made 11 films (including his solo directorial outing "Kotch," which earned Matthau a Best Actor Oscar nomination). In films such as "The Fortune Cookie" (1966), "The Odd Couple" (1968), and "Grumpy Old Men" (1993), Lemmon's fastidiousness played beautifully off of Matthau's scruffiness. (So close were the two, in fact, that Lemmon died almost exactly one year after Matthau did.)

Ron Moody was an English actor, composer, singer and writer.
He was best known for his portrayal of Fagin in Oliver! and its 1983 Broadway revival. Moody earned a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination for the film, as well as a Tony Award nomination for the stage production.

Among his better known roles was that of Prime Minister Rupert Mountjoy in the comedy The Mouse on the Moon (1963), alongside Margaret Rutherford, with whom he appeared again the following year in Murder Most Foul (1964), one of Rutherford's Miss Marple films.

Shirley Mae Jones (born March 31, 1934) is an American actress and singer.

In her six decades in show business, she has starred as wholesome characters in a number of musical films, such as Oklahoma! (1955), Carousel (1956), and The Music Man (1962). She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing a vengeful prostitute in Elmer Gantry (1960).
She played the lead role of Shirley Partridge, the widowed mother of five children, in the musical situation-comedy television series The Partridge Family (1970-1974), which co-starred her real-life stepson, David Cassidy, son of Jack Cassidy.

Rhonda Fleming
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rhonda Fleming (born Marilyn Louis, Hollywood, California, August 10, 1923) is an American film and television actress.

She acted in more than forty films, mostly in the 1940s and 1950s, and became renowned as one of the most glamorous actresses of her day. She was nicknamed the "Queen of Technicolor" because her fair complexion and flaming red hair photographed exceptionally well in Technicolor.

Montgomery Clift (1920 - 1966) was an American actor. The New York Times said he was known for his portrayal of "moody, sensitive young men".

He is best remembered for his roles in Red River (1948), The Heiress (1949), A Place in the Sun (1951), From Here to Eternity (1953), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and The Misfits (1961).

Along with Marlon Brando and James Dean, Clift was considered one of the original method actors in Hollywood (though Clift distanced himself from the term); he was one of the first actors to be invited to study in the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan. He also executed a rare move by not signing a contract after arriving in Hollywood, only doing so after his first two films were a success. This was described as "a power differential that would go on to structure the star-studio relationship for the next 40 years".

Edward G Robinson (born Emanuel Goldenberg; Yiddish: עמנואל גאָלדנבערג

Golden Age Hollywood's ultimate , Edward Robinson made a living as a "tough guy" in a raft of iterations, from hardboiled newspaperman to intrepid G-man. In real life soft-spoken, intellectual and selfless, Robinson would nevertheless imprint himself as cold-eyed Machiavellian thugs in such film classics as "Little Caesar" (1931), "The Sea Wolf" (1941) and "Key Largo" (1948) - though he could also single-handedly lift films with his rapid-fire comic timing, as with such screwball outings as "The Whole Town's Talking" (1935) and "A Small Case of Murder", and with colourful, cerebral supporting roles, as in "Double Indemnity" (1944).
Able to command the screen by both verve and subtlety, he played his roles with such archetypal distinction and verbal flare that he would wind up inspiring a number of cartoon characters, from the shorts of Warner Bros. studio-mate Bugs Bunny while he was alive to lovably inept constable Chief Wiggum in American television's longest-running show, "The Simpsons" (Fox, 1989- ).

Off the screen for a few years, Jean Simmons captivated moviegoers with a brilliant performance as the mother in All the Way Home (1963), a literate, tasteful adaptation of James Agee's "A Death in the Family".
However, after that, she found quality projects somewhat harder to come by, and took work in Life at the Top (1965), Mister Buddwing (1966), Divorce American Style (1967), Rough Night in Jericho (1967), The Happy Ending (1969) (a Richard Brooks film for which she was again Oscar-nominated, this time as Best Actress).

Jean continued making films well into the 1970s. In the 1980s, she appeared mainly in television miniseries, such as North and South (1985) and The Thorn Birds (1983). She made a comeback to films in 1995 in How to Make an American Quilt (1995) co-starring Winona Ryder and Anne Bancroft, and most recently played the elderly Sophie in the English version of Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle (2004).
She now resided in Santa Monica, California, with her dog, Mr. Gates, and her two cats, Adisson and Megan. Jean Simmons died of lung cancer on January 22, 2010, nine days before her 81st birthday.

Jeremy John Irons (born 1948) is an English actor and activist. After receiving classical training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, Irons began his acting career on stage in 1969 and has appeared in many West End theatre productions, including the Shakespeare plays The Winter's Tale, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew and Richard II.
In 1984, he made his Broadway debut in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing and he received a Tony Award for Best Actor.

Irons's first major film role came in the romantic drama The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981). After starring in dramas, such as Moonlighting (1982), Betrayal (1983), and The Mission (1986), he was praised for portraying twin gynaecologists in David Cronenberg's psychological thriller Dead Ringers (1988).
Irons has won multiple awards, including the Academy Award for Best Actor, for his portrayal of the accused attempted murderer Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune (1990).

During Gloria Swanson's heyday, audiences went to her movies not only for her performances, but also to see her wardrobe.

She was frequently ornamented with beads, jewels, peacock and ostrich feathers and other extravagant pieces of haute couture. Her fashion, hair styles, and jewels were copied around the world. She was the screen's first clothes horse and was becoming one of the more famous and photographed women in the world.

In 1950, after an absence from the screen for several years, Swanson achieved widespread praise and recognition for her role as Norma Desmond, a reclusive silent film star, in the critically acclaimed 1950 film Sunset Boulevard. The film earned her a Golden Globe Award and a nomination for an Academy Award. In 1989, the film was among the first group of films to be chosen by the Library of Congress for preservation as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

Walter Pidgeon, a handsome, tall and dark-haired man, began his career studying voice at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. He then did theater, mainly stage musicals. He went to Hollywood in the early 1920s, where he made silent films, including Mannequin (1926) and Sumuru (1927).
When talkies arrived, Pidgeon made some musicals, but he never received top billing or recognition in these.

Robert Newton was one of the great character actors -- and great characters -- of the British cinema, best remembered today for playing Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1950) and its sequel for Walt Disney in the 1950s.
His portrayal of Long John Silver and of Blackbeard, the Pirate (1952) created a persona that was so indelible that his vocal intonations created the paradigm for scores of people who want to "Talk Like a Pirate".
The performance overshadows Newton's legacy, which is based on many first-rate performances in such movies as This Happy Breed (1944), Odd Man Out (1947) and Oliver Twist (1948), where his Bill Sykes is truly chilling.

Oliver Reed, who played Sykes in the Oscar-winning movie musical Oliver! (1968) was influenced by Newton.

Already trained in dance and theater, Webb quit school at age 13 to study music and painting. By 19 he was a professional ballroom dancer in New York, and by his mid-twenties he was performing in musicals, dramas on Broadway and in London, and in silent movies.
His first real success in film came in middle age as the classy villain Waldo Lydecker in Laura (1944), followed by the part of Elliott Templeton in The Razor's Edge (1946) - both of which won him Oscar nominations.

His priggish Mr Belvedere in a series of films was supposedly not far removed from his fastidious, finicky, fussy, abrasive and condescending real-life persona. He was inseparable from his overbearing mother Maybelle, with whom he lived until her death at 91, six years before his own death.
The recent success of Titanic (1997) created brief interest due his having appeared with Barbara Stanwyck in the 1953 version of the story.

His elegant taste kept him on Hollywood's best-dressed lists for decades. His scrupulously-private gay life has also been respective one to his personality as a true gentleman.

Suellyn Lyon was an American actress. She joined the entertainment industry as a model at the age of 13, and later rose to prominence and won a Golden Globe for playing the title role in the film Lolita. Her other film appearances included The Night of the Iguana, 7 Women, Tony Rome, and Evel Knievel.

When she was 14 years old, she was cast in the role of Dolores "Lolita" Haze in Stanley Kubrick's film Lolita (1962), against James Mason, then aged 53. Kubrick described her as the "perfect nymphet". She was chosen for the role partly because the film makers had to alter the age of the character to an older adolescent rather than the 12-year-old child Lolita in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita.

Although Kubrick's film altered the story so as not to be in violation of the Hollywood Production Code, it was still one of the more controversial films of the day.
Lyon was 15 when the film premiered in June 1962, too young to watch the film. She became an instant celebrity and won a Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer—Female.

Lyon was cast as a seductive teenager in John Huston's The Night of the Iguana (1964), competing for the affections of disgraced preacher Richard Burton against the likes of Deborah Kerr and Ava Gardner

His acting career reached a peak in the 1960s with leading roles in other films like Two-Way Stretch (1960), The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), Murder Ahoy! (opposite Margaret Rutherford), First Men in the Moon (1964) and Camelot (1967).
Bhowani Junction (1956)
Blue Murder at St Trinian's (1957)
Two-Way Stretch (1960)
The Wrong Arm of the Law (1963)
Murder Ahoy! (1964)

One of the most recognizable deep voices in all of film, radio or television.
Frequently wrote, directed, and/or starred in films that feature the rise and fall of the main character, often unmade by their own vices: Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane (1941), George Amberson Minafer in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Macbeth in Macbeth (1948), Othello in Othello (1951), Gregory Arkadin in Confidential Report (1955), Detective Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil (1958), Sir John Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight (1965).

After the Second World War, demonstrating her range, she appeared in Holiday Camp (1947), the first of a series of films which featured the very ordinary Huggett family; as Sister Philippa in Black Narcissus (1947); as a magistrate in Good-Time Girl (1948); as a prospective Labour MP in Frieda (1947); and in the costume melodrama Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948).
Her other film roles included the Empress Dowager Cixi in 55 Days at Peking (1963), Miss Milchrest in Murder at the Gallop (1963), the Queen of Hearts in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972), and Livia in the aborted I, Claudius in 1937.

Sonia Dresdel (1909 - 1976) was an English actress, whose career ran between the 1940s and 1970s.
Her performance in the lead role of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler at the Westminster Theatre in 1942 "was legendary. It was the performance on which her reputation was founded. James Agate was ecstatic. For a decade Dresdel was regarded as one of England's foremost stage actresses.[Her leading role in the 1947 film While I Live also gained her a great deal of acclaim.
Her best remembered role is as Mrs. Baines in the film version of Graham Greene's The Fallen Idol (1948), which starred Ralph Richardson and Michèle Morgan.
While I Live (1947)
The Fallen Idol (1948)
The Third Visitor (1951)
The Clouded Yellow (1951)