✿     Anne Bancroft was born in 1931 in The Bronx, NY. She made her cinema debut in Don't Bother to Knock (1952) in 1952, and over the next five years appeared in a lot of undistinguished movies. By 1957 she grew dissatisfied with the scripts she was getting, left the film business and spent the next five years doing plays on Broadway. She returned to screens in 1962 with her portrayal of Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker (1962), for which she won an Oscar. Bancroft went on to give acclaimed performances in The Pumpkin Eater (1964), The Slender Thread (1965), Young Winston (1972), The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975), The Elephant Man (1980), To Be or Not to Be (1983), 84 Charing Cross Road (1987) and other movies, but her most famous role would be as Mrs Robinson in The Graduate (1967). Her status as the 'older woman' in the film is iconic, although in real life she was only eight years older than Katharine Ross and just six years older than Dustin Hoffman. Bancroft would later express her frustration over the fact that the film overshadowed her other work.

✿     One of the quintessential images of pre-war French cinema was the almond-eyed Michèle Morgan, dressed in trench coat and beret, trying to grab some happiness together with the doomed army deserter, Jean Gabin, in a sombre fogbound port in Le Quai des Brumes. It was the first film in which the distinctive melancholic 'poetic realism' of the director Marcel Carné and the screenwriter Jacques Prévert expressed itself. The then 18-year-old Morgan had already been in pictures for three years, yet never again in her long career would she appear in a role so perfectly suited to her, that of the beautiful, mysterious waif, old beyond her years. Following Le Quai des Brumes, Morgan, who has died aged 96, was paired once more with the great Gabin, with whom she had a brief affair, in Jean Grémillon's Remorques (Stormy Waters, 1941), another gloomy tale of doomed love, with Morgan again falling for a married man. On the strength of her performances in these successful films, Morgan was offered a Hollywood contract by RKO Pictures.

✿     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.

✿     Bergman, who was born on August 29, 1915, studied acting at Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theatre and became a film star in Sweden before making her first Hollywood movie, David O. Selznick's Intermezzo: A Love Story (1939). In 1942, Bergman co-starred in Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart, who uttered the famous line to her: 'Here's looking at you, kid.' She received a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for 1943's For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was followed by a win in the same category for 1944's Gaslight. She was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar again for 1945's The Bells of St. Mary's and 1948's Joan of Arc. Bergman worked with director Alfred Hitchcock on Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946) and Under Capricorn (1949). In 1949, Bergman began a romance with Roberto Rossellini when he directed her in Stromboli (1950). When the actress, who at the time was married to a Swedish physician with whom she had a daughter, became pregnant with Rossellini's child, it created a huge scandal. Bergman was even reprimanded on the floor of the U.S. Senate. The couple, whose son was born in February 1950, married in May of that same year. In 1952, Bergman gave birth to twin daughters; one of them, Isabella Rossellini, later became a noted actress in her own right. Pia Lindstrom, Bergman's daughter from her first marriage, also had an acting career. Bergman and Roberto Rossellini divorced in 1957. Bergman won another Best Actress Academy Award for 1956's Anastasia; the actor Cary Grant accepted the award on her behalf. Bergman did not return publicly to Hollywood until the 1958 Oscars, at which she was a presenter. She won her third Academy Award, in the category of Best Actress in a Supporting Role, for 1974's Murder on the Orient Express. Her final Oscar nomination, in the Best Actress category, was for 1978's Autumn Sonata, which was helmed by famed Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (to whom she was not related).