Karen Moncrieff (born on December 20, 1963 in Sacramento, California, U.S.), is an American actor, director, and screenwriter. Her directing credits are in both television and features and she acted in the soap operas Days of our Lives and Santa Barbara. In 1985, she was crowned Miss Illinois and competed in the Miss America pageant. Karen graduated from Rochester (Michigan) Adams High School in 1982, the same high school Madonna and David Geister attended.

David Russell Strathairn (born January 26, 1949) is an American actor. He was nominated for an Academy Award for portraying journalist Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck. He has appeared in many of writer/director John Sayles's movies.

Strathairn was born in San Francisco, California, the second of three children of Mary Frances (née Frazier), a nurse, and Thomas Scott Strathairn, Jr., a physician. He is of Scottish descent through his paternal grandfather, Thomas Scott Strathairn, a native of Crieff, and of Native Hawaiian ancestry through his paternal grandmother, Lei. Strathairn attended Redwood High School in Larkspur, California, and graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 1970.

He studied clowning at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College in Venice, Florida and briefly worked as a clown in a travelling circus.

Strathairn was nominated for an Academy Award for his starring portrayal of CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow in the 2005 biopic Good Night, and Good Luck. The movie explored Murrow's clash with Senator Joseph McCarthy over McCarthy's Communist "witch-hunt" in the 1950s. Strathairn also received Best Actor Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild (SAG) nominations for his performance.

Brittany Anne Murphy-Monjack (November 10, 1977 – December 20, 2009), known professionally as Brittany Murphy, was an American actress and singer. She starred in films such as Clueless, Just Married, Girl Interrupted, Spun, 8 Mile, Uptown Girls, Sin City, Happy Feet, and Riding in Cars with Boys. She voiced Luanne Platter on the animated TV series King of the Hill. Her final film, Something Wicked, was released on August 25, 2011.

Brittany Murphy was born as Brittany Anne Bertolotti in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 10, 1977. Her parents, Sharon Kathleen Murphy and Angelo Joseph Bertolotti, divorced when she was two years old, and Murphy was raised by her mother in Edison, New Jersey, where she attended Edison High School. Bertolotti was so estranged from the family that he was not named as the father on the first death certificate. The family later moved to Los Angeles so that Murphy could pursue an acting career. Murphy said her mother never tried to stifle her creativity, and she considered her mother a crucial factor in her later success: "When I asked my mom to move to California, she sold everything and moved out here for me. ... She always believed in me." Murphy's mother is of Irish and Eastern European descent and her father is Italian American. She was raised a Baptist and later became a non-denominational Christian. She had two older half-brothers and a younger half-sister.

Barbara Kelly (5 October 1924 – 15 January 2007) was a Canadian-born actress, possibly best-known for her television roles in the United Kingdom opposite her husband Bernard Braden in the 1950s and 1960s and for many appearances as a panelist on the British version of What's My Line?.

Barbara Kelly was born in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1924. As a child, she was given elocution lessons, and while Kelly hated the stage her mother was a frustrated actress. Kelly's first professional role was playing the Virgin Mary in a Nativity Play. Kelly's father, an Irishman, was a lorry driver in Vancouver. Her mother, who was from Manchester, forced ballet classes and elocution lessons on her.

Deeply unhappy at home, in 1942, she escaped at the age of 17 to marry the actor and broadcaster Bernard Braden, and she soon did much radio work and toured across Canada in a stage show. Kelly also made her television debut at this time, appearing in The Stage Show. In 1949, she and her husband moved to the United Kingdom with their two children. A third child Kim was born in 1949 in London.

Barbara Mason (born 9 August 1947, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American R&B/soul singer best known for her 1965 hit song, "Yes, I'm Ready".

A soul singer, Mason initially focused on songwriting when she entered the music industry in her teens. As a performer, though, she had a hit single in 1965 with her self-penned Top 10 hit, "Yes, I'm Ready" (number five pop, number two R&B), a fetching soul-pop confection that spotlighted her high, girlish vocals. One of the first examples of the sweet, lush sound that came to be called Philly soul, she had modest success throughout the rest of the decade on the small Arctic label, reaching the Billboard Hot 100 Top 40 again in 1965 with "Sad, Sad Girl", and "Oh How It Hurts" in 1967-68.

In the early and mid 1970s, Mason toughened her persona considerably, singing about sexual love and infidelity with a frankness that was uncommon for a female soul singer in songs like "Bed and Board," "From His Woman to You," and "Shackin' Up." Sweet soul continued to be her groove, and she continued to write some of her material. But the production, as it was throughout soul in the '70s, was more funk-oriented, and at times Mason would interrupt her singing to deliver some straight-talkin' raps about romance. Curtis Mayfield produced her on a cover version of Mayfield's "Give Me Your Love," which restored her to the pop Top 40 and R&B Top Ten in 1973; "From His Woman to You" (the response to Shirley Brown's single "Woman to Woman") and "Shackin' Up" were also solid soul sellers in the mid '70s. After leaving Buddah Records in 1975, she only dented the charts periodically, with "I Am Your Woman, She Is Your Wife" (1978), "Another Man" (1984) on West End Records, and a couple of other singles.