Frederick John Inman (28 June 1935 – 8 March 2007) was an English actor best known for his role as Mr. Humphries in Are You Being Served?, a British sitcom in the 1970s and 1980s. Inman was also well known in the United Kingdom as a pantomime dame.

Born in 1935, Inman made his stage debut aged 13. He worked in retail in London as a young adult and after four years left to earn his Equity Card. He made his West End debut in the 1960s, and his television debut in an episode of A Slight Case of ... entitled The Enemy Within in 1965, next appearing in an episode of Two In Clover in 1970. After a successful pilot of Are You Being Served?, Inman played the camp Mr. Humphries in the sitcom from 1972 to 1985. This role made him a household name and won him awards, including BBC TV Personality of the Year. In his later years, John Inman became a well known pantomime dame. He died of hepatitis in 2007 aged 71.

Inman was born in 1935 in Preston, Lancashire, and was a cousin of actress Josephine Tewson. At the age of 12, Inman moved with his parents to Blackpool where his mother ran a boarding house, while his father owned a hairdressing business. As a child, he enjoyed dressmaking. He was educated at Claridge House in Preston, and then a secondary modern. Inman always wanted to be an actor, and his parents paid for him to have elocution lessons at the local church hall. At the age of 13 he made his stage debut in the Pavilion on Blackpool's South Pier, in a melodrama entitled Freda. Aged 15, he took a job at the pier, making tea, clearing up, and playing parts in plays.

Isobel Mary "Mollie" Sugden (21 July 1922 – 1 July 2009) was an English comedy actress, best known for portraying the saleswoman Mrs. Slocombe in the British sitcom Are You Being Served? from 1972 to 1985. She later reprised this role in Grace & Favour, which ran from 1992 to 1993. Sugden appeared in many other television series, including The Liver Birds and Coronation Street.

Sugden was born in Keighley in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1922. When she was four years old, she heard a woman reading a poem at a village concert making people laugh. The following Christmas, after being asked if she could "do anything", Sugden read this poem and everyone fell about laughing. She later remarked that their response made her "realise how wonderful it was to make people laugh". Shortly after she left school, the World War II broke out, and Sugden worked in a munitions factory in Keighley making shells for the Royal Navy. She was later made redundant, so attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.

Frank Thornton (born 15 January 1921) is an English actor who is known for playing Captain Peacock in Are You Being Served? and its sequel Grace & Favour (Are You Being Served Again) and as Truly in Last of the Summer Wine.

Frank Thornton Ball (he would later drop his surname professionally) was born in Dulwich, London, the son of Rosina Mary (née Thornton) and William Ernest Ball. He wanted to act from an early age, but his father, who worked in a bank, wanted him to get a 'proper' job and so he got a job working in insurance after leaving Alleyn's School. He soon enrolled at a small acting school, the London School of Dramatic Art, and did evening classes. After two years working at the insurance company, Frank Thornton was invited to become a day student at the acting school and persuaded his father to finance his studies.

During the Second World War Thornton was evacuated along with the drama school and his first job was touring with four plays in Ireland. On 5 June 1945, he married actress Beryl Jane Margaret Evans in West Wickham, London and they had a daughter, Jane. He served during World War II as an officer in the Royal Air Force and was demobilised in 1947. Almost immediately after, Thornton joined a rep company. His first credited role was in the 1954 film Radio Cab Murder.

Wendy Richard, MBE (born Wendy Emerton 20 July 1943 – 26 February 2009) was an English actress best known for playing Miss Brahms in Are You Being Served? and Pauline Fowler in EastEnders. She was first educated at St George's Primary School in Mount Street, Mayfair, west London, before attending the Royal Masonic School for Girls in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, and then the Italia Conti Academy stage school in London.

She died on 26 February 2009 at the Harley Street clinic where she was being treated for a third bout of breast cancer.

Richard, an only child, was born in Middlesbrough in 1943. Her parents, Henry William (died in 1954) and Beatrice Reay (1910–1972) (née Cutter) Emerton, were publicans and ran the Corporation Hotel in the town. Emerton and Cutter married in Paddington in 1939. While Richard was a baby, her family moved to Bournemouth. Later they moved to the Isle of Wight and then to London, where they ran the Shepherds Tavern in Shepherd Market, where Elizabeth Taylor and Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon were said to be customers. Richard attended the local primary school, St George's, but her education was interrupted when her family moved again, this time to the Valentine Hotel at Gants Hill, then in Essex, now in Greater London. Another move, to the Streatham Park Hotel in south London, followed a few months later. It was here, in December 1954, that Richard's father committed suicide. The actress, then 11, found his body. Her mother Beatrice never remarried, and died of liver cancer in May 1972.

Trevor Gordon Bannister (14 August 1934 – 14 April 2011) was an English actor best known for having played the womanising junior salesman Mr. Lucas in the sitcom Are You Being Served? from 1972 to 1979, and for his role as Toby Mulberry Smith in the long-running sitcom Last of the Summer Wine, from 2003 until it ended its run in 2010. He died the following year.

In 1960 Bannister appeared on stage at the Cambridge Theatre in London in Billy Liar, which starred Albert Finney. He starred as Darkie Pilbeam, a wartime spiv, in the 1968 television series The War of Darkie Pilbeam, and from 1969 to 1970 he appeared as "Heavy Breathing" in Jack Rosenthal's sitcom, The Dustbinmen. Shortly afterwards, he was asked to play Mr. Lucas in a Comedy Playhouse pilot called Are You Being Served? and took the part in the series.

In 1972 he appeared as the weak bladdered Producer of a local theatre company in "Steptoe and Son", Episode 2 series 7 - "A Star is Born". He played Peter Pitt in the 1988 BBC sitcom Wyatt's Watchdogs. Other TV appearances include Keeping Up Appearances, Call Earnshaw, Gideon's Way, The Saint, The Tomorrow People, Only on Sunday and The Avengers. Bannister played three different characters in the ITV soap Coronation Street. From 2001 he played a recurring character (The Golf Captain) in Last of the Summer Wine. becoming a regular in the 30th series in 2009, finally receiving a name (Toby Mulbery-Smith), moving next door to Barry and Glenda (Mike Grady and Sarah Thomas) and befriending Morton (Christopher Beeny).