Shemp Howard (March 11, 1895 – November 22, 1955) was an American actor and comedian best known as a part of The Three Stooges comedy team. Born Samuel Horwitz, he was called "Shemp" because "Sam" came out that way in his mother's thick Litvak accent. He was an older brother of both Moe Howard and Curly Howard as well as the "third stooge" in the early years of the act. He would rejoin the trio in May 1946 after Curly suffered a stroke.

Shemp was born in Manhattan, New York. He was the third of the five Horwitz brothers and of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry.

Moe Howard entered show business as a youngster, on stage and in films. Eventually, he and older brother Shemp tried their hands as minstrel-show-style "blackface" comedians with an act they called "Howard and Howard—A Study In Black", and even worked for a rival vaudeville circuit at the same time by appearing without makeup. By the 1920s Moe had teamed in a roughhouse act with boyhood friend-turned-vaudeville star Ted Healy. One day Moe spotted his brother Shemp in the audience, and yelled at him from the stage. Quick-witted Shemp yelled right back, and walked onto the stage. From then on, Shemp was part of the act, usually known as "Ted Healy and His Stooges". On stage, Healy would sing and tell jokes while his three noisy stooges would get in his way. Healy would retaliate with physical and verbal abuse. Healy's original stooges were the Howard brothers and Larry Fine. Shemp played a bumbling fireman in the Stooges' first film, Soup to Nuts, the only film in which he plays one of Healy's gang.

Roscoe Conkling "Fatty" Arbuckle (March 24, 1887 – June 29, 1933) was an American silent film actor, comedian, director, and screenwriter. Starting at the Selig Polyscope Company he eventually moved to Keystone Studios where he worked with Mabel Normand and Harold Lloyd. He mentored Charlie Chaplin and discovered Buster Keaton and Bob Hope.

He was one of the most popular silent stars of the 1910s, and soon became one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood, signing a contract in 1921 with Paramount Pictures for an unprecedented $1 million.

In September 1921, Arbuckle attended a party at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco during the Labor Day weekend. Bit player Virginia Rappe became drunk and ill at the party; she died four days later at a sanitarium known for performing abortions. Arbuckle was accused by a well-known madam of raping and accidentally killing Rappe. Arbuckle endured three widely publicized trials for manslaughter. His films were subsequently banned and he was publicly ostracized.

Lionel Jay Stander (January 11, 1908 – November 30, 1994) was an American actor in films, radio, theater and television.

Lionel Stander was born in The Bronx, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrants, the first of three children. According to newspaper interviews with Stander, as a teenager he appeared in the 1926 silent film Men of Steel, perhaps as an extra; he is not listed in the credits. During his one year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he appeared in a student production of "The Muse and the Movies: A Comedy of Greenwich Village." Stander's professional acting career began in 1928, as Cop and First Fairy in "Him" by e.e. cummings at the Provincetown Playhouse. He claimed that he got the roles because one of them required shooting craps, which he did well, and a friend in the company volunteered him. He appeared in a series of short-lived plays through the early 1930s, including The House Beautiful, which Dorothy Parker famously derided as "the play lousy."

In 1932, Stander landed his first credited film role in the Warner-Vitaphone short feature In the Dough, with Fatty Arbuckle and Shemp Howard. He made several other shorts, the last being The Old Grey Mayor with Bob Hope in 1935. That year, he was cast in a feature, Ben Hecht's The Scoundrel with Noël Coward. He moved to Hollywood and was signed a contract with Columbia Pictures. Stander was in a string of films over the next three years, appearing most notably in Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) with Gary Cooper, playing Archie Goodwin in Meet Nero Wolfe (1936) and The League of Frightened Men (1937), and in A Star Is Born (1937) with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March.

Bert Lahr (born Irving Lahrheim; August 13, 1895 – December 4, 1967) was an American actor and comedian. Lahr is remembered today for his roles as the Cowardly Lion and Kansas farmworker Zeke in The Wizard of Oz, but was also well known for work in burlesque, vaudeville, and on Broadway.

Lahr was born in New York City, the son of Augusta and Jacob Lahrheim. His parents were German Jewish immigrants. Lahr grew up in the Yorkville section of Manhattan. Dropping out of school at the age of 15 to join a juvenile vaudeville act, Lahr worked his way up to top billing on the Columbia Burlesque Circuit. In 1927 he debuted on Broadway in Delmar's Revels. Lahr played to packed houses, performing classic routines such as "The Song of the Woodman" (which he later reprised in the film Merry-Go-Round of 1938). Lahr had his first major success in a stage musical playing the prize fighter hero of Hold Everything! (1928–29). Several other musicals followed, notably Flying High (1930), Florenz Ziegfeld's Hot-Cha! (1932) and The Show is On (1936) in which he co-starred with Beatrice Lillie. In 1939, he co-starred with Ethel Merman in DuBarry Was a Lady.