Emil Jannings (23 July 1884 – 2 January 1950) was a Swiss-born German/Austrian actor. He was the first actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, as well as the first person to be presented an Oscar. He later starred in a number of Nazi propaganda films.

He was christened as Theodor Friedrich Emil Janenz in Rorschach, Switzerland, the son of a German mother and an American father. While he was still young the family moved to Görlitz in Germany and in the town state theatre Jannings started his stage career. He worked in Bremen and Leipzig before joining the Max Reinhardt theatre company in Berlin.

Jannings was a theater actor who went into films. He starred in the 1922 film version of Othello and in F. W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (Der Letzte Mann, 1924), as a proud but aged hotel doorman who is demoted to a restroom attendant. Jannings worked with Murnau on two other films, playing the title character in Herr Tartüff (1925) and Mephistopheles in Faust (1926). Jannings eventually started a career in Hollywood. In 1929 he won the Oscar for two films, The Way of All Flesh, and The Last Command.

Marlene Dietrich (German pronunciation: [maɐˈleːnə ˈdiːtʁɪç]; 27 December 1901 – 6 May 1992) was a German-American actress and singer.

Dietrich remained popular throughout her long career by continually re-inventing herself, professionally and characteristically. In the Berlin of the 1920s, she acted on the stage and in silent films. Her performance as "Lola-Lola" in The Blue Angel, directed by Josef von Sternberg, brought her international fame and provided her a contract with Paramount Pictures in the US. Hollywood films such as Shanghai Express and Desire capitalised on her glamour and exotic looks, cementing her stardom and making her one of the highest-paid actresses of the era. Dietrich became a US citizen in 1939, and throughout World War II she was a high-profile frontline entertainer. Although she still made occasional films in the post-war years, Dietrich spent most of the 1950s to the 1970s touring the world as a successful show performer.

In 1999, the American Film Institute named Dietrich the ninth-greatest female star of all time.

Kurt Gerron (11 May 1897 – 28 October 1944) was a German Jewish actor and film director.

Born Kurt Gerson into a well-off merchant family in Berlin, he initially studied medicine but was called up for military service in World War I. Seriously wounded he qualified as a military doctor of the German Army. After the war Gerron turned to a stage career and became a theatre actor under director Max Reinhardt in 1920. He appeared in secondary roles in several silent films and from 1926 also directed film shots. He had his breakthrough starring in such films as The Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel) opposite Marlene Dietrich, while on stage he originated the role of "Tiger" Brown in the premiere production of The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) at the Berlin Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in 1928, also singing Mack the Knife.

After the Machtergreifung in 1933 Gerron left Nazi Germany with his wife and parents, traveling first to Paris and later to Amsterdam. There, he kept on working as an actor at the Stadsschouwburg and director in several movies. He was offered employments in Hollywood by the agency of Peter Lorre and Josef von Sternberg, but refused several times, one time because his potential employer didn't offer first class tickets, and stayed behind in Europe. After the Wehrmacht had occupied the Netherlands, he was interned in the transit camp at Westerbork before being sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. There he ran a cabaret called Karussell to entertain the inmates.

Rosa Valetti (17 March 1878 – 10 December 1937), born Rosa Vallentin, was a German actress, cabaret performer and singer.

Rosa Valetti was born in Berlin, the daughter of industrialist Felix Vallentin and sister of actor Hermann Vallentin. She played her first roles in the theatres of suburban Berlin. Inspired by the November Revolution and her meeting with political satirist Kurt Tucholsky, Valetti began performing in cabarets. In 1920, she founded the Café Grössenwahn ("Café Megalomania"), which has been recognized as one of the most important literary and political cabarets in 1920s Berlin. Café Megalomania was frequented by Expressionist writers, and the program of sketch comedy and political songs reflected Valetti's belief in the cabaret as an instrument of political and social criticism.

The inflation of 1919 to 1923 and the subsequent collapse of the German economy forced Valetti to close Cafe Megalomania. She directed the cabaret Rakete for a time, then launched another cafe of her own, the Rampe, which hosted the works of revolutionist poet and singer Erich Weinert. Valetti was among the founders of the floating cabaret Larifari during the late 1920s. In 1928 she performed as Mrs. Peachum in the original cast of Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera, which was staged under the direction of Erich Engel at Berlin's Theater am Schiffbauerdamm.

The Blue Angel (German: Der blaue Engel) is a 1930 film directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Emil Jannings, Marlene Dietrich and Kurt Gerron. Written by Carl Zuckmayer, Karl Vollmöller and Robert Liebmann – with uncredited contributions by von Sternberg – based on Heinrich Mann's 1905 novel Professor Unrat ("Professor Garbage"), and set in Weimar Germany, The Blue Angel presents the tragic transformation of a man from a respectable professor to a cabaret clown, and his descent into madness. The film is considered to be the first major German sound film, and brought Dietrich international fame. In addition, it introduced her signature song, Friedrich Hollaender and Robert Liebmann's "Falling in Love Again (Can't Help It)".

The film was shot simultaneously in German and English language versions, but the German version is much better known. The English language version was considered a lost film for many years until a print was discovered in a German film archive and restored. This restored print of the English version had its U.S. premiere at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco on 19 January 2009 as part of the "Berlin and Beyond" film festival. Both the German and English versions are widely considered classics.