Edgar Georg Ulmer (September 17, 1904 – September 30, 1972) was an Austrian-American film director. He is best remembered for the movies The Black Cat (1934) and Detour (1945). These stylish and eccentric works have achieved cult status, whereas Ulmer's other films remain relatively unknown.

Ulmer was born in Olomouc, in what is now the Czech Republic. As a young man he lived in Vienna, where he worked as a stage actor and set designer while studying architecture and philosophy. He did set design for Max Reinhardt's theater, served his apprenticeship with F. W. Murnau, and worked with directors including Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann and cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan, inventor of the Schüfftan process. He also claimed to have worked on Der Golem (1920), Metropolis (1927), and M (1931), but there is no evidence to support this. Ulmer came to Hollywood with Murnau in 1926 to assist with the art direction on Sunrise (1927). In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, he also recalled making two-reel westerns in Hollywood around this time.

William Henry Pratt (23 November 1887 – 2 February 1969), better known by his stage name Boris Karloff, was an English actor.

Karloff is best remembered for his roles in horror films and his portrayal of Frankenstein's monster in Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and Son of Frankenstein (1939). His popularity following Frankenstein was such that for a brief time he was billed simply as "Karloff" or "Karloff the Uncanny." His best-known non-horror role is as the Grinch, as well as the narrator, in the animated television special of Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966).

Karloff was born at 36 Forest Hill Road, Honor Oak, London, England, where a blue plaque can now be seen. His parents were Edward John Pratt, Jr. and Eliza Sarah Millard. His paternal grandparents were Edward John Pratt, an Anglo-Indian,^{[citation needed]} and Eliza Julia (Edwards) Pratt, a sister of Anna Leonowens (whose tales about life in the royal court of Siam [now Thailand] were the basis of the musical The King and I). The two sisters were also of Anglo-Indian heritage.

Hedy Lamarr ( /ˈhɛdi/; 9 November 1913 – 19 January 2000) was an Austrian-born American actress, celebrated for her great beauty, who was a major contract star of MGM's "Golden Age".

Lamarr also co-invented – with composer George Antheil – an early technique for spread spectrum communications and frequency hopping, necessary to wireless communication from the pre-computer age to the present day.

Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only child of assimilated Jewish parents. Her mother, Gertrud (née Lichtwitz), was a pianist and Budapest native who came from the "Jewish haute bourgeoisie", and her father, Lemberg-born Emil Kiesler, was a successful bank director.

She studied ballet and piano at age 10. When she worked with Max Reinhardt in Berlin, he called her the "most beautiful woman in Europe".^{[citation needed]}

In early 1933 she starred in Gustav Machatý's notorious film Ecstasy, a Czechoslovak film made in Prague, in which she played the love-hungry young wife of an indifferent older husband. Closeups of her face during orgasm in one scene (rumored to be unsimulated), and full frontal shots of her in another scene, swimming and running nude through the woods, gave the film great notoriety.

George Henry Sanders (3 July 1906 – 25 April 1972) was a Russian-born English film and television actor, singer-songwriter, music composer, and author. His prominent English accent and baritone voice often led him to be cast as sophisticated but villainous characters. He is perhaps best known as Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950), Jack Favell in Rebecca (1940), and the malevolent tiger Shere Khan in The Jungle Book (1967). His career spanned more than 40 years.

Sanders was born in Saint Petersburg, Imperial Russia, at number 6 Petrovski Ostrov. His English parents were Henry Sanders (1873–1961) and Margaret Sanders (1875–1967). Actor Tom Conway (1904–1967) was his elder brother. His younger sister, Margaret Sanders, was born in 1912. George was 11 when, in 1917, at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, the family went back to England. Like his brother, he attended Brighton College, a boys' independent school in Brighton, Sussex, then went on to Manchester Technical College. After graduation he worked at an advertising agency, where the company secretary, aspiring actress Greer Garson, suggested he take up a career in acting.