Andrew Keir (3 April 1926 – 5 October 1997) was a Scottish actor, who rose to prominence featuring in a number of films from Hammer Film Productions in the 1960s. He was also active in television, and particularly in the theatre, in a professional career that lasted from the 1940s to the 1990s. He is most remembered for starring as Professor Bernard Quatermass in Hammer's film version of Quatermass and the Pit (1967). He also originated the role of Thomas Cromwell in Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons in 1960.

His obituary in The Times newspaper described him as possessing "considerable range and undeniable distinction."

Keir was born Andrew Buggy in Shotts, North Lanarkshire, Scotland. He was the son of a coalminer, and had five brothers and one sister. When he was fourteen years old he left school and began working down the coal mine alongside his father. He began acting by chance, when he went to meet a friend at the Miners' Welfare Hall, and one member of the cast of an amateur dramatics production being performed at the Hall had failed to turn up. Keir was persuaded to take the minor role of a farmer in the play, and enjoyed the experience so much that he became a regular in the group's performances.

John Vincent Hurt, CBE (born 22 January 1940) is an English actor and former voice actor. Among other honours, he has received two Academy Award nominations, a Golden Globe Award, and four BAFTA Awards, with the fourth being a Lifetime Achievement recognition.

Hurt is known for his leading roles as Joseph Merrick (billed as John Merrick) in The Elephant Man, Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Mr. Braddock in The Hit, Stephen Ward in Scandal, and Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant and An Englishman in New York. Recognizable for his distinctive rich voice, he has also enjoyed a successful voice acting career, starring in films such as Watership Down, The Lord of the Rings and Dogville, as well as BBC television series Merlin.

Hurt initially came to prominence for his role as Richard Rich in the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons, and has since appeared in such popular motion pictures as: Alien, Midnight Express, Rob Roy, V for Vendetta, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the first, penultimate, and last Harry Potter films, the Hellboy film series, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Hurt is one of England's best-known, most prolific and sought-after actors, and has had a versatile film career spanning six decades. He is also known for his many Shakespearean roles. His character's final scene in Alien is consistently named as one of the most memorable in cinematic history.

Roy Ward Baker (19 December 1916 – 5 October 2010), born Roy Horace Baker, was an English film director, credited as Roy Baker for much of his career. His best known film is A Night to Remember (1958) which won a Golden Globe for Best English-Language Foreign Film in 1959. His later career included many horror films and television shows.

Born in London where his father was a Billingsgate fish merchant, Baker was educated at a Lycée in Rouen, France, and at the City of London School. From 1934 to 1939, he worked for Gainsborough Pictures, a British film production company based in the Islington district of London. His first jobs were menial, making tea for crew members, for example, but by 1938 he had risen to the level of as assistant director on Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938).

He served in the Army during World War II, transferring to the Army Kinematograph Unit in 1943 to make better use of his skills as a production manager and director on documentaries. One of his superiors at the time was novelist Eric Ambler, who insisted on Baker being given his first big break directing The October Man, from an Ambler screenplay, in 1947. Ambler also adapted Walter Lord's A Night to Remember for Baker's 1958 screen version. His next two films, The Weaker Sex (1948) and Paper Orchid (1949) were popular but overshadowed by the success of Morning Departure (1950), also featuring John Mills.

Barbara Shelley (born 15 August 1933) is an English film and television actress.

She is now retired, but was at her busiest in the late 1950s (Blood of the Vampire) and 1960s when she became Hammer Horror's number one female star, with The Gorgon (1964), Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966), Rasputin, the Mad Monk (1966), and Quatermass and the Pit (1967) among her credits. Although she is known as a scream queen, in fact her most famous scream (in the aforementioned Dracula film) was dubbed by co-star Suzan Farmer.

She also appeared in Village of the Damned (1960) and in the 1984 Doctor Who serial Planet of Fire.

In 2010, writer and actor Mark Gatiss interviewed Shelley about her career at Hammer Films for his BBC documentary series A History of Horror.

Keir Starmer, QC, (born 2 September 1962, Southwark) is a barrister in England and Wales. He became the fourteenth Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) and the sixth head of the Crown Prosecution Service on 1 November 2008. Until then, although he had prosecuted cases for the CPS during his career, he was mainly known as a defence lawyer, with special expertise in the law of human rights.

Starmer was the second of four children. He was named after former Labour Party leader and socialist Keir Hardie. He was educated at Reigate Grammar School. He gained a 1st class LLB from the University of Leeds in 1985 and a BCL from St Edmund Hall, Oxford in 1986.

He became a barrister in 1987, became a Queen's Counsel in 2002, and was joint head of his chambers, Doughty Street Chambers.

Acting in several appeals to the Privy Council for defendants who had been sentenced to death in Caribbean countries, his legal submissions led to the abolition of the mandatory death penalty in those countries. He worked with lawyers in African countries towards the same end. In 2005 he persuaded the House of Lords that evidence obtained by torture should be inadmissible in court. In 2007 he represented two alleged terrorists in a case in the House of Lords in which he successfully challenged their control orders on human rights grounds. He has also acted in 15 other cases in the House of Lords since 1999, including two cases about the conduct of British soldiers in Iraq, and representing David Shayler in his appeal against conviction for breaching the Official Secrets Act 1989. He gave free legal advice to the defendants in the "McLibel" case, and was interviewed twice — ten years apart — in Franny Armstrong's 2005 documentary, McLibel.