William Bruce Davis (born January 13, 1938) is a Canadian actor and director, known for his role as The Smoking Man on The X-Files. Besides appearing in many TV programs and movies, Davis founded his own acting school the William Davis Centre for Actors Study. In his personal life, Davis is an avid water-skier, works with the Canadian Cancer Society and lectures on skepticism most recently at Committee for Skeptical Inquiry's CSICON. In 2011 Davis published his memoir, Where There’s Smoke .... The Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man.

Davis was born in Toronto, Ontario, to a lawyer father and psychologist mother. He began his acting career as a child in 1949, in radio drama and summer stock theatre. His cousins Murray and Donald Davis ran The Straw Hat Players in Ontario in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and rehearsed in the basement of Davis' house. When they needed a boy they gave William his first professional acting job. He went on from there to have a career as a boy actor on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) radio before his voice broke. In 1955 he enrolled in the University of Toronto to study philosophy, but actively pursued a career as an actor alongside future actor Donald Sutherland. In 1959, he graduated from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy. While at university he switched his attention from acting to directing and with his partner, Karl Jaffary, took over and ran The Straw Hat Players for four years.

John Rhys-Davies (born 5 May 1944) is a Welsh actor and voice actor. He is perhaps best known for playing the charismatic Arab excavator Sallah in the Indiana Jones films and the dwarf Gimli in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He also played Agent Michael Malone in the 1993 remake of the 1950s television series The Untouchables, Pilot Vasco Rodrigues in the mini-series Shōgun, Professor Maximillian Arturo in Sliders, King Richard I in Robin of Sherwood, General Leonid Pushkin in the James Bond film The Living Daylights, and Macro in I, Claudius. Additionally, he provided the voices of Cassim in Disney's Aladdin and the King of Thieves, Man Ray in SpongeBob SquarePants, and Tobias in the computer game Freelancer. He is also the narrator for the TV show Wildboyz.

Rhys-Davies was born in Ammanford, Wales, the son of Welsh parents Mary Margaretta Phyllis Jones, a nurse, and Rhys Davies, a mechanical engineer and Colonial Officer. He spent much of his childhood in his mother's home town of Ammanford, although he was also brought up in Tanganyika. He was educated at Truro School and at the University of East Anglia where he was one of the first 87 students admitted, and where he founded the Dramatic Society. After teaching at Watton County Secondary School in Norfolk he won a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Rhys Davies (9 November 1901 – 21 August 1978) (born Vivian Rees Davies) was a Welsh novelist and short story writer, who wrote in the English language.

One of the most prolific Welsh prose writers of the 20th century, Davies is best known for his short stories, of which he wrote over a hundred. He also wrote eighteen novels, including The Withered Root (1927), The Black Venus (1944) and The Perishable Quality (1957), an autobiography, Print of a Hare's Foot (1969), and a successful play, No Escape (1954), as well as several works of non-fiction. Davies was homosexual, though he never wrote publicly about his own sexuality. Though he lived largely in London, Davies' work is often set in Wales.

Davies was invited to stay with D. H. Lawrence and Frieda Lawrence in France in 1928–9 (their meeting has been dramatised in Sex and Power at the Beau Rivage (2003), a play by Welsh author Lewis Davies). Though Lawrence's death in March 1930 made their friendship a brief one, Lawrence appears to have been an important influence on Davies' work. Other literary associates include the publisher Charles Lahr, who published some of Davies' early work in The New Coterie, and the author Anna Kavan, whose work he edited after her death.