Donna Murphy (born March 7, 1959) is an American stage, film, television actress and singer.

Murphy has won two Tony Awards for Best Actress in a Musical for her roles in Passion as Fosca and in The King and I as Anna Leonowens. She received three more Tony Award nominations for Best Actress in a Musical for her performances in Wonderful Town as Ruth Sherwood, LoveMusik as Lotte Lenya and The People in the Picture as Raisel/Bubbie.

She is known, most recently, for her role as Mother Gothel in the animated Disney film Tangled (2010), Anij, Captain Jean-Luc Picard's love interest, in Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) and her numerous stage roles in musical theatre.

Murphy, the eldest of seven children, was born in Corona, Queens, New York, the daughter of Lucinda (née Fink) and Robert Murphy, an aerospace engineer. Murphy is of Irish, French, German, and Czech ancestry. Her family moved to Hauppauge, Long Island, New York. At age three, she asked for voice lessons, and she put on shows as a child in Hauppauge. She later moved to Topsfield, Massachusetts and graduated from Masconomet Regional High School in 1977.

Karen Ziemba (born November 12, 1957) is an American actress, singer and dancer, best known for her work in musical theatre.

Ziemba was born in St. Joseph, Michigan, and went on to attend the University of Akron (in Ohio), where she studied dance and joined the Ohio Ballet in her sophomore year.

Her Broadway debut was in A Chorus Line as Diana Morales. Later, she played the lead of Peggy Sawyer in 42nd Street. While appearing in "42nd Street", she was featured in the October 1984 issue of Playboy in the article "Babes of Broadway", in which she posed partially nude.

Ziemba went on to win a Drama Desk Award for the Kander and Ebb revue And The World Goes 'Round (1991) and receive a Drama Desk nomination for I Do! I Do! (1996). The next year, she was nominated for another Drama Desk Award and a Tony for her role in Steel Pier. In 2000, Ziemba won the Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her performance in Susan Stroman's Contact. Four years later, she received another Tony nomination for Never Gonna Dance. In 2007, she portrayed the heartwarming lyricist Georgia Hendricks in Curtains, earning her fourth Tony award nomination.

Marin Joy Mazzie (born October 9, 1960) is an American actress and singer known for her work in musical theater. She was nominated for the Tony Award, Drama Desk Award and Olivier Award for her role as Lilli/Katharine in Kiss Me, Kate, and won the Outer Critics Circle Award. In addition to appearing in many musical stage productions, Mazzie also performs in concert with her husband, Jason Danieley.

Mazzie was born in Rockford, Illinois and graduated from Western Michigan University, where she received degrees in theater and music. With an early interest in the theatre, Mazzie began to perform and sing in church choir at the age of 8 and to study voice at the age of 12. She continued to act in school and at college and in summer stock, where she was an apprentice at the Barn Theatre in Augusta, Michigan.

After graduating from college in 1982, Mazzie moved to New York City and made her New York stage debut in a 1983 Equity Library Theatre revival of the 1948 musical Where's Charley? as "Kitty Verdun". She appeared in the 1991 off-Broadway Kander and Ebb revue And The World Goes 'Round and the subsequent 10-month national tour the following year. She went on to play starring roles in over a half dozen Broadway shows and also developed a cabaret act and made appearances in television.

Angela Brigid Lansbury, CBE (born 16 October 1925) is an English-born US-naturalized actress and singer in theatre, television, and motion pictures. Her career has spanned eight decades and earned an unsurpassed number of performance Tony Awards (tied with Julie Harris), with five wins. Her first film appearance was in the film Gaslight (1944) as a conniving maid, for which she received an Academy Award nomination. Among her other films are The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and Anastasia (1997).

She expanded her repertoire to Broadway musicals and television in the 1950s and was particularly successful in Broadway productions of Gypsy, Mame and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Lansbury is perhaps best known to modern audiences for her twelve-year run starring as writer and sleuth Jessica Fletcher on the American television series Murder, She Wrote (1984–1996). Her recent roles include Lady Adelaide Stitch in the film Nanny McPhee (2005), Leona Mullen in the 2007 Broadway play Deuce, Madame Arcati in the 2009 Broadway revival of the play Blithe Spirit and Madame Armfeldt in the 2010 Broadway revival of the musical A Little Night Music.

Chita Rivera (born January 23, 1933) is an American actress, dancer, and singer best known for her roles in musical theater. She is the first Hispanic woman to receive a Kennedy Center Honors award (December 2002). She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.

Rivera (birth name: Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero) was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Katherine, a government clerk, and Pedro Julio Figueroa del Rivero, a clarinetist and saxophonist for the United States Navy Band. Her father was Puerto Rican and her mother was of Scottish and Italian descent. Rivera was seven years old when her mother was widowed and went to work for The Pentagon.

In 1944, Rivera's mother enrolled her in the Jones-Haywood School of Ballet (now the Jones Haywood School of Dance). Later, when she was 15, a teacher from George Balanchine's School of American Ballet visited their studio and Rivera was one of two students picked to audition in New York City; she was accompanied to the audition by Doris Jones, one of the people who ran the Jones-Haywood School. Rivera's audition was successful and she was accepted into the school and given a scholarship