A butler is a domestic worker in a large household. In great houses, the household is sometimes divided into departments with the butler in charge of the dining room, wine cellar, and pantry. Some also have charge of the entire parlour floor, and housekeepers caring for the entire house and its appearance. A butler is usually male, and in charge of male servants, while a housekeeper is usually a woman, and in charge of female servants. Traditionally, male servants (such as footmen) were better paid and therefore rarer and of higher status than female servants. The butler, as the senior male servant, has the highest servant status.

In modern houses where the butler is the most senior worker, titles such as majordomo, butler administrator, house manager, manservant, staff manager, chief of staff, staff captain, estate manager and head of household staff are sometimes given. The precise duties of the employee will vary to some extent in line with the title given, but perhaps more importantly in line with the requirements of the individual employer. In the grandest homes or when the employer owns more than one residence, there is sometimes an estate manager of higher rank than the butler.

Jimmy Butler (Akron, Ohio, 20 February 1921 – France, 18 February 1945) was an American, juvenile, motion-pictures actor, active in the 1930s and early 1940s.

Butler earned acclaim for his role in the 1933 film Only Yesterday, and in 1934 his career got another significant boost when the actor earned lavish critical plaudits for his portrayal of Jim Wade in Manhattan Melodrama. Later he played one of the young protagonists, Boka, in No Greater Glory. The irony of this antiwar allegory spilled sadly over into the life of Butler, since he would lose his life a decade later in the real combat of World War II.

Oprah Winfrey (born Orpah Gail Winfrey; January 29, 1954) is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. Winfrey is best known for her self-titled, multi-award-winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011. She has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and was for a time the world's only black billionaire. She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world.

Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, claiming to be raped at age nine and becoming pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.

Forest Steven Whitaker (born July 15, 1961) is an American actor, producer, and director. He has earned a reputation for intensive character study work for films such as Bird and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and for his recurring role as ex-LAPD Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh on the gritty, award-winning television series, The Shield. Whitaker won an Academy Award for his performance as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the 2006 film The Last King of Scotland. Whitaker has also won a Golden Globe and a BAFTA.

Whitaker was born in Longview, Texas, and his family moved to South Central Los Angeles when he was four. His father, Forest Whitaker, Jr., was an insurance salesman and the son of novelist Forest Whitaker, Sr. His mother, Laura Francis (née Smith), was a special education teacher who put herself through college and earned two Masters degrees while raising her children. Whitaker has two younger brothers, Kenn and Damon, and an older sister, Deborah.

As a teenager, Whitaker commuted from Carson to wealthy Palisades High School on LA's West Side. There, he was all-league defensive tackle on the football team quarterbacked by Jay Schroeder, a future NFL player. While in high school, he also took voice lessons, performed in musicals, and caught the "acting bug"; his first role as an actor was the lead in Dylan Thomas' play, Under Milk Wood. Whitaker graduated from "Pali High" in 1979.

Gerard James Butler (born 13 November 1969) is a Scottish actor who has appeared on film, stage, and television. A trained lawyer, Butler turned to acting in the mid-1990s with small roles in productions such as the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), which he followed with steady work on television, most notably in the American miniseries Attila (2001). He garnered critical acclaim for his work as the lead in Joel Schumacher's 2004 film adaptation of the musical The Phantom of the Opera. In 2007, Butler gained recognition through his portrayal of King Leonidas in the film 300. Since then, he has appeared in projects including P.S. I Love You (2007), Nim's Island (2008), RocknRolla (2008), The Ugly Truth (2009), Gamer (2009), Law Abiding Citizen (2009), The Bounty Hunter (2010), and as a voice actor in How to Train Your Dragon (2010).

Butler was born in Paisley, which is in Renfrewshire, Scotland, the youngest of three children of Margaret and Edward Butler, a bookmaker. Of Irish descent, he was brought up in a strict Roman Catholic family. Butler spent the first few years of his life in Montreal, Quebec, before the family returned to live in Scotland.