Everett Sloane (October 1, 1909 – August 6, 1965) was an American stage, film and television actor, songwriter, and theatre director.

Born to a Jewish family in Manhattan, New York, Sloane attended the University of Pennsylvania before dropping out in order to join a theater company, but he stopped acting and became a runner on Wall Street after a number of negative stage reviews. After the stock market crash in 1929, he decided to return to the theater.

Sloane eventually joined Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre, and acted in Welles's films in roles such as Citizen Kane 's Bernstein in 1941 and The Lady from Shanghai's Arthur Bannister in 1948. He was memorable as a hired assassin in Renaissance Italy opposite Welles's Cesare Borgia in Prince of Foxes (1949).

Sloane's Broadway theater career began with the comedy Boy Meets Girl in 1945 and ended with From A to Z, a revue for which he wrote several songs, in 1960. In between, he acted in plays such as Native Son (1941), A Bell for Adano (1944), and Room Service (1953), and directed the melodrama The Dancer (1946).

Gig Young (November 4, 1913 – October 19, 1978) was an American film, stage, and television actor. Known mainly for second leads and supporting roles, Young won an Academy Award for his performance as a dance-marathon emcee in the 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don't They?.

Born Byron Elsworth Barr in St. Cloud, Minnesota, his parents John and Emma Barr raised him and his older siblings in Washington D.C. He developed a passion for the theatre while appearing in high school plays, and after some amateur experience he applied for and received a scholarship to the acclaimed Pasadena Community Playhouse. While acting in Pancho, a south-of-the-border play by Lowell Barrington, he and the leading actor in the play, George Reeves, were spotted by a Warner Brothers talent scout. Both actors were signed to supporting player contracts with the studio. His early work was uncredited or as Byron Barr (not to be confused with another actor with the same name, Byron Barr), but after appearing in the 1942 film The Gay Sisters as a character named "Gig Young", the studio decided he should adopt this name professionally.

Joan Tompkins, legally known as Joan Swenson (July 9, 1915–January 29, 2005) was an American actress of television, film, radio, and stage, who co-founded with her husband, Karl Swenson, an acting company in Beverly Hills, California. In the 1962-1963 television season, Tompkins played legal secretary Trudy Wagner in twenty-eight episodes of Edmond O'Brien's NBC legal drama Sam Benedict, co-starring Richard Rust. From 1967-1970, she guest starred nine times as Lorraine Miller in Fred MacMurray's CBS situation comedy, My Three Sons, with her last appearance in the episode "St. Louis Blues" on December 19, 1970.

According to the Social Security Death Index, Tompkins, listed as Joan Swenson at death, was living in New York when she procured her Social Security number, probably in the late 1930s. In 1938, at the age of twenty-three, she joined Henry Fonda in performing plays in White Plains, New York. Thereafter, she performed on radio in the soap opera role of Nora Drake on This Is Nora Drake, which ran on CBS radio until 1959. She appeared on Broadway in New York City in stage productions of Pride and Prejudice and My Sister Eileen. During her radio performances, she met Karl Swenson, who portrayed the Scandinavian Lars Hanson on Michael Landon's Little House on the Prairie NBC television series. Tompkins herself guest starred twice on Little House. The couple married sometime after Swenson and his first wife, the former Virginia Hanscom (1908–2003),divorced. They were living in southern California by 1957.

Everett Smith is a puzzler who, in 1935 may have coined the word pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, also spelled pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis as a hypothetical long word that could result from the protraction of medical terms. It is defined as "a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica or quartz dust." The actual name of the disease is pneumoconiosis.

At 45 letters, it is certainly the longest word ever to appear in a non-technical dictionary of English (Source: Oxford English Dictionary).

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.