Darryl Francis Zanuck (September 5, 1902 – December 22, 1979) was an American producer, writer, actor, director and studio executive who played a major part in the Hollywood studio system as one of its longest survivors (the length of his career being rivalled only by that of Adolph Zukor). He earned three Academy Awards during his tenure.

Zanuck was born in Wahoo, Nebraska, the son of Louise (Torpin) and Frank Zanuck, who owned and operated a hotel in Wahoo. Zanuck was of part Swiss descent and was raised a Protestant. At six, Zanuck and his mother moved to Los Angeles, where the better climate could improve her poor health. At eight, he found his first movie job as an extra, but his disapproving father recalled him to Nebraska.

In 1918, despite being sixteen, he deceived a recruiter and joined the United States Army and served in France with the Nebraska National Guard. Returning to the U.S., he worked in many part-time jobs while he tried to find work as a writer. He managed to find work producing movie plots, selling his first story in 1922 to William Russell and his second to Irving Thalberg. Screenwriter Frederica Sagor Maas, then story editor at Universal Pictures' New York office, stated that one of the stories Zanuck sent out to movie studios around this time was completely plagiarized from another author's work. Zanuck then worked for Mack Sennett and took that experience to Warner Bros. where he wrote stories for Rin Tin Tin and under a number of pseudonyms wrote over forty scripts from 1924–1929, including Old San Francisco (1927). He moved into management in 1929 and became head of production in 1931.

Sir Cedric Webster Hardwicke (19 February 1893 – 6 August 1964) was a noted English stage and film actor whose career spanned nearly fifty years. Hardwicke's theatre work included notable performances in productions of the plays of William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, and his film work included leading roles in a number of adapted literary classics.

Hardwicke was born in Lye, Worcestershire, the son of Jessie (née Masterson) and her husband Dr. Edwin Webster Hardwicke. He attended Bridgnorth Grammar School in Shropshire and then trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).

In 1928, he married English actress Helena Pickard. Hardwicke's son was the actor Edward Hardwicke, a well-known television actor in the UK.

He made his first appearance on stage at London's Lyceum Theatre in 1912 during the run of Frederick Melville's melodrama The Monk and the Woman, when he took up the part of Brother John. During that year he was at Her Majesty's Theatre understudying, and subsequently appeared at the Garrick Theatre in Charles Klein's play Find the Woman, and Trust the People. In 1913 he joined Benson's Company and toured in the provinces, South Africa, and Rhodesia. During 1914 he toured with Miss Darragh (Letitia Marion Dallas, d. 1917) in Laurence Irving's play The Unwritten Law, and he appeared at the Old Vic in 1914 as Malcolm in Macbeth, Tranio in The Taming of the Shrew, and the gravedigger in Hamlet, among many other roles.

Kyle Egan Richards (born January 11, 1969) is an American actress and television personality. She is known for returning to television with her sister, Kim Richards, on Bravo's The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

Richards was born in Hollywood, California, the daughter of Sharon Kathleen (née Dugan; 1933–2002) and Kenneth Edwin Richards (1917–1998). The couple separated in 1972 and Kathleen later remarried twice more. Richards' siblings are Kathy Hilton (her older half-sister from her mother's first marriage to Lawrence Avanzino; born 1959) and Kim Richards (born 1964).Nicky and Paris Hilton are her nieces.

Richards began acting in 1975. She appeared in several episodes of the television series Little House on the Prairie as Mr. Edward's adopted daughter, Alicia Sanderson Edwards. Her sister, Kim Richards (of Witch Mountain fame and various other very popular Disney films), also appeared once on the series, playing Laura's friend Olga, a shy child with one leg shorter than the other, who gets fitted with a hand-made wooden shoe by Laura's father, which finally enables her to run and play normally with the other children.

Arthur Gordon "Art" Linkletter (July 17, 1912 – May 26, 2010) was a Canadian-born American radio and television personality. He was the host of House Party, which ran on CBS radio and television for 25 years, and People Are Funny, on NBC radio-TV for 19 years. Linkletter was famous for interviewing children on House Party and Kids Say the Darndest Things, which led to a series of books quoting children. A native of Canada, he became a naturalized United States citizen in 1942.

Linkletter was born Gordon Arthur Kelly in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. In his autobiography, Confessions of a Happy Man (1960), he revealed that he had no contact with his natural parents or his sister or two brothers since he was abandoned when only a few weeks old. He was adopted by Mary (née Metzler) and Fulton John Linkletter, an evangelical preacher. When he was five, his family moved to San Diego, California, where he graduated from San Diego High School at age 16. During the early years of the Great Depression, he rode trains around the country doing odd jobs and meeting a wide variety of people. In 1934, he earned a bachelor's degree from San Diego State Teachers College (now San Diego State University) (SDSU), where he was a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. While attending San Diego State, he played for the basketball team and was a member of the swimming team. He had previously planned to attend Springfield College but did not for financial reasons.

Don Camillo is the main character created by the Italian writer and journalist Giovannino Guareschi (1908-1968), and is based on the historical Roman Catholic priest, WW II partisan and detainee of the concentration camps of Dachau and Mauthausen, Don Camillo Valota . Don Camillo is one of two protagonists, the other being the communist mayor of the town, known to everyone as Peppone. The stories are set in what Guareschi refers to as a "small world" and are an excellent representation of what rural Italy was like after the second world war. Most of the Don Camillo stories came out in the weekly magazine Candido, founded by Guareschi with Giovanni Mosca. These "Little World" ("Mondo Piccolo") stories amounted to 347 in total and were put together and published in eight books, only the first three of which were published when Guareschi was still alive.

In the post-war years (after 1945), Don Camillo Tarocci (his full name, which he rarely uses) is the hotheaded priest of a small town in the Po valley in northern Italy. Don Camillo is a big man, tall and strong with hard fists. For the films, the town chosen to represent that of the books was Brescello (which apart from being a lovely municipality, currently has a fine museum dedicated to Don Camillo and Peppone including a Russian T34 Tank) after the production of movies based on the Guareschi's tales, but in the first story Don Camillo is introduced as the parish priest of Ponteratto.