Marlon Brando, Jr. (April 3, 1924 ? July 1, 2004) was an Academy Award-winning American actor, whose body of work spanned over half a century. He is widely considered one of the greatest American film actors of all time, and is ranked fourth in AFI's (American Film Industry) Top 10 Greatest Actors. As a young sex symbol, he is best known for his roles as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, both directed by Elia Kazan in the early 1950s. In middle age, his well-known roles include his Academy Award-winning performance as Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Colonel Walter Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, both directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and an Academy Award-nominated performance as Paul in Last Tango in Paris.

Brando was also an activist, lending his presence to many issues, including the American Civil Rights and American Indian Movements. He was named the fourth Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute.

Vivien Leigh, Lady Olivier (5 November 1913 - 8 July 1967), was an English actress. She won two Academy Awards for playing "southern belles": Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a role she had also played on stage in London's West End.

She was a prolific stage performer, frequently in collaboration with her husband, Laurence Olivier, who directed her in several of her roles. During her thirty-year stage career, she played parts that ranged from the heroines of Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw comedies to classic Shakespearean characters such as Ophelia, Cleopatra, Juliet and Lady Macbeth.

Lauded for her beauty, Leigh felt that it sometimes prevented her from being taken seriously as an actress, but ill health proved to be her greatest obstacle. Affected by bipolar disorder for most of her adult lifeOlivier, Laurence, Confessions Of an Actor, Simon and Schuster, 1982, ISBN 0-14-006888-0 p 174 , she gained a reputation for being a difficult person to work with, and her career went through periods of decline. She was further weakened by recurrent bouts of chronic tuberculosis, with which she was first diagnosed in the mid-1940s. She and Olivier divorced in 1960, and Leigh worked sporadically in film and theatre until her death from tuberculosis, in 1967.

Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 - February 25, 1983), better known as Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright who received many of the top theatrical awards. He moved to New Orleans in 1939 and changed his name to "Tennessee", the state of his father's birth. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 and for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. In addition, The Glass Menagerie (1945) and The Night of the Iguana (1961) received New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards. His 1952 play The Rose Tattoo received the Tony Award for best play.