Career: Margulies' first movie was 1991's Out for Justice. She went on to appear in regional theatre, cropping up occasionally in such TV shows as Law & Order, and Murder, She Wrote. Her big break came in 1994 when she began playing nurse Carol Hathaway in ER. Thanks to her popularity, she was offered a $27million contract to stay with the show, but quit in 2000 to concentrate on theatre roles. Margulies then appeared in the movies Evelyn and Ghost Ship before returning to the small screen in several episodes of The Sopranos, The Lost Room and Canterbury's Law. She's currently the star of legal drama The Good Wife, for which she won a Golden Globe in 2010.

Career: Archie landed a supporting role in the 1999 comedy film East is East, and followed it up with several small TV roles, as well as the smash comedy flick Bend it Like Beckham. Her first Hollywood role was in 2005 as a British diplomat in the Oscar-winning The Constant Gardener in 2005. In the same year she won the Shooting Star Award for her role as the title character in Yasmin at the Berlin Film Festival, and in 2007, she appeared with Angelina Jolie in the movie adaptation of A Mighty Heart. Her performance earned her The Chopard Trophy for a Breakout Performance at the Cannes Film Festival. She joined the cast of critically-acclaimed legal drama The Good Wife in 2009.

Career: Cumming's cabaret act, Victor and Barry, with Forbes Masson, was critically acclaimed, winning numerous awards. TV roles quickly followed, but he continued working on the stage. Stints with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre raised his profile, as did his accolades following his film debut in the drama Prague (1992). In 1994, he starred in TV sitcom The High Life, closely followed by the movies Circle of Friends (1995), GoldenEye (1995) and Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion (1997). More recently, he has worked on three Spy Kids films (2001-2003), X-Men 2 (2003), The Tempest (2010), Burlesque (2010) and TV drama The Good Wife. A firm favourite on Broadway, Cumming won a Tony Award in 1998 for playing the MC in Caberet. He returned to the role in 2014.

Career: In 2004, Goode made his film debut in Chasing Liberty opposite Mandy Moore. Since then, he has starred on the big screen in Match Point (2005), Brideshead Revisited (2008), Watchman (2009), A Single Man (2009), Leap Year (2010), Cemetery Junction (2010) and Stoker (2013). He returned to TV with roles in Birdsong, The Poison Tree, Dancing on the Edge and Death Comes to Pemberley.

Career: Noth studied acting with Sandford Meisner in New York and at the Yale School of Drama. He made his film debut in 1981's Waitress! and eventually caught producers' interest with a solid performance in Off Beat in 1986. Roles in I'll Take Manhattan and Baby Boom followed, and he became a household name in the US thanks to his part as Detective Mike Logan in Law and Order. He quit after five years with the show. Sex and the City introduced him to an international audience in 1998. He's also appeared on the big screen in the show's spin-off movies, as well as Cast Away, The Glass House and My One and Only. His recent work includes The Good Wife and Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Career: David worked steadily on the stage throughout the 1980s and made his film debut in Bright Lights, Big City in 1988. He was later offered a role in Little Man Tate by former Yale classmate Jodie Foster, who remembered him from a student play. In 1992, he was in short-lived sitcom The Powers That Be and caught the eye of Frasier's creators, who noticed his resemblance to Kelsey Grammer and wrote the role of Niles especially for him. His performance in the long-running sitcom earned him four Emmy awards and a reported salary of $1million per episode for the last few seasons. Frasier came to an end in 2003 and David has since been seen in the film Down With Love and in various stage productions on Broadway and the West End. He won a Tony Award in 2007 for his performance in Kander and Ebb musical Curtains.