Career: At the age of 19, Finch toured Australia with George Sorlie's travelling troupe. His first screen performance was in the 1935 short The Magic Shoes. He made his feature film debut in Rudd Family Goes to Town (1938). He enlisted in the Australian army in 1941 and served in the Middle East. After the war, Finch worked in radio and put on a number of theatre productions in Sydney. He left Australia for London in 1948 and Laurence Olivier became his mentor. His first big break came when he was cast in Daphne Laureola at the Old Vic. In 1954, Finch began making films for Rank. In 1956 he appeared in box office hits A Town Like Alice and The Battle of the River Plate, and went on to become an international star with the success of The Nun's Story (1959). He had considerable success in the 1960s and 1970s in The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), No Love for Johnnie (1961) and Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971). He won a posthumous Academy Award for Network (1976). He died in Beverly Hills on January 14, 1977 at the age of 60.

Career: In 1950, Bronson married and moved to Hollywood, where he took acting classes and began landing small roles. He made several TV guest appearances during the 1950s in the likes of The Doctor, Waterfront, Treasury Men in Action, The Sheriff of Cochise, and US Marshall. His profile increased when he was cast as one of the seven gunfighters in the movie The Magnificent Seven (1960). Prominent films after that included The Great Escape (1963), The Dirty Dozen (1967), and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). In 1974, he made the film he is most associated with, Death Wish. It was a box-office hit and led to four sequels. After his health deteriorated, he retired from acting in 1998. He suffered from Alzheimer's in his final years and died of pneumonia on August 30, 2003, at the age of 81.