Career: While working in a department store in LA, Lansbury met a casting director through her mother. He offered her a role in the 1944 film Gaslight; she was just 18, but it landed her an Oscar nomination. Roles in National Velvet, Blue Hawaii and Bedknobs and Broomsticks followed. She gained further Academy Award nominations for The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Manchurian Candidate. She's also worked extensively on stage, winning a record five Tony Awards. But it was playing Jessica Fletcher in the long-running TV series Murder, She Wrote, that turned her into a household name. More recently, Lansbury has appeared in Nanny McPhee and Mr Popper's Penguins.

Career: After making his mark on the London stage, McGoohan appeared in his first film, The Dam Busters, in 1954. He later gained contracts with the Rank Organisation and Walt Disney, but it was the TV play The Greatest Man in the World that led to him being cast in spy series Danger Man in 1960. Its huge success made him Britain's highest-paid TV actor. McGoohan created surreal cult hit The Prisoner in 1967 before moving to the US. Afterwards his output was sporadic, but he appeared in, directed and written episodes of Columbo, had his own series called Rafferty, and starred in the films Ice Station Zebra, Escape from Alcatraz, Silver Streak and Braveheart. McGoohan died on January 13, 2009, in Santa Monica, California, following a brief illness.