Doris Abesser was born in Berlin on March 15, 1935. She started taking acting classes at the age of sixteen and attended the Deutsches Theater drama school from 1952 to 1956. After graduating, she was engaged at the theater in Senftenberg before becoming a member of the company at the Staatstheater Dresden and then moving on to the Volksbühne in Berlin.

Regimantas Adomaitis was born in Schaulen (now Šiauliai), Lithuania, on January 31, 1937. After graduating from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at Vilnius University, he studied acting at the Lithuanian Conservatory (now the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater) in Vilnius.

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea was an outstanding artist of the New Cuban cinema whose work was closely connected with the Cuban revolution. He was born in Havana on December 11, 1928, to a bourgeois family. Though he studied law at the University of Havana, he had a passion for film and shot amateur shorts on 8mm.

Giovanni Angella was born in Rome, Italy, on February 18, 1930. From an early age, he followed his passion for art and especially cinema. In 1950, he founded the Charlie Chaplin Film and Culture Club in Rome. Starting in the 1960s, this club hosted a special film program, I lunedì del Rialto (Rialto Mondays), rediscovering and presenting many forgotten or marginalized movies.

Carmen-Maja Antoni was born in Berlin on August 23, 1945. In 1970, she became a member of the Volksbühne in Berlin, where she became known for her comic and sometimes grotesque performances. In 1975, she joined the Berliner Ensemble where she became known for her character roles in performances from Shakespeare to Brecht.

Lev Arnshtam was born on January 15, 1905 in Yekaterinoslav, in the Russian Empire (now Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine). He studied piano at the Petrograd Conservatory, where he met Dmitri Shostakovich, who later became a famous composer.

Donatas Banionis was born in Kaunas, Lithuania on April 28, 1924. In 1941, when he was still a student, he was hired by the famous actor and theater director Juozas Miltinis for his newly founded Panevezys Drama Theater. Banionis went on to act in over 90 theatrical productions.

Kurt Barthel was born on January 30, 1931 in Berlin, where he experienced WWII as a child. From 1946 to 1949, he trained to become a mechanic and completed an apprenticeship, after which he worked in different jobs, including as a tractor driver and transportation worker.