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Today is Gregory Peck's 110th birthday. Born in San Diego, California, on April 5, 1916, Peck grew up with an ambition to become a doctor. After graduating high school, he enrolled at the San Diego State Teacher's College, and later transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, as an English major and pre-medical student. His deep, well-modulated voice soon got him attention and he was encouraged to try acting, having appeared in five plays during his senior year at Berkeley. In 1939, lacking one course to receive his degree, he headed to New York City to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse with the legendary acting coach Sanford Meisner. His stage career began two years later, when he appeared in a Katharine Cornell production of George Bernard Shaw's play The Doctor's Dilemma , which opened in San Francisco just one week before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He made his Broadway debut in 1942, playing the lead in Emlyn Williams' The Morning Star . Peck'...

Jean Harlow is one of most the defining figures of the early decades of American cinema. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, on March 3, 1911, she made her feature film debut as an uncredited extra in the silent drama Honor Bound (1928). After a small speaking part in The Saturday Night Kid (1929), starring Clara Bow and Jean Arthur, she was hired by Howard Hughes to star in his World War I epic Hell's Angels (1930), which turned her into a overnight sensation. Signing with MGM in 1932, she became one of the studio's most profitable leading ladies, appearing in such hits as Dinner at Eight (1933), China Seas (1935), Wife vs. Secretary (1936) and Libeled Lady (1936), the last three co-starring Clark Gable . Her final picture, Saratoga (1937), which also paired her with Gable, was released after her death and became not only the highest-grossing film of her career, but also the biggest moneymaker of that year. Although she was in the motion picture industry for only nine year...