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The 64th Berlin International Film Festival kicks off today and runs through February 16, bringing international premiers, a slew of sales and acquisitions and the world premiere of Wes Anderson’s much-anticipated The Grand Budapest Hotel. As the first major fest of the year after Sundance, the Berlinale plays host to the European Film Market, sure to be buzzing with business.

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Last Year Pablo Larain’s No with Gael García Bernal received a well deserved Academy Award nomination. This year Gloria directed by Sebastián Lelio was among the year’s best reviewed foreign language entries (and earned veteran Chilean actress Paulina García the prestigious Best Actress Silver Lion in Berlin.

Continuing his media tour for The Monuments Men, George Clooney recently paid a promotional visit to ABC Studios in New York City. The 52-year-old actor was in the house for an interview on Good Morning America, and the conversation inevitably turned to his much-talked-about prank on Matt Damon, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey.

Eldred Gregory Peck (born on April 5, 1916 in La Jolla, California, died on June 12, 2003) had a long and illustrious career as a Hollywood movie star; he was a tall, dark and handsome leading man, widely admired for his rectitude and his commitment to liberal causes. In Spellbound (1945) directed by Alfred Hitchcock, he played an honest man accused of murder, opposite Ingrid Bergman.

Burton Stephen Lancaster (born in New York City on November 2, 1913, died on October 20, 1994), a popular movie star, a respected dramatic actor, a successful producer of many of his own films and others like Marty (1955) and A Catered Affair (1956) starring Ernest Borgnine, was not cast in his first film, The Killers (1946), until age 32. In his youth he was a circus acrobat and developed the athletic skills that he would display in films like Jim Thorpe All-American (1951), The Crimson Pirate (1952) and Trapeze (1956) with Tony Curtis and Gina Lollobrigida.

Yoram Kahana (left) with Film Noir Foundation founder Eddie MullerBy Yoram Kahana The HFPA, which has been supporting film restoration for many years, last year gave a grant to a very specialized restoration-minded organization: the Film Noir Foundation, a San Francisco based non-profit dedicated to the research, restoration and showing of this most American of film genres. Film noir, in the words of one historian, is made of.

Italian film composer Riz Ortolani, who died recently in his villa outside Rome at age 87, was arguably one of the world’s most prolific creators of music for the movies. He scored comedies and dramas, spaghetti westerns and documentaries, erotica and horror, in a composing career that lasted some 50 years.

John Uhler “Jack” Lemmon III (born in Newton, MA, on February 8, 1925, died in Los Angeles on June 27, 2001) is an unusual movie star, because he did not play typical masculine heroes, but a great variety of everyman characters. He worked in the theatre and on television, before signing a 7-year contract with Columbia Pictures and being cast in his first film, It Should Happen to You (1954) by George Cukor, as a shy documentary filmmaker who falls in love with a girl (Judy Holliday) obsessed with seeing her name on billboards.

Olivia de Havilland was born in Tokyo on July 1, 1916, of British parents. Her father Walter was an attorney; her mother Lilian, an actress before her marriage, left her cheating husband and moved to California in 1919, with daughters Olivia and her younger sister Joan.