In a 1949 "exposé" of Communists active in Hollywood, Vincent Price was named alongside Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Kirk Douglas, Katharine Hepburn and Frank Sinatra as one of "Stalin's Stars."

Theatrical actress Natasha Pyne got her break in films with an ingénue part in Hammer's swashbuckler The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964), starring Christopher Lee.

Jenny Lee Wright, who plays Paul Toombes' doomed leading lady, had previously been seen in John Cassavetes' Husbands (1970) and as a stock player on The Benny Hill Show.

Relegated to a minor role as the luckless director of Paul Toombes' comeback series, stage actor Barry Dennen had just reprised his Broadway role as Pontius Pilate for the film version of the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar (1973).

Madhouse director Jim Clark began his career as a film editor, assisting cutter Jack Harris on the Ealing comedy The Ladykillers (1955) and editing Jack Clayton's horror classic The Innocents (1961), as well as several films for John Schlesinger.

The birthdays of Vincent Price (born 1911) and Peter Cushing (born 1913) were only a day apart. Price made his film debut in 1938, Cushing in 1939. Price died in 1993, and Cushing the following year.

Both Peter Cushing and Robert Quarry had appeared in Price's earlier film, Dr. Phibes Rises Again.

Although he had extensive experience in theatre and film, Peter Cushing was known primarily as a television actor prior to his breakthrough success in Hammer Studios' The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958).

Newly arrived in Hollywood, aspiring actor Robert Quarry lived for a time at the Pacific Palisades home of Joseph Cotten, whom he had met while working as a bellhop in the Santa Rosa, California hotel where the cast of Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943) were quartered.

Research compiled by Richard Harland Smith

Sources:
The Horror People by John Brosnan
Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography by Victoria Price
Peter Cushing: An Autobiography and Past Forgetting
IMDB