> Gregory Peck, who stars as Penny Baxter, was born Eldred Gregory Peck in La Jolla, California in 1916. After his parents divorced when he was five, Peck went to live with his grandmother. In those days before television, the movies were where most people went for entertainment, and Peck's grandmother would take him every week.

> Peck did not start out to become an actor; he went to the University of California, Berkeley with the intention of becoming a doctor. However, he got involved in theater while a student and abandoned his medical studies. He went to New York, where he studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and after graduation appeared on Broadway, where Hollywood talent scouts spotted him and he was off to Hollywood. Peck made his first film, Days of Glory in 1944 and became a star with his second film, The Keys of the Kingdom (1944), which gave him his first Academy Award nomination. For the next 50 years, until his death in 2003 at the age of 87, Gregory Peck remained a beloved star.

> Jane Wyman was born Sarah Jane Mayfield (later Sarah Fulks) in St. Joseph, Missouri in 1916. Like Gregory Peck, her parents divorced when she was young, but unlike Peck, Wyman knew she wanted to be an actress early in her life. She tried to get into movies as a girl, but failed, so she went to the University of Missouri and after graduation, became a radio singer.

> Wyman was discovered by talent scouts from Warner Bros., who brought her to Hollywood and gave her the name Jane Wyman. While at Warner Bros., Wyman starred in many "B" pictures - films that were shown before the more important "A" picture. She didn't become a real star until she appeared in The Lost Weekend (1945), which earned her a Best Actress Academy Award nomination. It was during Wyman's time at Warner Bros. that she met her third husband, actor Ronald Reagan, with whom she co-starred in Brother Rat (1938). The marriage ended in divorce, and Reagan would later become Governor of California and serve two terms as President of the United States.

> Wyman continued her acting career both in films and on television until the 1990s. She died in 2007 at the age of 90.

> Claude Jarman, Jr. was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1934. He had only performed in school plays and local theater productions, and had never heard of Marjorie Rawling's book when he was discovered by director Clarence Brown from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who was doing a nationwide search for an unknown boy to play Jody in The Yearling. Brown asked Jarman to come to California to make a screen test and he got the part.

> After The Yearling, Jarman, like many child actors, found finding good parts difficult as he became a teenager. He decided to move back to Nashville to finish high school, and later studied law at Vanderbilt University. After spending three years in the Navy, he returned to Hollywood, where he later worked as a producer. He now owns a travel company in San Francisco. In 2011, he returned to Florida with his family to visit many of the locations where The Yearling was filmed, saying that he still received fan letters every week from people who love the film.

By Lorraine LoBianco