In addition to his prowess as a director and producer, Spielberg has used his talents to highlight socially important issues in his films including racism (The Color Purple), the Holocaust (Schindler's List), and slavery (Amistad). He is the founder and director of the Shoah Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the accounts of survivors of the Holocaust.

At the age of 17, having completed his schooling in England, he became a reporter for the Western Daily Press in Bristol, spending the next six years as a full-time journalist, writing film and theatre criticism, among other assignments. He quit in 1960 to pursue his own writing and began a stage play, A Walk on the Water. The first draft of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, his most famous work, was writen during Stoppard's German sojourn, and the Royal Shakespeare Company took an option on a revised version in 1965.

Stoppard has written dozens of scripts for the stage, screen, and radio including Brazil, the Empire of the Sun, and most recently Shakespeare in Love.

Thatcher was born Margaret Hilda Roberts on October 13, 1925, in Grantham, Lincolnshire, England. A clever child whose father was an ardent worker in local politics, she decided early in life to become a member of Parliament. She was educated at Somerville College and at Oxford University, where she was the first woman president of the Oxford University Conservative Association. She earned a master of arts degree from Oxford in 1950 and worked briefly as a research chemist. In 1950 she ran unsuccessfully for Parliament, although she did increase the Conservative Party vote by 50 percent in her district. The following year she married Denis Thatcher, a director of a paint firm. After her marriage she read for the bar and specialized in tax law.

Oprah's commitments extend to her initiation of the National Child Protection Act in 1991; she testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee to establish a national database of convicted child abusers and on December 20, 1993, President Clinton signed the national "Oprah Bill" into law. Recently, Oprah joined Clinton at the Presidents' Summit, a call to action for volunteerism in our communities. She has established scholarships for hundreds of students, and has donated millions of dollars to higher education institutions, such as Morehouse College, Spelman College and Tennessee State University. Oprah also serves as the National Spokesperson for A Better Chance, an organization that provides students (predominantly from inner city school districts) the chance to attend many of the nation's finest schools.