Maureen Lipman

Academy Award-winner Michael Caine along with Julie Walters earned well-deserved 1983 Oscar nominations (Best Actor and Best Actress, respectively) for their outstanding performances in this brilliant, bittersweet comedy. Walters is Rita, a working-class woman seeking the path to self-discovery. Bored with her life as a hairdresser, and under pressure from her husband to start a family, she enrolls in literature tutorials at a British university determined to better herself. Caine is Frank Bryant, the disillusioned English professor who is assigned to teach her.

Winner of the prestigious Golden Palm award at the 2002 Cannes film festival, The Pianist is the film that Roman Polanski was born to direct. A childhood survivor of Nazi-occupied Poland, Polanski was uniquely suited to tell the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew and concert pianist (played by Adrien Brody) who witnessed the Nazi invasion of Warsaw, miraculously eluded the Nazi death camps, and survived throughout World War II by hiding among the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto.