Meet 20 Other Cast Members of The Beatles’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night’

July 6th holds a particularly special place in Beatles history.

For starters, it was on this date in 1956 that John Lennon, then aged 16, met Paul McCartney, then aged 15, in a church auditorium in Liverpool, where Lennon was playing with his school skiffle band, the Quarrymen. If the two had never crossed paths that day, it is impossible to say what, if anything, The Beatles might have become.

But their paths crossed that day, and exactly eight years later, on July 6, 1964, the very first Beatles film was shown at the London Pavilion, A hard day’s Night. It was received with much praise — The Voice of the Village He described it as “the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals” and won two Academy Awards, one for Best Screenplay (Alun Owen) and one for Best Score (Adapted) (George Martin).

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Certainly, none of the Beatles were trained actors, but they were, of course, professional entertainers, more than accustomed to putting on a show for the public.

“It was very hard to learn a line and say it, because we’d never done that kind of thing before,” McCartney said at a 1964 press conference the band held to promote the film. “We always thought of something and said it, rather than reading something off a piece of paper. But I think towards the end of the film, we got the hang of it a little bit more. At first, it was very scary, you know. It was a challenge to try to say these things as if we meant them – because it takes training as an actor, I think. So, you know, we had to try to make it sound convincing without any experience.”

But while the focus was on the Fab Four, the rest of the cast was rounded out by several accomplished actors and actresses, without whom the film’s plot would have been doomed. Below, we take a look at 20 other members of the Beatles cast. A hard day’s Night.