According to the famous quote, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels.
Sadly, Ms. Rogers didn’t make our Top 25 list, but the sentiment holds true for the Leading Ladies who did: after all, like the actors in our recent posting of The Top 25 Leading Men of All Time, the following matinee idols managed to fascinate and captivate over the course of varied careers with astonishing on-screen performances (and off-screen personas)...yet they also achieved their success in a notoriously sexist, looks-obsessed business with a tendency to relegate women to underimagined wife and girlfriend parts...
...or, to quote Goldie Hawn’s actress character in The First Wives’ Club, there are usually three stages to a woman’s Hollywood career: "Ingénue, district attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.”
But not always, thankfully, as we here at the Screengrab hereby celebrate with our salute to 25 celluloid dames (some of them actual Dames) who defined and redefined our notions of film and femininity...backwards, forwards, up and down, in high heels, cowboy boots and everything in between.
25. NAOMI WATTS (1968 - )
Oh yes, Ms. Watts absolutely kills in the above scene from Mulholland Dr. But she has had a bit of a quality-control problem since, appearing in The Ring and its sequel, 21 Grams, Stay, King Kong, and the unnecessary remake of Funny Games. All of these movies seem risky and high-concept in the abstract, but all of them hedge their bets in some way and fail to deliver on their promise. They’re good enough for what they are, but none of them reach the greatness they suggest. Naomi Watts, however, completely throws herself into her roles. You can see the movie that could have been when she’s on-screen...if you can see anything but her, that is.
24. (TIE) JULIA ROBERTS (1967 - ) & JESSICA LANGE (1949 - )
In The Player, Robert Altman’s poison pen love letter to Hollywood, there’s a running gag about Julia Roberts: every producer pitches every project with her in mind, and even the integrity-bound screenwriter who vows that his “serious” indie film will feature “no stars” eventually gives in, leading to a charmingly self-deprecating film-within-a-film cameo by, yes, Julia Roberts. And though her wattage may have dimmed in recent years (along with the general star power of human actors versus, say, Chihuahuas and Decepticons), she’s still the current reigning champ of modern female movie stars in terms of her career Trifecta of salary (the first female star to crack the $20 million mark), box office clout (over $2 billion + international star power) and industry respect (with multiple awards, nominations and a Best Actress Oscar for her dynamo performance as the titular (get it?) legal clerk of Erin Brockovich). It hasn’t all been hosannas, of course: for all her fame, Roberts hasn’t really given that many memorable performances, and her star turns can range from somnambulant snoozers (The Pelican Brief, Mary Reilly) and romantic comedy fluff (Runaway Bride) to inexplicable appearances in unmitigated disasters like The Mexican and Mona Lisa Smile. But when she’s in the zone, her charisma and presence are formidable: many who loathed Pretty Woman on principle were nevertheless charmed (against their will!) by Roberts’ hooker with a heart of Amex gold, and when she lets herself be likably unlikable (as in her bittersweet chocolate romantic comedies Notting Hill and My Best Friend’s Wedding), she hints at a largely untapped range that may yet blossom in the second half of her already impressive career.
Lange made her movie debut in the 1976 King Kong remake. An actual look at the footage reveals that she was perfectly charming as a sweet but not-too-bright piece of fluff with vague aspirations to stardom, but the movie was used as a piñata by critics, and many of them went so far as to suggest that if Lange was convincing as a dumb blonde, that must mean that she wasn't acting. Badly burned, she didn't appear in another movie until Bob Fosse cast her as some kind of Wilhelmina Agency Angel of Death in 1979's All That Jazz. Her performance there was more kindly treated -- call it the lowered expectations, or Sarah Palin effect -- but it wasn't until she paired off against Jack Nicholson with an unexpectedly fiery performance in 1981's The Postman Always Rings Twice that people began to suspect that they just might have a live one. She followed that up in 1982 with a classic romantic-comedy lead in Tootsie and a performance as the doomed movie actress Frances Farmer (in Frances) that snapped a few necks. Her best work since then has include her performance as Patsy Cline in Sweet Dreams, her end-of-the-sisterhood trio in Crimes of the Heart, and her troubled, trouble-making military wife in Tony Richardson's Blue Sky, for which she won an Academy Award. (Sadly, the movie, which was completed in 1991, got caught up in the bankruptcy of its funding studio, Orion, and didn't make it to theaters until 1994, by which time Richardson had died.) Little that she has done since that has been especially worthy of her, though she has appeared onstage in London and on Broadway in Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Glass Menagerie. She is currently set to play the ruined society matriarch "Big Edie" Bouvier Beale (with Drew Barrymore as Little Edie) in a movie based on the Maysles brothers documentary Grey Gardens.
23. (TIE) SISSY SPACEK (1949 - ) & JANE FONDA (1937 - )
Sissy Spacek was the amoral girl-on-the-cusp-of-womanhood in three of the defining films of the '70s: Badlands, Carrie, and 3 Women (yeah, you read that right: I said 3 Women was a defining film of the '70s). She could have quit after that, but she moved on to playing maternal figures in the movies. Her eyes look different now. She’s lost the shock that made her seem so delicate and young and precious back then, but that shock was always hiding something else, something weirder and harder to define. Her only recent movie where she's recaptured the shade of her younger self was The Straight Story, in which she played a woman who was a little slow. The Straight Story is also one of the very few movies she’s made that’s worth a damn since 1977, so go figure.
Fonda's offscreen reputation as a Vietnam-era leftist political scold has largely overshadowed her legacy as an actress. If there's any justice in this, it has less to do with her right to express her opinions, however embarrassingly, in what passes for her private life, than with her misguided decision to waste what might have been her peak years as an artist on half-baked scripts that she seemed to select on the basis of whatever political message they seemed to be editorializing, whether it was the legacy of Vietnam or nuclear power or women's rights in the workplace. In the 1980s, she didn't seem to know what to do with herself, and she basically retired after an unpleasant run-in with Vietnam vets who picketed the set of the awful Stanley & Iris, in which she taught Robert De Niro to read. But if there was only a short window of time in which Fonda was an actress first and at the top of her game, what she did during that time would still qualify her for any Mount Rushmore of American movie actresses. She spent most of her first ten years in movies establishing herself as an exceptionally saucy, cuddly comic actress: she's a hoot, and a turn-on, even in Barabarella, one of the ugliest-looking rip-off jobs that a pretentious French twat ever talked his trusting American wife into starring in. When her tobacco-road inflection on the line "Essence of man?" and the scene where she shorts out the orgasm machine failed to give Henry Fonda a fatal heart attack, she went about any daughter's life's work another way, becoming "radicalized" offscreen while pouring all that angry, room-clearing energy into starring roles in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and Klute, two of the least sentimental, most hard-edged, beautifully detailed portraits of doomed women of the New Hollywood era (or anytime). Her Bree Daniels in Klute, the New York prostitute who has total control over her clients and zero control of anything else in her life, remains one of the most perfectly executed and daring star performances in movies.
22. JOAN CRAWFORD (1905-1977)
It’s a testament to the sheer power of Joan Crawford’s personality that the mere act of portraying her can wreck a career: Faye Dunaway, once one of Hollywood’s most promising stars, took on the job in the infamous Mommie Dearest, and she was never the same again. It’s a cliché to say that some famous person is less a human being and more a force of nature, but it’s a cliché that was invented with Joan Crawford in mind: once a drifting youngster who only wanted to be a dancer, she got her hooks into Hollywood at a young age (becoming famous as a flapper even before the sound era made her a superstar), and she never let go for a second. In everything from acting to dancing to business to parenthood to sitting on the board of directors of Pepsi-Cola, Crawford insisted on running the game her way, and woe betide anyone who crossed her. For such a stunning screen presence – named by the AFI as the greatest female star of all time! – Crawford wasn’t the best there was at anything. She was an above-average dancer, but not a great one; she had a unique look – all flashing eyes and floating hair – but she wasn’t one of the screen’s greatest beauties; and she could put in some fine performances (witness Mildred Pierce and Strange Cargo for proof), but she was an unreliable box office draw and never one of the greatest actresses of her day. Indeed, as with her doppelganger Bette Davis, she’s often treasured as much for her bad performances, like Sudden Fear, as for her good ones. But there is probably no one in Hollywood history, male or female, who was so commanding, so arresting, so utterly implacable when she was onscreen: Joan Crawford had more presence than anyone who had come before or has been seen since, and if she wasn’t going to take over the world with her acting, then goddamn it, she at least was not going to be ignored.
21. JULIE CHRISTIE (1948 - )
Julie Christie! The rumors are true! Wait, no. Terry met Julie at Waterloo Station every Friday night. Hold it, she wasn’t just the subject of rock songs? Julie Christie could actually act? Yowza. Actually, even if the only movie she'd ever made was McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Julie Christie would still be one of my favorite actresses. But she’s always great, even when the movie isn’t. And despite the openness in her face (not to mention that incredible perpetual pout), she always brings a sense of mystery and intelligence to her roles, giving them a fully rounded life, though we sometimes only see a snippet.
Click Here for Part Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight
Contributors: Hayden Childs, Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce