LOUISE BROOKS (1906-1985)



It may seem odd to include an actress whose career spanned little more than a decade and whose reputation rests almost entirely on two movies on a list of the greatest leading ladies of all time. Yet in the case of Louise Brooks, no explanation should be required. A former Ziegfeld Girl, Brooks came to Hollywood at a time when the biggest female draw was “American’s Sweetheart” Mary Pickford, who continued playing girlish characters well into her thirties. With her trademark black bob, pouty mouth and decidedly adult sensuality, Brooks couldn’t fit the type if she tried, and her outspoken nature and resistance to the narrow range of roles offered her led her to walk out on her Paramount contract. Effectively blackballed by the studios, she quickly fell in with German filmmaker G.W. Pabst, a collaboration that resulted in her two most famous films, Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. Thousands of miles from Hollywood, Brooks was finally able to play roles perfectly suited to her persona -- sexually-liberated, independent, and defiant. Her two films with Pabst finally brought her real big-screen stardom, and surely enough, Hollywood lured her back. Alas, the studios still didn’t know what to do with her (turning down the female lead in The Public Enemy probably didn’t help) and Brooks’ career fizzled out by the end of the 1930s. But big-screen stardom was only one chapter in Brooks’ fascinating life -- after her retirement, she worked as a ballroom-dancing teacher and a salesgirl, and for a time she was the mistress of CBS founder William Paley before becoming a call girl. But perhaps Brooks’ greatest post-fame role was as a writer and vivid raconteur of the classic era of Hollywood, whose witty memoirs of her younger days contain some of the best writing in the genre. Even in her written work, she remained defiant and unapologetic -- unmistakably, quintessentially Louise Brooks.

VANESSA REDGRAVE (1937 - )



For more than forty years, Redgrave has kept surprising audiences. For a few years there in the late sixties, in such movies as Blow Up and Morgan, she seemed to be a budding movie star and sex symbol, albeit one who was an uncommonly tall drink of water. For most of her career, though, she's been undefinable: you might call her an institution, except that she's not boring. On the contrary, in many of the prestige literary adaptations of which she's been a part, she's often been the lonely pulse still beating in a work of taxidermy. Her primary concern in choosing her projects seems to be whether they give her the chance to try something new and challenging, which has led her to such unexpected choices as playing the transsexual tennis player Dr. Renee Richards on TV. And she makes great daughters.

SUSAN SARANDON (1946 - )



Sarandon aged as beautifully as anyone in the history of movies, both as a woman and as an actress. The Rocky Horror Picture Show wasn't all she did during the seventies, though it might be a mercy to pretend that it was. (She also took a bath with a hippie and got shot in the back by her hippie-hating dad in Joe, fell off the wing of Robert Redford's plane in The Great Waldo Pepper, sired Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby, and was the last woman standing at the end of The Other Side of Midnight.) Her real career began in earnest with her wide-awake performance in Atlantic City, applying lemons to her skin and giving Burt Lancaster something to think about in the winter of his years. Bull Durham and her string recital in The Witches of Eastwick solidified her standing as a tempestuous cloud of a romantic sex object, though her most distinctive role, in such movies as Lorenzo's Oil and Safe Passage and Little Women, may be that of the fieriest mother in pictures, in every sense of the term.

EMMA THOMPSON (1959 - )



In most of her earliest screen roles (Henry V, Dead Again, Peter's Friends, Much Ado About Nothing and the TV miniseries Fortunes of War), in which she was directed by and and co-starred with Kenneth Branagh, Thompson, who was married to Branagh at the time, was widely taken for a charming adornment to her husband's second-coming-of-Laurence-Olivier act. Today, thirteen years after the marriage ended, Thompson is an international treasure who appears too seldom in roles too small for her, while Branagh is recognized as that douchebag who thought it would be a good idea to cast Robert De Niro as Frankenstein's monster and model his makeup after my uncle Lido, the guy who fell off the construction site beam and landed on his head. Liberated, Thompson did fine work in The Remains of the Day, In the Name of the Father and Carrington, though she arranged for her own best opportunity by adapting Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility for herself to star in and Ang Lee to direct.

DEBRA WINGER (1955 - )



In the early 1980s, in Urban Cowboy, An Officer and a Gentlemen, Terms of Endearment, and the too-little-seen Mike's Murder, Winger made direct contact with audiences in a way that made it seem as if nothing could slow her career down, let alone stop it. In fact, she was slowed down, and stopped for a while, by an industry that lured her into lucrative traps like Legal Eagles -- for an actor like Winger, the cinematic equivalent of the La Brea Tar Pits -- until she felt that she had to withdraw to keep her sanity. Many of her daring big tries, such as her stab at incarnating Jane Bowles in The Sheltering Sky, broke down on the runway, and many of her most remarkable performances got tucked into movies like Everybody Wins that nobody saw. Between 1993 and 1995, she was paired onscreen romantically with both Anthony Hopkins and Billy Crystal, a new definition of flailing. In 1996, she married the actor Arliss Howard and began a long break from acting in movies. It was during that dry spell that Rosanna Arquette directed a documentary about the never-ending frustrations of being an actress and called it Searching for Debra Winger. It's nice that she's become a symbol of something; she's also started gingerly sneaking back onscreen (as in the current Rachel Getting Married), which is a damn sight nicer.

JEAN SIMMONS (1929 - )



She was one silky number. At seventeen, she played the young Estella in David Lean's Great Expectations, and dealt the movie an awful blow when her character grew up and had to be replaced in the latter half by Valerie Hobson. A year later, she played Ophelia to Olivier's Hamlet. Her luck in Hollywood was less steady, and she arrived in time to get sucked into a lot of dull epics, such as The Robe, The Egyptian, and Desiree, in which she got into romantic clinches with Marlon Brando, which might not have been so bad if it weren't for the fact that he was supposed to be Napoleon. (At least it wasn't like their later pairing in Guys and Dolls where she had to put up with him singing at her.) Still, if you ever find yourself too hung over to change the channel when one of these movies comes on, you might find yourself inordinately grateful that she's there, looking just embarrassed enough about what's going on around her to earn your sympathy but not so mortified that you feel kind of stupid for watching. Her best epic was certainly Spartacus, where the scenes in which Kirk Douglas is denied her company by the guy holding the whip serve as concrete evidence that it would really suck to be a Roman slave. (Her best performance in a Hollywood movie may be in the smaller scale but still hokey Home Before Dark.) In more recent decades, she turned up in enough network miniseries (The Thorn Birds, North and South Books One and Two, not to mention her role in the 1991 revival of Dark Shadows) to establish that her sense of humor was still in good working order.

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Contributors: Paul Clark, Phil Nugent