10. ISABELLA ROSSELLINI (1952 - )
Rossellini made her movie debut in 1976, playing a nun in Vincente Minnelli's A Matter of Time, which starred her mother, Ingrid Bergman -- but that was basically just a family outing. Her movie career didn't really take root until after her mother's death, when she appeared in 1985's White Nights. The next year, equipped with a tacky wig, a tackier apartment, and a kitchen knife, she achieved neo-noir immortality as Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet. She and Lynch became a couple, acting together in Zelly and Me and collaborating on his Wild at Heart. Around the time that picture hit theaters, he reportedly broke up with her over the phone, inspiring millions of film geeks across the globe to murmur in unison, "Jesus Christ, maybe he is nuts!" More recently, she has formed a productive working partnership with Canadian auteur Guy Maddin, who directed her in his feature The Saddest Music in the World and also in the short film My Dad Is 100 Years Old, a tribute to her father, Roberto Rossellini, which she wrote. (She also seized the opportunity to cast herself as Alfred Hitchcock, David Selznick, and Charlie Chaplin.) More recently, she wrote, directed and starred in the "Green Porno" short film series.
9. CATHERINE DENEUVE (1943 - )
With her cool elegance and breathtaking beauty, it would have been all too easy for Catherine Deneuve to become yet another in a long line of Euro-babes who were emerging during the 1950s and 1960s. That she dated notorious starlet-“groomer” Roger Vadim for a time would seem to indicate this. Yet from the early stages of her career, it was clear that Deneuve was in it for the long haul. For most rising performers, starring in a film by a relative neophyte in which every line of dialogue was not merely sung but dubbed by a professional singer would have seemed risky. But Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg became a sensation largely on the basis of Deneuve’s charisma, and she quickly became an international star. But rather than simply playing girlish characters again and again in a series of Umbrellas clones, Deneuve began seeking out roles that tweaked this archetype, notably as the tightly wound virgin of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and the bourgeois wife with the vivid fantasy life in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour. In the decades that followed, Deneuve became an icon in France -- literally, having served as the face of the French national symbol “Marianne” during the 1980s. Hollywood came calling on several occasions throughout her career, and Deneuve answered, most memorably as the 200-year-old bisexual vampire in The Hunger. But more often, Deneuve has leveraged her stardom -- and her still-formidable beauty -- to work with directors of international renown. In addition to Demy, Polanski, and Buñuel, Deneuve’s roll-call of world-class collaborators has also included François Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Melville, Andre Téchiné, Robert Aldrich, Raul Ruiz, Agnès Varda, Manoel de Oliveira, Léos Carax, and Arnaud Desplechin. Heck, she even petitioned to play a punch-press operator in Dancer in the Dark just to work with Lars Von Trier. Perhaps most happily for her fans, François Ozon’s 8 Women finally allowed Deneuve to unveil the singing voice that Jacques Demy had dubbed over decades before- which, as it turned out, was just fine after all.
8. MARILYN MONROE (1926-1962)
There are a lot of bad things you can say about Marilyn Monroe. A depressive, self-pitying pillhead, she had the biggest career anyone could ever hope for, and she threw it away; she was too ambitious, she fell in love too easily (and always with the wrong men), she was talented enough to go just so far and no farther. She never realized her potential (or never had any real potential to begin with); she helped to introduce a poisonous dumb-blonde stereotype for actresses – and, for that matter, for women – that persists to this day; and, if you believe some people (including, reportedly, Richard Nixon), she’s one of the reasons John F. Kennedy died. That’s pretty bad stuff. So what can you say in her defense? How about this: she was the biggest movie star of all time, and she will be for the rest of time. She was one of the most beautiful women who ever lived, and if the platinum-tressed knockout look has gotten out of control since her heyday, she had the pleasure of inventing it. She took a limited acting range and worked it to razor-sharpness, and if she never stepped out of a very specific spectrum of characters, she played each and every one of them to the hilt, and what’s more, she seemed to have a great time doing it. She was so universally beloved that every man wanted her and every woman wanted to be her, and she was the most mourned figure in America until JFK bought a bullet a year later. She is – more than James Dean, more than Humphrey Bogart, maybe even more than the Hollywood sign – a visual symbol of the movie business. She’s an icon’s icon, rivaled in our entire culture by only Elvis Presley. That’s what you can say about Marilyn Monroe.
7. BETTE DAVIS (1908-1989)
If you can judge even a superstar by the company they keep, how are we to judge Bette Davis? It’s beyond question that she’s one of the biggest stars who ever lived, but what kind of star was she? The name she’s most often linked with, by both fate (their most productive periods coincided) and judgment (they ran neck and neck for Oscar nominations much of their careers), is Katharine Hepburn. But Hepburn always seemed to be in Hollywood, but never of it: you could easily get the idea she was just a well-meaning, patrician East Coast gal who happened to be really good at acting in movies. Davis, on the other hand, was a self-constructed creature of Hollywood who was nearly as influential off screen as she was on. A ruthless manager of her own career, she forced more than one studio into court when she felt she was being mishandled by the system, and so influential was she in backstage wrangling that she became known as “the fourth Warner Brother”. Of course, her other famous nickname was “Mother Goddamn”; her only rival in sheer ballsy spite, and the only person who could assess an enemy and go right for their jugular, was Joan Crawford. With their cut-throat business acumen, their penetrating eyes, their disastrous personal lives, and their ability to exploit a studio system built to exploit them, Crawford would be the real actress Davis most resembled if it weren’t for one thing: Davis was ten times the actress Crawford was. With her dramatic intensity, her cynical humor, and her ease in any kind of genre, Bette Davis wasn’t just a superstar, she was also a legitimately great actress – and that’s why she’s on this list.
6. MERYL STREEP (1949 - )
If there is one thing that can be considered a transcendental aspect of Meryl Streep’s career, it is that she proved that you don’t have to be inhumanly attractive to become an actress of superstar caliber. (Obligatorily, we will mention that it also says a lot about Hollywood that Ms. Streep – who, in fact, has always been a perfectly lovely-looking woman – is not considered particularly attractive by its standards.) Simultaneously, if there is one thing that can be considered an abject failure about Meryl Streep’s career, it is that it set no particular precedent; since her stunning early work in movies like Sophie’s Choice and Silkwood to her amazing latter-day roles in Adaptation and The Hours, she has been widely feted as the greatest actress alive, while elsewhere, starring roles keep on going to the sort of women who look like she doesn’t. Pity poor Streep: she’ll have to go to her grave content to be merely the most spellbinding actress of the last half-century, with nothing but an unprecedented 14 Oscar nominations to show for it. If it were anyone else getting that many nods for Academy gold, you’d have to suspect the fix was in – no one can be that good. But Meryl Streep is, astonishingly, that good. At times, in fact, she seems to be some sort of highly sophisticated android that has been programmed by omniscient aliens to be good at acting: every one of her fourteen nominations was well-earned, and you could make a solid argument she should have won at least half a dozen more than the two she owns. She has no particular schtick, tic, or gimmick; she’s seemingly not drawn to a particular type of role, nor does she seek out scripts that play to one strength or another. Instead, she acts the way Michael Jordan plays basketball: whatever is required of her in the moment, she finds some unexpected yet utterly effective way of doing it, and there is no way to stop her.
Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven & Eight
Contributors: Phil Nugent, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce