15. LAUREN BACALL (1924 - )
How cool is Lauren Bacall? Cool enough that she tamed Humphrey Bogart, the greatest leading man of all time. Originally making her name as a teenage fashion model, Bacall’s slender frame and fiery eyes caught the attention of Howard Hawks, who changed her name, fixed her hair, and likely would have driven her career straight into the ground if he hadn’t arranged to cast her in The Big Sleep opposite the man she called “Mr. Bogart”. Bacall wasn’t even the best actress in the movie – according to both Raymond Chandler and William Faulkner, Martha Vickers, cast as her sister, acted rings around her to the degree that her scenes were cut so as not to make Bacall look bad. But she was good enough: her chemistry with Bogey was electrifying, her patented chin-down, eyes-up look was enchanting, and her clever patter, delivered in a sultry, husky voice combining East Coast class with East Side brass, could be felt in the hip pockets of every man in hearing distance. America demanded more of her, and she went on to prove that while she wasn’t the greatest actress of her day, she was at least game for anything, and surprisingly adept with light comedy as well as her trademark dangerous-dame roles. Now a ripe old 84 years old, Bacall is the very image of the classy old Hollywood dame, occasionally taking acting work (with Lars von Trier, even!), but mostly content to be one of Tinseltown’s great raconteurs – a fearless liberal, a hilarious storyteller, and a priceless link to the Golden Era.
14. ANNA KARINA (1940 - )
When she was young, she was the face of the French New Wave. And she was (and is) utterly beautiful, but she has always looked younger than her years. So she has the face of a little girl in those early films, but the words that she speaks -- and the way that she speaks them -- are those of an older, wiser person. Her first film appearance was in a film by the Situationist philosopher Guy Dubord. She has worked with Agnes Varda, Jacques Rivette, Fassbinder, Visconti, and, of course, Godard, to whom she was married during his greatest period of creativity. Wow.
13. MYRNA LOY (1905-1993)
With her pert features and her way with a tart comeback, Loy was peerless in her day at the delicate art of making sanity look sexy, which is always a cause worth fighting for. Much of what needs to be said about her career got said last week in our entry on William Powell in our Leading Men list: they did, after all, co-star in fourteen films. It was the double impact of Manhattan Melodrama, in which she left Clark Gable (with Gable's enthusiastic consent) for Powell, and their first Thin Man movie that, as she was wont to put it, made her an overnight success after more than eighty films. Her earlier jobs had included uncredited bit parts in The Jazz Singer and the 1925 silent Ben-Hur, as well as punching the clock as the sexy-evil-zombie daughter of the Yellow Peril supervillain embodied by Boris Karloff in the camp classic The Mask of Fu Manchu. She also served her country as Fredric March's wife in The Best Years of Our Lives, making a pretty good case for going off to war so long as you had her to come back to. Her last movie roles included 1978's The End (where the director-star, Burt Reynolds, made a bid for being considered a man of taste by casting her as his mother), and the underappreciated Just Tell Me What You Want (1980), as Alan King's unflappable assistant. In 1973, she made her Broadway debut in a production of Clare Booth Luce's The Women, which was reportedly a failure, but which absolutely has to have been better than the recent movie version.
12. GRETA GARBO (1905-1990)
Garbo began her career in silent pictures in her native Sweden and in Germany. It was after seeing one of these, Gosta Berlings Saga, that Louis B. Mayer decreed that she and the film's director be brought to America and installed at MGM. It didn't take him long to decide that the director could go back home after all, but Garbo stuck around, entrancing the crowds who piled into theaters to watch her co-starring roles with her offscreen lover John Gilbert through the clouds of steam that the two of them seemed to give off together. When Garbo made her first sound picture, Anna Christie (1930), MGM famously promoted it with the line, "Garbo Talks!"; years later, when she made the comedy Ninotchka (a calculated, and successful, attempt to lighten what had come to seem an oppressively heavy image), they used the line, "Garbo Laughs!" Pauline Kael once asked why, when she gave what is generally remembered as her finest performance in the 1936 Camille, they didn't think to use the line, "Garbo Acts!" Garbo was a superb actress, but the real historic impact of her career is the degree to which she established that there are some faces so beloved by the camera that their bearers can do no wrong in its all-seeing eye. Although most of her vehicles (Camille included) are kind of stodgy and crude and cheesy at the edges, they hold up to the extent that you cannot take your eyes off that woman. Garbo retired from the screen after 1941, reportedly due to a feeling that her moment had passed and in rebellion against MGM's desire to change her image and maker her seem like more of an accessible, regular gal. (The mind reels, the blood curdles, at the thought of how they might have tried going about this.) The only known time since then that she willingly stepped in front of a camera came in 1949, when she was 43, and agreed to do a screen test for a picture that she was considering coming out of retirement for but that subsequently fell through. To judge from that footage, seen above, whatever her reasons for not returning to movies, it couldn't have been that she'd lost her ability to make the camera go weak in the knees.
11. KATE WINSLET (1975 - )
The story of modern Hollywood is largely one of actresses who start out doing interesting, challenging roles until some big studio takes notice and rewards them for their hard work by putting them in blockbuster movies that make them rich – and utterly boring. Though she’s made some bad choices in her career (let’s not even talk about The Life of David Gale), former sandwich shop employee Kate Winslet, after becoming one of the biggest stars in the world by virtue of appearing as the female lead in Titanic, has steadfastly refused to settle into the role of a reliable, rich and uninteresting box office draw. Her pre-Titanic career was launched with an eerie, unforgettable performance in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, which she followed up with adventurous roles in classical adaptations like Jude and Hamlet; but shockingly, it was after appearing in the highest-grossing film of all time that her career really got interesting. Since that time, she’s become known for her unconventional beauty (having had many pointed things to say about Hollywood’s insistence that its leading ladies stay rail-thin) and her willingness to portray women who are sexually adventurous, unflatteringly neurotic, and possessed of unexpected and sometimes alarming depths. Outside of a few bill-paying blockbusters – likely the result of knowing she’ll never luck into another Titanic – she’s chosen a rare path, appearing in movies like Hideous Kinky, Quills, Iris, and Finding Neverland. She’s even put an unforgettable twist on romantic comedy with her role as Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. When you’re the star of the biggest movie in history, maybe you can afford to take those kinds of risks; if so, we’re glad it was Kate Winslet who got the chance.
Click Here for Part One, Two, Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight
Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs, Phil Nugent