20. LILLIAN GISH (1893-1993)



One should resist the temptation to guess that Gish's name is better-remembered than most of the actresses who did their most noteworthy work during the silent era because she was such a favorite of D. W. Griffith, a director who has received (and deserved) so much of the credit for the development of the movies as an art form. In her performances for Griffith -- the titles include Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, Orphans of the Storm, and, of course, The Birth of a Nation -- she embodied fragile, beautiful girlhood, and had to carry out all the cliches of Victorian melodrama that make so many dramatic silent movies look ridiculous today.  Yet she did it with an unearthly technique that poeticized the material and made her eternally threatened characters seem not so much frail and dainty but rather not of this world; it's as if they'd become their own ghosts without taking the customary step of first abandoning their bodies. She also made two great silents with director Victor Sjostrom, The Scarlet Letter and The Wind; the latter was a box-office failure that led to the cancellation of her MGM contract. Although she was never to enjoy anywhere near the same degree of success in talkies, she had a few notable roles spread far apart over the course of her remarkably long life and career, the most impressive being the stern, Christian spinster who holds her own against the devil, in the form of Robert Mitchum, in The Night of the Hunter. Her last film appearance was in 1987's The Whales of August. She reacted to news that people were appalled she didn't get an Oscar nomination for it by saying that she really didn't mind not being put in the position of losing to Cher.

19. JODIE FOSTER (1962 - ) 



I’m pretty sure there’s only one actress on this list I’ve had a crush on since first grade, a crush even more doomed than my usual movie star fantasies (if all the rumors about Foster’s famously off-limits private life are true). Starting with her appearance as Becky Thatcher in the 1973 screen version of Tom Sawyer (though her career actually started at seven with a 1969 cameo on The Doris Day Show), Foster always seemed like the smart, cute, preternaturally mature older girl next door who clued you in to the grown-up world and made you feel cooler just for knowing her. Then one day, as cool, older girls tend to do, Foster leapfrogged straight from child’s play to adulthood with her amazing Oscar-nominated role as the not-as-smart-as-she-thinks-she-is jailbait streetwalker in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), inspiring the insane, obsessive infatuation of would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley, Jr. Most child and teen stars fade away with far less provocation, but after putting the Hinckley incident behind her with a stint at Yale and transitional roles in a string of box office disappointments (including the cult classic, Foxes), Foster’s adult career finally caught fire with a pair of Best Actress Oscars for The Accused (1988) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Since then, Foster’s had the clout to largely follow the whims of her own smarty-pants muse, like a real-life version of Gwyneth Paltrow’s aging prodigy in The Royal Tennenbaums, flitting from brainy mainstream fare like her driven SETI researcher in Contact (1997) and offbeat fandangos like Nell (1994) to interesting supporting roles, most notably her fantastically amoral fixer in Spike Lee’s Inside Man. Thanks to her evident mental toughness (and probably the collective unconscious memory of her signature role as the serial killer- slaying Clarice Starling), Foster has also become an unlikely action star in movies like Panic Room and The Brave One...and while some of her paycheck jobs (like the terrible, terrible Flightplan) are miles beneath her, they can also be seen as forgivable means to her directorial ends, financing humble passion projects like Flora Plum and Little Man Tate. Given the range and breadth of her career, the usual rules and restrictions of female stardom in Hollywood just never seem to apply to Foster, and hopefully they never will: smart people rule!!!

18. GONG LI (1965 - )



First off, just look at that face. Gong Li was blessed with a timeless beauty, coupled with a regal movie-star bearing. However, the road to big-screen immortality is littered with the nipped and tucked bodies of gorgeous women. Luckily for Gong, then, that she got her start as an actress during China’s fabled Fifth Generation of filmmakers, an era that had little use for empty glamour. As the muse of leading Fifth Generation directors Chen Kaige and longtime lover Zhang Yimou, Gong quickly began to specialize in playing women who were systematically ground down by the oppressive forces of Chinese patriarchy. In movies like Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, and Farewell My Concubine, Gong suited the filmmaking style perfectly, her soulfulness grounding the often-tragic stories while her beauty complemented the eye-popping imagery. Yet there was more to her than suffering and anguish, as evidenced by her tenacious turn in The Story of Qiu Ju and the bitchy moll she portrayed in Shanghai Triad. Around the turn of the millennium, Gong’s roles became increasingly ornamental for a time -- honestly, there’s no compelling reason to see Zhou Yu’s Train other than to stare at her -- but in recent years she’s finally begun working outside of her native land on a regular basis. And although her Hollywood roles have been inconsistent at best -- thumbs up for Miami Vice, thumbs down for Memoirs of a Geisha and (ugh) Young Hannibal -- she gave one her best performances yet in Wong Kar-wai’s 2046. As the female equivalent of Tony Leung’s seedy writer Mr. Chow, Gong excels at the kind of morally compromised character that can only be played convincingly by an actress who’s grown into the role. It’s a tantalizing hint of the treasures that should be in store for us as Gong approaches middle age, and frankly, we can’t wait.

17. SHELLEY DUVALL (1949 - )



She’s gawky and weird, with stringy hair and an awkward way about her. And she’s mesmerizing. And beautiful. And one of the most amazing actresses of her generation. It took an eye like Robert Altman’s to see the gorgeous leading lady behind her not-so-Hollywood looks. She’s at her best in Altman’s Thieves Like Us, where a love scene transforms her from a funny-looking teenager into a Modigliani beauty. But she’s great in all of the Altman films she made, even Popeye. She popped up in Annie Hall, Time Bandits, and Underneath, but the general public probably knows her best as Wendy from The Shining. Let’s look at that list of directors again: Altman, Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam, Stanley Kubrick, and Stephen Soderbergh. And yet, what has she done worth watching since 1995? In fact, she’s been mostly MIA since 1980. What gives?

16. MARLENE DIETRICH (1901-1992)



Josef von Sternberg brought her from Germany to the US and made her the ur-femme fatale before WWII. Later she became Hollywood’s go-to girl when they needed a faded flower of decadent old-world Europe. The Nazis tried to lure her back to Germany, but she hated Nazis. And she loved Orson Welles. After she broke with von Sternberg, she made some okay westerns (and one with Fritz Lang that sounds extraordinary, but has not been released on DVD), a second-tier Hitchcock film, a couple of Billy Wilder movies, and Touch Of Evil, one of the greatest movies ever made. She was some kind of a woman. What does it matter what you say about people?

Click Here for Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven & Eight 

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Hayden Childs