After completing my recent list of top 100 films of all time, I got in the habit of thinking about more inspirational names and titles. It occurred to me that I had a few actors in mind, which I admired greatly.
So I return with my top 50 favourite cinema actors.
There are a few faces who made it in the list, who are often forgotten and even ignored, so I found it my duty to make sure that these much loved and watched performers of mine make it in the hall of fame.
The list is in order of date of birth.
Walter Huston (1883–1950)
He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1948 for his role in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was directed by his son, John Huston. His last film was The Furies in 1950 with Barbara Stanwyck.
Emil Jannings (1884–1950)
Jannings was a theater actor who went into films. He starred in the 1922 film version of Othello and in F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (Der Letzte Mann, 1924), as a proud but aged hotel doorman who is demoted to a restroom attendant. Jannings worked with Murnau on two other films, playing the title character in Herr Tartüff (1925) and Mephistopheles in Faust (1926). He eventually started a career in Hollywood. In 1929 he won the Oscar for two films, The Way of All Flesh, and The Last Command.
He returned to Europe, where he starred opposite Marlene Dietrich in the 1930 film The Blue Angel.
Charles Chaplin (1889–1977)
Chaplin was one of the most creative and influential personalities of the silent-film era. He was influenced by his predecessor, the French silent film comedian Max Linder, to whom he dedicated one of his films. His working life in entertainment spanned over 75 years, from the Victorian stage and the music hall in the United Kingdom as a child performer, until close to his death at the age of 88. His high-profile public and private life encompassed both adulation and controversy.
Margaret Rutherford (1892 – 1972)
Margaret Rutherford was an English character actress, who first came to prominence following World War II in the film adaptations of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. In 1963 she won the best supporting actress Oscar as The Duchess of Brighton in The VIPs.
She is probably best known for her 1960s performances as Miss Marple in several films based loosely on Agatha Christie’s novels.
Edward G. Robinson (1893–1973)
A popular star during Hollywood’s Golden Age, he is best remembered for his roles as gangsters, such as Rico in his star-making film Little Caesar and as Rocco in Key Largo. Other memorable roles include Barton Keyes in the film noir Double Indemnity, and as Dathan in The Ten Commandments. Robinson was selected for an Honorary Academy Award for his work in the film industry, which was posthumously awarded two months after the actor’s death in 1973. He was included in the American Film Institute’s list of the 25 greatest male stars in American cinema.
Buster Keaton (1895–1966)
He was best known for his silent films, in which his trademark was physical comedy with a consistently stoic, deadpan expression, earning him the nickname “The Great Stone Face”.
Orson Welles stated that Keaton’s The General is “the greatest comedy ever made, the greatest Civil War film ever made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made.”
Michel Simon (1895–1975)
In silent movies, he brought his amazing appearance and his unusual face – a talent with an exceptional mobility, but truly without mannerism. He easily played with his body using an unlimited virtuosity, especially his ugliness, evolving from smartness to sympathy, goodness to naivety, ludicrousness to frightening, stupidity to comical, mischievousness to cruelty.
His film career was really boosted with the advent of talking pictures. People remarked that his elocution and voice tone were as original as his appearance and play. He then revealed his unclassifiable talent: action comedy, drama, tragedy, light comedy.
He appeared in Dreyer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc. He acted in films for Jean Renoir (La Chienne, Boudu Saved From Drowning), Jean Vigo (L’Atalante) and Marcel Carné (Port of the Shadows, Bizarre, Bizarre).
Arletty (1898–1992)
In 1945, Arletty appeared in her most famous film role, the central part of Garance in Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis, her fourth role for the director. Arletty was imprisoned in 1945 for having had a wartime liaison with a German officer during the occupation of France. She allegedly later commented on the experience, “My heart is French but my ass is international.” After a moderately successful period as a stage actress in later life, an accident in 1963 left her nearly blind, forcing her to retire. One of her final screen appearances was in a small role as an elderly French woman in the 1962 epic The Longest Day.
Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957)
His breakthrough as a leading man came in 1941, with High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon. The next year, his performance in Casablanca raised him to the peak of his profession and, at the same time, cemented his trademark film persona, that of the hard-boiled cynic who ultimately shows his noble side. Other successes followed, including To Have and Have Not (1944); The Big Sleep (1946); Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948), with his wife Lauren Bacall; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948); In a Lonely Place (1950); The African Queen (1951), for which he won his only Academy Award; Sabrina (1954); and The Caine Mutiny (1954). His last movie was The Harder They Fall (1956). During a film career of almost thirty years, he appeared in 75 feature films.
Gloria Swanson (1899–1983)
She was one of the most prominent stars during the silent film era as both an actress and a fashion icon, especially under the direction of Cecil B. DeMille, made dozens of silents and was nominated for the first Academy Award in the Best Actress category. She had also produced her own films such as the controversial Sadie Thompson and The Love of Sunya. In 1929, Swanson successfully transitioned to talkies with The Trespasser.
However, personal problems and changing tastes saw her popularity wane during the 1930s when she moved into theater and television. Today she is best known for her role as Norma Desmond, a faded silent film star, in the critically acclaimed film Sunset Boulevard (1950).
James Cagney (1899–1986)
Cagney’s seventh film, The Public Enemy, became one of the most influential gangster movies of the period. Notable for its famous grapefruit scene, the film thrust Cagney into the spotlight, making him one of Warners’ and Hollywood’s biggest stars. In 1938, he received his first Academy Award for Best Actor nomination, for Angels with Dirty Faces, before winning in 1942 for his portrayal of George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy. He was nominated a third time in 1955 for Love Me or Leave Me. Cagney retired for twenty years in 1961, spending time on his farm, before returning for a part in Ragtime, mainly to aid his recovery from a stroke. Cagney walked out on Warners several times over the course of his career, each time coming back on better personal and artistic terms. In 1935, he sued Warners for breach of contract and won; this marked one of the first times an actor had beaten a studio over a contract issue.
Charles Laughton (1899 – 1962)
English-American stage and film actor, screenwriter, producer and director. Laughton received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for his role as Sir Wilfrid Robarts in the screen version of Agatha Christie’s play Witness for the Prosecution (1957).
He played a British admiral in Under Ten Flags (1960) and worked for the only time with Laurence Olivier in Spartacus (1960) as a wily Roman senator.
His final film was Advise and Consent (1962), for which he received favorable comments for his performance as a southern US Senator. Laughton worked on the film, which was directed by Otto Preminger, while he was dying from cancer of the kidney.
Marlene Dietrich (1901–1992)
Dietrich remained popular throughout her long career by continually re-inventing herself, professionally and characteristically. In the Berlin of the 1920s, she acted on the stage and in silent films. Her performance as Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel, directed by Josef von Sternberg, brought her international fame and provided her a contract with Paramount Pictures in the US. Hollywood films such as Shanghai Express and Desire capitalised on her glamour and exotic looks, cementing her stardom and making her one of the highest paid actresses of the era. Dietrich became a US citizen in 1939, and throughout World War II she was a high-profile frontline entertainer. Although she still made occasional films in the post-war years, Dietrich spent most of the 1950s to the 1970s touring the world as a successful show performer.
Jean Gabin (1904–1976)
He starred in the Jean Renoir masterpiece La Grande Illusion, an anti-war film that was a huge box office success and given universal critical acclaim, even running at a New York City theatre for an unprecedented six months. This was followed by another one of Renoir’s great successes: La Bête Humaine (The Human Beast), a film noir tragedy based on the novel by Émile Zola and starring Gabin and Simone Simon, as well as Le Quai Des Brumes (Port of Shadows), one of director Marcel Carné’s most acclaimed films.
Flooded with offers from Hollywood, for a time Gabin turned them all down until the outbreak of World War II. Following the German occupation of France, he joined Jean Renoir and Julien Duvivier in the United States. Divorced from his second wife in 1939, during his time in Hollywood, Gabin began a torrid romance with actress Marlene Dietrich. However, his films in America proved less than successful.
Peter Lorre (1904–1964)
He caused an international sensation in 1931 with his portrayal of a serial killer who preys on little girls in the German film M. Later he became a popular featured player in Hollywood crime films and mysteries, notably alongside Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet, and as the star of the successful Mr. Moto detective series.
Cary Grant (1904–1986)
Grant was named the second Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute. Noted particularly for his work in comedy but also for drama, Grant’s best-known films include The Awful Truth (1937), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Gunga Din (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), Notorious (1946), To Catch A Thief (1955), An Affair to Remember (1957), North by Northwest (1959) and Charade (1963).
Nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Actor, for Penny Serenade (1941) and None But the Lonely Heart (1944), and five times for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor, Grant was continually passed over, and in 1970 was given an Honorary Oscar at the 42nd Academy Awards. Frank Sinatra presented Grant with the award, “for his unique mastery of the art of screen acting with the respect and affection of his colleagues”.
Greta Garbo (1905–1990)
Garbo launched her career with a leading role in the 1924 Swedish film The Saga of Gosta Berling. Her performance caught the attention of Louis B. Mayer, chief executive of Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM), who brought her to Hollywood in 1925. She immediately stirred interest with her first silent film, Torrent , released in 1926; a year later, her performance in Flesh and the Devil, her third movie, made her an international superstar.
With her first talking film, Anna Christie (1930), she received her first Academy Award nomination. MGM marketers enticed the public with the catch-phrase “Garbo talks!” That same year she won a second Oscar nomination for her performance in Romance. In 1932, her immense popularity allowed her to dictate the terms of her contract, and she became increasingly choosy about her roles. Many critics and film historians consider her performance as the doomed courtesan Marguerite Gautier in Camille to be her finest. The role gained her a third Academy Award nomination. After working exclusively in dramatic films, Garbo turned to comedy with Ninotchka (1939), which earned her a fourth Academy Award nomination, and Two-Faced Woman (1941).
In 1941, she retired after appearing in 27 films. Although she was offered many opportunities to return to the screen, she declined most of them. Instead, she lived a private life, shunning publicity.
Pierre Brasseur (1905–1972)
Renowned for playing outsized characters, Brasseur is probably best known in the anglophone world for his (semi-fictionalised) portrayal of the actor Frédérick Lemaître in Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise, 1945) and as Docteur Génessier (more subdued) in the horror film Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage, 1960) co-starring with Alida Valli.
On May 30, 1927, Brasseur performed the spoken role of the Narrator in the world premiere of Igor Stravinsky‘s opera-oratorio Oedipus rex.
Takashi Shimura (1905–1982)
In company with Toshirō Mifune, Shimura is the actor who is most closely associated with Akira Kurosawa. Shimura appeared in 21 of Kurosawa’s 30 films. His roles include the doctor in Drunken Angel (1948), the veteran detective in Stray Dog (1949), the flawed lawyer in Scandal (1950), the woodcutter in Rashomon (1950), the mortally ill bureaucrat in Ikiru (1952), and the lead samurai Kambei in Seven Samurai (1954).
In fact, Kurosawa’s cinematic collaboration with Shimura, from 1943 to 1980, started earlier and lasted longer than his work with Mifune (1948–65). Shimura appeared in the director’s debut film Sanshiro Sugata (1943), and the last film of Kurosawa’s in which he acted was Kagemusha (1980), for which Kurosawa specifically wrote a part for Shimura.
Henry Fonda (1905–1982)
Fonda made his mark early as a Broadway actor. He also appeared in 1938 in plays performed in White Plains, New York, with Joan Tompkins. He made his Hollywood debut in 1935, and his career gained momentum after his Academy Award-nominated performance as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, a 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel about an Oklahoma family who moved west during the Dust Bowl. Throughout six decades in Hollywood, Fonda cultivated a strong, appealing screen image in such classics as The Ox-Bow Incident, Mister Roberts and 12 Angry Men. Later, Fonda moved both toward darker epics as Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and lighter roles in family comedies like Yours, Mine and Ours with Lucille Ball.
Fonda was the patriarch of a family of famous actors, including daughter Jane Fonda, son Peter Fonda, granddaughter Bridget Fonda, and grandson Troy Garity. His family and close friends called him “Hank”. In 1999, he was named the sixth Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute.
Joan Crawford (1905–1977)
After her triumph in RKO’s Sudden Fear, Crawford appeared in films ranging from the camp western film Johnny Guitar (1954) to the drama Autumn Leaves (1956), opposite a young Cliff Robertson.
As Blanche Hudson in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Crawford starred as Blanche Hudson, a wheelchair bound former A-list movie star in conflict with her psychotic sister in the highly successful thriller What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962).
Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003)
Raised in Connecticut by wealthy, progressive parents, Hepburn turned to acting after graduation from Bryn Mawr College. After four years in the theatre, favorable reviews of her work on Broadway brought her to the attention of Hollywood. She became an instant star with her feature debut, 1932′s A Bill of Divorcement, and within 18 months received an Academy Award for Morning Glory. This initial success was followed by a series of commercial failures, and in 1938 she was labeled “box office poison”. Hepburn masterminded her own comeback, buying herself out of her contract with RKO Radio Pictures and acquiring the film rights to The Philadelphia Story, which she sold on the condition that she be the star. The movie was a hit, and Hepburn’s career was successfully revived.
James Stewart (1908–1997)
Over the course of his career, he starred in many films widely considered classics and was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning one in competition and receiving one Lifetime Achievement award. He was a major MGM contract star. He also had a noted military career and was a World War II and Vietnam War veteran, who rose to the rank of Brigadier General in the United States Air Force Reserve.
Gunnar Björnstrand (1909–1986)
Gunnar was a Swedish actor known for his frequent work with writer/director Ingmar Bergman. He was born in Stockholm. He appeared in over 180 films.
Björnstrand was a versatile actor who could play tough and tender as well as comedy and tragedy.
One of his most famous roles was as the worldly squire who makes such a contrast to his austere and spiritual master in Bergman’s most famous film The Seventh Seal.
Gert Fröbe (1913–1988)
In 1958 he was cast as the villain in the Swiss-German film Es geschah am hellichten Tag (It Happened in Broad Daylight), which was novelized by Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt. His role as a serial killer of children drew the attention of the producers of the James Bond movie Goldfinger, (1964) and he was chosen to play one of the most well-remembered villains of the series, gold tycoon Auric Goldfinger.
Alec Guinness (1914–2000)
He was featured in several of the Ealing Comedies, including Kind Hearts and Coronets in which he played eight different characters. He later won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai. He is known for playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars trilogy, Prince Feisal in Lawrence of Arabia, and George Smiley in the TV adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. He is also known for his portrayal of Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations (1946).
Ingrid Bergman (1915–1982)
She won three Academy Awards, two Emmy Awards, and the Tony Award for Best Actress. She is ranked as the fourth greatest female star of American cinema of all time by the American Film Institute. She is best remembered for her roles as Ilsa Lund in Casablanca (1942), a World War II drama co-starring Humphrey Bogart and as Alicia Huberman in Notorious (1946), an Alfred Hitchcock thriller co-starring Cary Grant.
Orson Welles (1915–1985)
Citizen Kane (1941), his first film with RKO, in which he starred in the role of Charles Foster Kane, is often considered the greatest film ever made. Several of his other films, including The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Touch of Evil (1958), Chimes at Midnight (1965), and F for Fake (1974), are also widely considered to be masterpieces.
Anthony Quinn (1915–2001)
He starred in numerous critically acclaimed and commercially successful films, including Zorba the Greek, Lawrence of Arabia, The Guns of Navarone, The Message, Guns for San Sebastian, Lion of the Desert and Federico Fellini’s La Strada. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor twice; for Viva Zapata! in 1952 and Lust for Life in 1956.
Toshirô Mifune (1920–1997)
He is best known for his 16-film collaboration with filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, from 1948 to 1965, in works such as Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, and Yojimbo. He is also popular for portraying Musashi Miyamoto in Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai Trilogy.
Walter Matthau (1920–2000)
Walter was an American actor best known for his role as Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple and his frequent collaborations with Odd Couple star Jack Lemmon, as well as his role as Coach Buttermaker in the 1976 comedy The Bad News Bears. He won an Academy Award for his performance in the 1966 Billy Wilder film The Fortune Cookie.
Setsuko Hara (1920–)
Setsuko is a Japanese actress who appeared in six of Yasujirō Ozu’s films, most notably as Noriko in the ‘Noriko Trilogy’: Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953). Her other films for Ozu were Tokyo Twilight (1957), Late Autumn (1960) and finally The End of Summer in 1961.
Simone Signoret (1921–1985)
Simone was a French cinema actress often hailed as one of France’s greatest movie stars. She became the first French person to win an Academy Award, for her role in Room at the Top (1959). In her lifetime she also received a BAFTA, an Emmy, Golden Globe, Cannes Film Festival recognition and the Silver Bear for Best Actress.
Dirk Bogarde (1921–1999)
Sir Dirk Bogarde was an English actor and novelist. Initially a matinee idol in such films as Doctor in the House (1954) and other Rank Organisation pictures, Bogarde later acted in art-house films such as Death in Venice (1971). He also wrote several volumes of autobiography.
Giulietta Masina (1921–1994)
Giulietta was an Italian film and stage actress. She starred in La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, both winners of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, in 1956 and 1957, respectively. Masina won the Best Actress award at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival for the later film.
She was the wife and muse of the Italian film director Federico Fellini, in whom she found an artistic equal and collaborator. Owing to her intense performances of naïve characters dealing with cruel circumstances, Masina is often called the “female Chaplin”.
Ava Gardner (1922–1990)
She was signed to a contract by MGM Studios in 1941 and appeared mainly in small roles until she drew attention with her performance in The Killers (1946). She became one of Hollywood’s leading actresses, considered one of the most beautiful women of her day. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her work in Mogambo (1953).
She appeared in several high-profile films from the 1950s to 1970s, including The Hucksters (1947), Show Boat (1951), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), The Barefoot Contessa (1954), Bhowani Junction (1956), On the Beach (1959), Seven Days in May (1964), The Night of the Iguana (1964), The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), Earthquake (1974), and The Cassandra Crossing (1976). Gardner continued to act regularly until 1986, four years before her death from pneumonia, at age 67, in 1990.
She is listed 25th among the American Film Institute’s Greatest female stars.
Erland Josephson (1923 – )
Erland Josephson is a Swedish actor and author. He is best known to international audiences for his work in films directed by Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Theodoros Angelopoulos.
Josephson was born in Stockholm, Sweden. He was leader of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm from 1966 to 1975. He has also has published novels, short stories, poetry and drama, and was director of several films. In 1980, he directed and starred in the film Marmalade Revolution, which was entered into the 30th Berlin International Film Festival.
Lauren Bacall (1924–)
She first emerged as leading lady in the Humphrey Bogart film To Have And Have Not (1944) and continued on in the film noir genre, with appearances in Bogart movies The Big Sleep (1946) and Dark Passage (1947), as well as a comedienne in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) with Marilyn Monroe and Designing Woman (1957) with Gregory Peck. Bacall has also worked on Broadway in musicals, gaining a Tony Awards for Applause in 1970 and Woman of the Year in 1981. Her performance in the movie The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996) earned her a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination.
Marcello Mastroianni (1924–1996)
In 1945, Mastroianni started working for a film company and began taking acting lessons. His first role was in I Miserabili (1948). He soon became a major international celebrity, starring in Big Deal on Madonna Street; and in Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita with Anita Ekberg in 1960, where he played a disillusioned and self-loathing tabloid columnist who spends his days and nights exploring Rome’s high society. Mastroianni followed La dolce vita with another signature role, that of a film director who, amidst self-doubt and troubled love affairs, finds himself in a creative block while making a movie in Fellini’s 8½. His prominent films include La dolce vita; La Notte; Divorce, Italian Style; Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow; Marriage Italian-Style; A Special Day; and Ready to Wear, opposite Sophia Loren. Mastroianni and Loren were one of the most successful and enduring screen couples of cinema history, paired up in 14 movies over twenty years.
Peter Sellers (1925–1980)
Perhaps best known as Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther film series, he is also notable for playing three different characters in Dr. Strangelove, as Clare Quilty in Lolita, and as the TV-addicted man-child Chance the gardener in his penultimate film, Being There. Leading actress Bette Davis once remarked of him, “He isn’t an actor—he’s a chameleon.”
Richard Burton (1925–1984)
Richard was a Welsh actor. He was nominated seven times for an Academy Award, six of which were for Best Actor in a Leading Role (without ever winning), and was a recipient of BAFTA, Golden Globe and Tony Awards for Best Actor. Although never trained as an actor, Burton was, at one time, the highest-paid actor in Hollywood. He remains closely associated in the public consciousness with his second wife, actress Elizabeth Taylor; the couple’s turbulent relationship was rarely out of the news.
Jack Lemmon (1925–2001)
He starred in more than 60 films including Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Mister Roberts (for which he won the 1955 Best Supporting Actor Academy Award), Days of Wine and Roses, The Great Race, Irma la Douce, The Odd Couple, Save the Tiger (for which he won the 1973 Best Actor Academy Award), The Out-of-Towners, The China Syndrome, Missing (for which he won ‘Best Actor’ at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival), Glengarry Glen Ross, Grumpy Old Men and Grumpier Old Men.
Klaus Kinski (1926–1991)
Klaus was a German actor. He appeared in more than 130 films, and is perhaps best-remembered as a leading role actor in the films of Werner Herzog, including: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Woyzeck (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Cobra Verde (1987).
George C. Scott (1927–1999)
George was an American stage and film actor, director and producer. He was best known for his stage work, as well as his portrayal of General George S. Patton in the film Patton, and as General Buck Turgidson in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.
Max von Sydow (1929-)
Some of his most memorable film roles include knight Antonius Block in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (the first of his eleven films with Bergman and the film that includes the iconic shot of his career in the scene where he plays chess with Death), Jesus in George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told, Father Merrin in Friedkin’s The Exorcist, Joubert the assassin in Three Days of the Condor, Ming the Merciless in the 1980 version of Flash Gordon, Dr. Liet-Kynes in David Lynch’s 1984 film version of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune, Never Say Never Again, as the non-canonical villain Blofeld, and as Brewmeister Smith in the 1983 film Strange Brew.
Grace Kelly (1929–1982)
Grace was an American actress who, in April 1956, married Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, to become Princess consort of Monaco, styled as Her Serene Highness The Princess of Monaco, and commonly referred to as Princess Grace.
After embarking on an acting career in 1950, at the age of 20, Grace Kelly appeared in New York City theatrical productions as well as in more than forty episodes of live drama productions broadcast during the early 1950s Golden Age of Television. In October 1953, with the release of Mogambo, she became a movie star, a status confirmed in 1954 with a Golden Globe Award and Academy Award nomination as well as leading roles in five films, including The Country Girl, in which she gave a deglamorized, Academy Award-winning performance. She retired from acting at 26 to enter upon her duties in Monaco.
Shirley MacLaine (1934-)
MacLaine made her film debut in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry (1955), for which she won the Golden Globe Award for New Star Of The Year – Actress. In 1956 she had roles in Hot Spell and Around the World in Eighty Days. At the same time she starred in Some Came Running, the film that gave her her first Academy Award nomination – one of five that the film received – and a Golden Globe nomination.
Her second nomination came two years later for The Apartment, starring with Jack Lemmon. The film won five Oscars, including Best Director for Billy Wilder. She later said, “I thought I would win for The Apartment, but then Elizabeth Taylor had a tracheotomy”.
Albert Finney (1936–)
Albert is an English actor. He achieved prominence in films in the early 1960s, and has maintained a successful career in theatre, film and television.
A recipient of BAFTA, Golden Globe, Emmy and Screen Actors Guild Awards, Finney has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor four times, for Tom Jones (1963), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), The Dresser (1983), and Under the Volcano (1984); and was nominated for Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Erin Brockovich (2000).
Jack Nicholson (1937-)
He is renowned for his often dark portrayals of neurotic characters. Nicholson has been nominated for an Academy Award twelve times, and has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice: for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and for As Good as It Gets. He also won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the 1983 film Terms of Endearment. He is tied with Walter Brennan for most acting wins by a male actor (three). Nicholson is well-known for playing Jack Torrance in The Shining and the Joker in 1989′s Batman, among many other roles.
Liv Ullmann (1938–)
Liv is a Norwegian actress and film director, as well as one of the “muses” of the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. A winner of the Golden Globe, Ullmann has also been nominated for the Palme d’Or, two times for the Academy Award, and a BAFTA Award.
Ullmann began her acting career on the Norwegian stage in the mid 1950s. She continued to act in the theatre for most of her career, and became noted for her portrayal of Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, but became wider known once she started to work with eminent Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. She went on to act to significant acclaim in 10 of his most admired films, including Persona in 1966, The Passion of Anna in 1969, Cries and Whispers in 1972 and Autumn Sonata, in which her co-star, Ingrid Bergman, made her return to Swedish cinema. She co-starred often with Swedish actor and fellow Bergman collaborator, Erland Josephson, with whom she made the 1973 Swedish television drama, Scenes from a Marriage, which was also edited to feature-film length and distributed theatrically. Ullmann appeared with Laurence Olivier in Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far in 1977.
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