Olivia de Havilland and the Last 14 AFI Stars

Olivia de Havilland was not, despite what you might read on news releases and tributes to her, the last major star of Hollywood's Golden Age (or Classical Hollywood, as it also known).  The Classical Hollywood era's beginning is up for debate (some say as early as the 1910's, others say it began in the early 1930's, still others state it began in 1939).  Either way, there is a solid amount of agreement that the era ended in the early 1960's, so not only are there still actors alive from this era who were headlining films in the 1950's & 60's, there are some (like Harry Belafonte & Shirley MacLaine) who are still working today.

But de Havilland is probably the last major star of the 1940's and certainly of the 1930's to have still been alive, and with her passing, I wanted to discuss something we haven't done an update on in about two years on the blog (not since the death of Tab Hunter).  In 1999, the American Film Institute created a list of 50 (25 male, 25 female) of the greatest stars of Classical Hollywood, capping requirement at people who made their film debuts in or before 1950 (so people like Belafonte & MacLaine wouldn't have been eligible).  They did so from a list of 500 performers, most of whom at that point were already dead.  Though she didn't make the Top 25, one of the actors that was among those 500 was Olivia de Havilland.  We have in the years since checked in on those 500 stars, arbitrarily thrown together but significant enough to make the ballot, and since de Havilland has passed away, I wanted to see how many were left still from the list.  This is not an all-encompassing list of all of the actors who made their debut before 1950 and had a significant role in Hollywood (off the top of my head Arlene Dahl & Glynis Johns come to mind as actresses who would've qualified for this list but aren't on it), but it is a reminder of the few actors from Classical Hollywood (enough so that the AFI took note), who are still alive.

(For the curious, in addition to de Havilland, Kirk Douglas, Max von Sydow, and Doris Day have also passed since we last looked at this list.  Also, quite a few of these people still don't have Oscars of any kind, so hopefully the Academy takes note!)

The Living Actors...

Sidney Poitier (1927-Present)

Screen Debut: His first credited screen appearance came in 1950's No Way Out, which launched his landmark film career in a big way.
Oscar Nominations: Poitier received two Oscar nominations in his career, winning Best Actor for Lilies of the Field (becoming the first black man to win Best Actor).  Poitier also won an Honorary Award in 2002.
Probably Best Known Today For: Being an iconic and celebrated figure in the Civil Rights movement in the United States, and along with Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, and Harry Belafonte, being one of the very first black movie stars (he was also Ambassador from the Bahamas to Japan, as he actually has dual citizenship with both the Bahamas and the United States-random fact!).  Poitier is one of the most widely-respected actors in the industry, and one of its most enduring stars.
Is He Still Working?: Poitier quit acting in 2001, with the television movie The Last Brickmaker in America-his final theatrically-released film was 1997's The Jackal with Richard Gere & Bruce Willis.
My Favorite Performance: I know that some like to quibble about how Poitier never received an Oscar nomination for In the Heat of the Night, but part of me thinks it was more to do with vote-splitting (he also had Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and To Sir, with Love out that year) than racism.  Still, he certainly deserved an Oscar nomination for his iconic Virgil Tibbs.
Glaring Miss in His Filmography: I've never actually seen the movie that landed Poitier his Academy Award.  For whatever reason Lilies of the Field has never made it to the top of my queue, though I've seen a lot of Poitier films through the years.

Dean Stockwell (1936-Present)

Screen Debut: 1945's The Valley of Decision with Greer Garson & Gregory Peck
Oscar Nominations: Stockwell has received one Oscar nomination, for 1988's Married to the Mob (he lost to Kevin Kline).
Most Famous For: The career of Dean Stockwell is a fascinating one, as he is one of those rare child actors who went on to have a very strong career as an adult, though in this case in character actor parts. Starting acting as a cherubic-faced youth in movies like Gentleman's Agreement and Anchors Aweigh, he eventually became a hit actor as an adult, dropped out of acting to get involved in the hippie subculture, reappeared in the 1980's in the art house cinema of David Lynch and Wim Wenders, and is most well-known today for playing Al Calavicci in Quantum Leap and Brother Cavil in the revival of Battlestar Galactica.
Is He Still Working?: Stockwell suffered a stroke in 2015, and has since retired.
Glaring Miss in His Filmography: I've actually seen a few Stockwell pictures, and thought he was terrific if terrifying singing Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" in the exceptional Blue Velvet.  I'll go with his Oscar-nominated work as my missing piece, though I have always meant to watch the revived Battlestar Galactica.

The Living Actresses...

Claire Bloom (1931-Present)

Screen Debut: 1948's The Blind Goddess
Oscar Nominations: Never nominated
Most Famous For: For her long and illustrious career on the British stage, as well as her many tabloid romances.  Ms. Bloom made her stage debut at sixteen opposite John Gielgud and a young Richard Burton, whom she had a passionate love affair with (Burton claimed he loved two women before Liz Taylor-his wife Sybil and Claire Bloom).  She would perform on in the West End for decades, and continue having tabloid-worthy relationships, including marriages to Rod Steiger and Philip Roth, as well as affairs with Laurence Olivier and Yul Brynner.
Is She Still Working?: Yes!  Her most recent work was in the BBC Miniseries Summer of Rockets as Aunt Mary opposite Toby Stephens & Timothy Spall.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: With Bloom it's hard not to pick her first international starring role in Limelight, where she plays a suicidal ballerina in the only film that features both Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

Ann Blyth (1928-Present)

Screen Debut: Chip off the Old Block (1944) with Donald O'Connor & Peggy Ryan
Oscar Nominations: 1 nomination (for Mildred Pierce)
Most Famous For: Portraying the selfish daughter from hell in Mildred Pierce.  Her work opposite Joan Crawford won her an Oscar nomination early in her career, and she eventually went on to become a major star of musicals, at one point being a rival for Kathryn Grayson at MGM.  She eventually moved completely away from the cinema, instead starring in a series of television guest spots, including a memorable turn as a potential murderer opposite longtime friend Angela Lansbury in Murder, She Wrote and as an actress with a secret on The Twilight Zone in "Queen of the Nile."
Is She Still Working?: Blyth quit working in film after her role in The Helen Morgan Story with Paul Newman.  She quit television in the 1980's, though she does occasional do interviews still.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I've actually seen Mildred Pierce and The Great Caruso, the two most important pictures in her filmography, so maybe Brute Force with Burt Lancaster, where she plays a woman dying of cancer whose husband is in prison.

Rhonda Fleming (1923-Present)

Screen Debut: While she did work before then, her first onscreen credit was in Spellbound, making her the (only?) person to play a significant role in one of Hitchcock's films of the 1940's.
Oscar Nominations: Never nominated
Most Famous For: Being the "Queen of Technicolor."  Along with Maureen O'Hara and Arlene Dahl, Fleming's red hair made her a major motion picture star, and one that photographed particularly well in Technicolor, which was very in fashion during the height of her fame.  Her best known films are probably from the 1940's, when she had supporting roles in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound and the brilliant Out of the Past, but she was a bigger headliner in the 1950's when she appeared opposite Dana Andrews, Ronald Reagan, Burt Lancaster, and Kirk Douglas.  Like a number of women on this list, she was an ardent Republican in her personal life, particularly as an advocate for school prayer.
Is She Still Working?: No-her most recent film would be 1990's Waiting for the Wind with Robert Mitchum, her Out of the Past costar.  She still frequently makes appearances, though, and has participated in the Turner Classic Film Festival.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: In case you missed it, Rhonda Fleming was one of our Saturdays with the Stars actresses last year, so I'm actually very familiar with her work.  As a result, I'll pick the curiosity of Fleming playing Cleopatra in Serpent of the Nile as the next of her movies I want to investigate.

Mitzi Gaynor (1931-Present)

Screen Debut: 1950's My Blue Heaven (which we talked about earlier this year when were discussing Betty Grable in February)
Oscar Nominations: Never nominated
Most Famous For: Being Krusty the Clown's go-to name drop?  Just kidding (Simpsons reference!).  Gaynor was in fact one of 20th Century FOX's biggest stars in the 1940's and 1950's, starring in a number of hit musicals.  While she could boast costarring roles with Bing Crosby and Gene Kelly, it was with Rossano Brazzi, a little-known Italian actor, that she enjoyed her biggest and most enduring cinematic success.  The movie?  Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific, with Gaynor as the main character of Nellie Forbush, forever washing that man right out of her hair before a very enchanted evening.  She also had one of the most famous numbers in Oscar history (though she wasn't nominated for or even in the film) when she got the longest-standing ovation in the history of the ceremony for her performance of "Georgy Girl" in 1967.
Is She Still Working?: While she no longer acts, she frequently is featured in documentaries chronicling the Golden Age of the musical, and actually won an Emmy for her 2010 documentary "Mitzi Gaynor: Razzle Dazzle!"  Also, she's on Twitter!
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: Gaynor was also one of our stars last year, and so I've seen most of her major movies, though I have not caught the big-screen adaptation of Anything Goes.

Marsha Hunt (1917-Present)

Screen Debut: The Virginia Judge (1935)
Oscar Nominations: Never nominated
Most Famous For: Her politics.  A star for both Paramount and MGM in the 1930's and 1940's who watched her career unravel during the 1950's as part of the blacklist, Hunt was a vocal advocate for free speech and freedom to petition, and refused to denounce her activities protesting Congress on behalf of the blacklist...and therefore didn't work for most of the 1950's, extinguishing her career.
Is She Still Working?: It doesn't appear so-Hunt quit acting in 2008, but does make some public appearances and grant interviews despite her advanced age.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I'm going to go with Born to the West, starring an extremely handsome John Wayne in his twenties, which gives Hunt an unusually robust screenplay to work with for a love interest role in the 1930's.

Angela Lansbury (1925-Present)

Screen Debut: Gaslight (1944) with Charles Boyer & Ingrid Bergman
Oscar Nominations: 3 (for Gaslight, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Manchurian Candidate, as well as an Honorary Oscar in 2013).
Most Famous For: Lansbury has enjoyed an incredible amount of succcess throughout her career, principally on Broadway (she has won five Tony Awards) and on television (as J.B. Fletcher on the long-running CBS show Murder, She Wrote).  Of course, Lansbury has had a plethora of film roles as well that have become part of her own personal lore.  Her work in John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate and Disney's Beauty and the Beast would be toward the top of the public consciousness.
Is She Still Working?: Yes-one of her most recent rolls was as the Balloon Lady in Mary Poppins Returns just two years ago.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: Here I've seen enough of her work (I've even seen her on-stage) to have a favorite performance (The Manchurian Candidate, though honestly I've loved almost everything-she's a personal favorite) and have all three of those Oscar-nominated roles done, so I'll go with the comic classic The Court Jester, which I have for some reason never gotten around to and in which she plays Princess Gwendolyn opposite Danny Kaye & Glynis Johns.

Piper Laurie (1932-Present)

Screen Debut: Louisa (1950) with Ronald Reagan & Ruth Hussey
Oscar Nominations: 3 (for The Hustler, Carrie, and Children of a Lesser God)
Most Famous For: Laurie is most known to film audiences as the mother from hell in Carrie (oddly enough, Angela Lansbury arguably plays the cinema's other most famous mother from hell on-screen in The Manchurian Candidate).  Laurie also was Paul Newman's love interest in The Hustler, and got a Best Actress nomination for it and was Catherine Martell on Twin Peaks.
Is She Still Working?: After an eight year absence, Laurie was on movie screens opposite Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Jason Leigh in White Boy Rick in 2018.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I cannot believe I am admitting this, but I have somehow never seen The Hustler, one of those great films from the 1960's and one of the most important roles of Paul Newman's (and of course Piper Laurie's) careers.  I should get on this quickly.

Gina Lollobrigida (1927-Present)

Screen Debut: Return of the Black Eagle (1946)
Oscar Nominations: Never nominated
Most Famous For: Look at the picture to the left and I'll give you one (err...two) guesses.  Lollobrigida was the Italian sex symbol, a counterweight to the American Marilyn and the French Bardot.  She did make a handful of films with the leading men of the era (Burt Lancaster, Anthony Quinn, Frank Sinatra), but quite frankly it was her incredible beauty and her bizarre change in careers late in life (she became a journalist, and eventually managed to land an interview with Fidel Castro of all people in the 1970's) that made her a household name.
Is She Still Working?: She is not acting, but she does still stay in the tabloids for her charitable giving and bizarre love life (as well as the occasional public snipe at her longtime rival Sophia Loren).
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I don't know if I've ever actually seen a Lollobrigida film, so I would probably make it a bit of a marathon to catch up.  I'd start with her Golden Globe-winning work in Come September with Rock Hudson, follow it with her Esmerelda opposite Anthony Quinn in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and finish things with her Solomon and Sheba with Yul Brynner, which has the distinction of being King Vidor's final film.

Sophia Loren (1934-Present)

Screen Debut: Bluebeard's Six Wives (1950)
Oscar Nominations: Loren received two Oscar nominations in her career, winning for Two Women in 1961 (the first person to win for a foreign-language film).  She would go on to win an Honorary Oscar in 1991 for her body of work.
Probably Best Known Today For: For starters, thankfully being alive and still working (the only woman on the Top 25 still with us, and along with Poitier the only person who charted on either list).  Loren's most recent film is Rob Marshall's Nine, but is probably best known for her enduring beauty.  Consistently considered one of the most striking and attractive women in the history of cinema, she was a major star at the height of America's fascination with foreign language cinema. (Completely Random Aside-I once had a car that I named after Loren because the car was so pretty...my brother still drives it).
Is She Still Working?: After an 11 year absence, Loren is returning to the movies with The Life Ahead, which has a significant part for her (could this be a third Oscar nomination if it's done well?).
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: Let's go with The Fall of the Roman Empire, which was a huge film for Loren, and made her the second (after Elizabeth Taylor) actress to receive $1 million for a film.

Rita Moreno (1931-Present)

1950: The Toast of New Orleans (1950) with Mario Lanza & Kathryn Grayson
Oscar Nominations: One nomination (which she won for-Best Supporting Actress for 1961's West Side Story)
Most Famous For: For thoroughly enjoying life in Ame-RIC-a.  Moreno starred in one of the great American musicals in 1961, taking over the role made famous by Chita Rivera on Broadway and becoming a household name as a result (as well as an Oscar-winner).  Though at that time she had been featured in three of the best-loved musicals of all-time (she was also in Singin in the Rain and The King and I), she didn't star in a lot of high-profile films again (a Latina actress in the 1960's frequently had to rely on stereotypical roles, which Moreno refused to partake of).  Instead she forged a bold multi-platform career, winning an Emmy, Grammy, and Tony in the 1970's to complete her EGOT.  She is best known from this period for her work on The Muppets and The Electric Company (with Morgan Freeman).  Moreno also had a pretty spectacular personal life, being romantically involved with both Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley during her career.
Is She Still Working?: Absolutely-she was one of the key players in One Day at a Time and supposedly has a role in Steven Spielberg's upcoming West Side Story.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I've seen her three iconic musicals, so I'm going to go with The Ritz, which earned Moreno a Tony Award on Broadway and a Golden Globe nomination on film.

Margaret O'Brien (1937-Present)

Screen Debut: Journey for Margaret (1942)
Oscar Nominations: None, though she won the Juvenile Academy Award in 1944.
Most Famous For: Being one of the biggest child stars on the planet.  Margaret O'Brien was to the 1940's what Shirley Temple & Judy Garland were to the 1930's.  She even appeared opposite Garland in the most famous of O'Brien's movies: Meet Me in St. Louis, where she played Tootie.  O'Brien was a major star, but couldn't jump to adult roles like Garland, whom she is oftentimes compared to, and instead only made the occasional television or film appearance.  If you ever want a fun story, read about O'Brien's Oscar and how she lost it for some fifty years before it finally returned to her.
Is She Still Working?: I think so-it looks like she has a relatively long recent IMDB cast page but it's not entirely clear if these are just clips of her in her youth or her actually playing a role.  If the 2017 movie where she stars opposite Mickey Rooney in a retelling of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde actually exists, I need to see it immediately.  Her last roles you'd have heard of would have been guest spots on The New Lassie and Murder, She Wrote in the early 1990's.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I'd probably go with the film that made her a star, Journey for Margaret with Robert Young and Fay Bainter, as I've seen (and loved) Meet Me in St. Louis before.

Jane Withers (1926-Present)

Screen Debut: Bright Eyes (1934)
Oscar Nominations: Never nominated
Most Famous For: Being insufferable.  Or rather, playing insufferable, in the Shirley Temple classic Bright Eyes, where Withers plays her bratty nemesis.  Withers became one of the biggest stars of the late 1930's, joining Shirley Temple as a major box office draw despite being a child star, and then eventually going into supporting roles, like her work in Giant (she and James Dean were good friends) and eventually commercials, taking on what would become her most famous role for the Baby Boomer generation: Josephine the Plumber in the Comet commercials (for comparison's sake, think of Flo from the Progressive commercials and her ubiquity).  And continuing our streak, she was in several episodes of Murder, She Wrote.
Is She Still Working?: From what I can tell her most recent work would be voiceover contributions to The Hunchback of Notre Dame and its direct-to-video sequel, which happened almost 18 years ago, so she does appear to be retired.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I think Bright Eyes, Withers' most noted work, would probably have to be at the top of the list.

Saturdays with the Stars: Season 1 Recap

Ida Lupino & Ann Sheridan, two of our
stars kicking their heels!

With yesterday's sojourn into the South Pacific, we have finished our first season of "Saturday with the Stars!"  I'm not much for naval-gazing (mostly because I am aware this blog is not read by swaths of people), but I am really, really proud of this past season.  When I came up with this idea, I mostly wanted to see if I could do it for a year, and with one exception (you won't be able to tell this unless you were paying really close attention because I pre-dated the article, but when I was suffering from a 103-fever & pneumonia, I published one article on a Sunday), I did!

This year has taught me about the careers of twelve amazing artists, and I hope you learned some things about them too.  I had never really done something like this with actors, focusing instead on genre or something arbitrary like Oscar nominations, but getting to see the progressions in these women's careers was eye-opening, noting the similarities as well as the differences in their journeys.  I am struck by how expansive the universe of classic film is still to me some 25 years after I first started to delve into it. This year we watched movies that I'd never even heard of until I included them in the project, and made a bunch of "deep cut" discoveries.

We'll begin our second season in a few days (click here if you want to learn more about it), but before we go I am a lover of lists, and wanted to rank a few of the movies we watched this year.  I'm appreciative to all of these actresses for the education & cinematic pleasure they gave me during this journey, so I'm only focusing on the positives (no "worst of" lists).  If you have enjoyed this series, please feel free to comment or tweet this post-I'd love to have more people joining us in Season 2.  And if you have opinions on these actresses (or further research I should do), share in the comments as well!

Favorite Performances from Each Star
January: Ann Sheridan-Woman on the Run
February: Virginia Mayo-Along the Great Divide
March: Cyd Charisse-The Band Wagon
April: Alice Faye-Hello Frisco Hello
May: Linda Darnell-A Letter to Three Wives
June: Lizabeth Scott-Too Late for Tears
July: Rhonda Fleming-While the City Sleeps
August: Ruth Roman-Lightning Strikes Twice
September: Esther Williams-Bathing Beauty
October: Hedy Lamarr-Ecstasy
November: Ida Lupino-The Hard Way
December: Mitzi Gaynor-Les Girls

5 Favorite Actresses of the Year (Alphabetical)

Linda Darnell
Alice Faye
Rhonda Fleming
Ida Lupino
Lizabeth Scott

5 Favorite Performances of the Year (Alphabetical)

Linda Darnell, A Letter to Three Wives
Alice Faye, Hello Frisco Hello
Ida Lupino, The Bigamist
Ida Lupino, The Hard Way
Lizabeth Scott, Too Late for Tears

10 Favorite Films of the Year (Alphabetical)

The Band Wagon
The Bigamist
Brigadoon
It's Always Fair Weather
Les Girls
A Letter to Three Wives
The Man Who Came to Dinner
My Darling Clementine
Strangers on a Train
Too Late for Tears

10 Favorite Performances of the Year in these Films (Not By Our Leading Ladies)

Humphrey Bogart, High Sierra
Kirk Douglas, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
Nanette Fabray, The Band Wagon
Patricia Hitchcock, Strangers on a Train
Van Johnson, Brigadoon
Kay Kendall, Les Girls
Janis Paige, Silk Stockings
Ann Sothern, A Letter to Three Wives
Robert Walker, Strangers on a Train
Monty Woolley, The Man Who Came to Dinner

Alias Jesse James (1959)

Film: Alias Jesse James (1959)
Stars: Bob Hope, Rhonda Fleming, Wendell Corey, Gloria Talbott, Jim Davis
Director: Norman Z. McLeod
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Rhonda Fleming-click here to learn more about Ms. Fleming (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.


By the end of the 1950's (where we will end our look at the actress), Rhonda Fleming's career was in a weird place.  She had had a very big hit just two years prior to our picture today, Gunfight at the OK Corral, that might have turned around her career had she had a more significant part in it (we would have certainly profiled that for this series, and I'll likely see it at some point, but she didn't get above-the-line billing for it so it didn't qualify under our rules).  She had, in 1957, opened up a wildly successful nightclub act in Vegas and she had become independently wealthy through shrewd real estate investments (Fleming would not be one of those stars who soared and would go broke later in her career), but it was clear that a film career that had been given great promotion throughout the decade was coming to a close.  At 36, she reunited  with the man who had made her career in 1949 with The Great Lover, Bob Hope, but starring opposite Hope in 1959 didn't mean as much as it had ten years earlier, as Hope's career (in film, at least) was also winding down.  As a result, Alias Jesse James would come out just one year before Fleming would announce her "semi-retirement" from cinema and while she'd appear in pictures occasionally after 1960, she never had another starring role in the movies.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is a silly little western, one that exists almost solely for Hope to be a witty dope as Milford Farnsworth, an insurance salesman who accidentally gives a $100k life insurance policy to outlaw Jesse James (Corey), and his boss tasks him with tracking down James, stating that he either needs to prevent James from getting killed or die trying.  James and his brother Frank (Davis) see Wendell as an easy mark, someone who can be duped, and whom they can kill (and pretend it was James in order to get the insurance money).  Milford keeps foiling their plans by accident, living through preposterous situations, until he finally realizes toward the end of the film what is happening.  Along the way, he falls for Jesse's girlfriend Cora Lee (Fleming), who takes a shine to him despite the seemingly sexless nature of Milford (at one point Jesse tells Milford, who has just been kissing Cora Lee, something to the effect of "oh, Milford good, it's just you-I thought I saw a man through the window."  Like all films of the era, Milford gets the girl who is totally out-of-his-league, and then takes over as president of the insurance company, with a family of redheads in tow.

The film is most well-known for two scenes toward the end of the picture.  The first is an extended chase sequence where Hope is literally running at the speed of a moving horse as he's fallen through the bed of his carriage.  It's funny, and Hope makes the most of the physical comedy (Hope's humor, though dated and predictable, has a retro feeling watching it today that probably felt tired when the movie came out in 1959 & he was an everyday part of most people's film-watching lives for the past 15 years).  The most famous scene, though, is having Milford "shoot down" the James gang, but instead it's actually a series of western heroes who show up (without context) to shoot down the gang.  This is a delight, so if you genuinely haven't seen the movie skip to the next paragraph as I wasn't kidding about the spoiler alert.  The film has not only Hope's old pal Bing Crosby (just as a random cowboy), but also (in their famed costumes) Fess Parker's Davy Crockett, Gary Cooper's Will Kane, Jay Silverheels's Tonto, Hugh O'Brian's Wyatt Earp, James Arness's Matt Dillon, Ward Bond's Seth Adams, Gail Davis's Annie Oakley, and Roy Rogers as himself.  It's a who's who of popular western figures at the time, and for years the film was difficult to find on home release because of the copyrights involved with recruiting these characters.  The film marks the final cinematic appearance for both Bond and Arness.

Rhonda Fleming's role is, as you might be able to tell, minimal.  She once again plays a beautiful woman, someone for our hero to fall-in-love with within seconds of meeting her, and to be almost comically attractive to the point where men do stupid things to stay in her favor.  Fleming was very good at this type of role as we've seen throughout this series, and her Cora Lee is funny & she finds ways to elevate her even when she's not an interesting character on-paper.  However, the assertion made by Fleming that we discussed at the beginning of this series was apt-after working on films like Spellbound and Out of the Past (genuine masterpieces), Fleming used her newfound fame and leading lady status to kind of make forgettable pictures.  She definitely got fame & money, but she was correct in that she sort of sold out for playing toss-away parts in pictures that seemed to be beneath an actress as talented as she was.  It's hard not to think of two other actresses born the same year as Fleming (Gloria Grahame & Anne Baxter) who also took promising careers in supporting parts but unlike Fleming transformed them into memorable leading roles, and have as a result enjoyed a career longevity that Fleming has lacked.  Had she demanded at her heyday to get better parts in better movies, Fleming certainly had the talent to get off of a list of "actresses Oscar never acknowledged" and might not have needed to go into retirement in such unceremonious fashion.  Instead, she's the sort of actress you're surprised to watch in Out of the Past and realize how good she can be.

Fleming, though, is probably better remembered than the woman we'll profile starting on Thursday, an actress who enjoyed only a few years of proper leading lady status, and is arguably the most obscure leading woman we're going to profile during our 2019 series.  That said, unlike Fleming, she managed to get one truly great film out during her career that is better-remembered now than anything Fleming ever made in her career.  Stay tuned!

While the City Sleeps (1956)

Film: While the City Sleeps (1956)
Stars: Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, George Sanders, Howard Duff, Thomas Mitchell, Vincent Price, Sally Forrest, John Drew Barrymore, James Craig, Ida Lupino
Director: Fritz Lang
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Rhonda Fleming-click here to learn more about Ms. Fleming (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We continue on with our look at the career of Rhonda Fleming with a second noir film for RKO.  By this point in her career, Fleming's fame had largely passed, or at least was nearing its tail-end.  She'd continue to headline films for the rest of the 1950's, and we'll get to one of the final films that she starred in next week, but after several years as the Queen of 3-D, she was no longer at Paramount and RKO wasn't putting her in gigantic epics.  You can see that here when, rather than being the main character (or at least his love interest, as the billing order suggests), she's largely sixth or seventh in terms of actual screen credit, and doesn't even share the screen with the film's proper star, Dana Andrews.  Still, though, While the City Sleeps is an impressive and rather frank look at serial killers in the 1950's, focusing on a fictionalized version of the real "Lipstick Killer" William Heirens.

(Spoilers Ahead) After the death of his father, spoiled media heir Walter Kyne (Price) is pitting three key figures in his dad's news organization (Jon Day Griffith (Mitchell), Mark Loving (Sanders), & Harry Kritzer (Craig)) against each other for essentially the job of "CEO" of the organization while Kyne enjoys all of the wealth and privilege of being the titular head of the conglomerate.  Essentially he's using a recent string of murders of young women perpetrated by an unknown assailant (whom the audience knows from witnessing one of the crimes in the opening scene to be Barrymore's Robert Manners) as a proxy fight to see who is worthy enough of snagging the story and getting Kyne more sales.  Each of these men have a key asset in their fight: Griffith has Edward Mobley (Andrews), a savvy former crime beat journalist who now hosts an Edward R. Murrow-style nightly news program and recently has become engaged to Nancy (Forrest), Loving has Mildred Donner (Lupino) a lascivious and ambitious newspaper columnist, and Kritzer has Kyne's own wife Dorothy (Fleming) with whom he's having an affair.

The film progresses with each of these men and their allies duking it out, all-the-while trying to suss out Barrymore's killer.  The film is very much an ensemble piece (though Andrews is decidedly the lead), and this makes it easy to compare and contrast the different performances.  By far the best one is Lupino, playing up her sexuality to the hilt (she flirts with anyone that moves, particularly Mobley, getting him to kiss her while he's engaged to Nancy), and getting all of the best lines.  Barrymore is, well, not great as a mama's boy killer who seems to have no real reason other than his own adoption to hate the world and the women in it.  But the film keeps humming with us genuinely guessing who might end up on top in the newspaper fight, and watching Thomas Mitchell of all people try (unsuccessfully) to be corrupt when he's really just a good guy (as are all of Mitchell's characters).

Fleming's role is small (she's in more of the back half than the front half, but regardless she's got a relatively small part, especially compared to Forrest or Lupino).  She's good in it though-Fleming got her start as a character actress, and makes the most of the work she does here.  There's that great scene where she instinctively puts on her sunglasses to not give away any tells that she's lying, or the way that she speaks to Lupino's Mildred with the confidence of a woman who knows she'll never really be caught as long as she's beautiful.  It's not really a lead performance at all, but it's solid work, and she does a great job in the ensemble, even if Lupino is the one stealing the film.

Slightly Scarlet (1956)

Film: Slightly Scarlet (1956)
Stars: John Payne, Rhonda Fleming, Arlene Dahl, Kent Taylor, Ted de Corsia
Director: Allan Dwan
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Rhonda Fleming-click here to learn more about Ms. Fleming (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

In the 1950's, there were essentially three women who could claim the title of "Queen of Technicolor" as the brief romance with that particular color motion process hit its heyday during that decade (despite being a part of cinema for some twenty years prior).  These three women claimed that by virtue of their red hair, and despite being major stars, none of them were nominated for Academy Awards.  Maureen O'Hara was one, but as I've seen most of O'Hara's chief work (thanks to having a mother and grandfather who were both fans of hers), so she wasn't part of this series.  Rhonda Fleming, one of the holders of this title, was another, but there was a third I toyed with adding to this series, potentially as a replacement for Fleming: Arlene Dahl.  Like Fleming, Dahl was a spellbinding redhead who was briefly a leading woman in the 1950's, noted more for her beauty and dazzling hair color than for her acting ability.  Both women were tabloid fixtures, going through husbands at a speed that Zsa Zsa Gabor would envy (Dahl is also from my home state of Minnesota), and both are still alive as of this publication.  This film, where the two sometime rivals teamed up, felt like a way to acknowledge Dahl in this series, while also of course continuing our look at the woman I chose to be our star of the month, Rhonda Fleming.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on two sisters June (Fleming) and Dorothy (Dahl), the former a good girl who works as a secretary for a mayoral candidate (Taylor) who is hopelessly in love with her (though the movie makes a concerted point to show that they haven't had sex yet) while the latter is a horny kleptomaniac.  The two both become involved with Ben Grace (Payne) a seemingly honorable man who makes his money on the wrong side of the law, working for a crime boss named Caspar (de Corsia) whom he runs out of town after the reforming candidate gets elected.  The problem is both that he continues to profit from Caspar's syndicate, and that both June & Dorothy are falling for him.  Dorothy gets herself into trouble with the law again, stealing a pearl necklace, but June uses the new mayor's connections to get her out, causing a friction in their relationship.  The movie ends with a shootout, as Dorothy has sex with Caspar, who then threatens to kill her sister (they've had a fight where they admitted their jealousies and frustrations with each other), and weirdly it's Ben, not Dorothy, who tries to save June, and in the process he's shot.  The film ends with us not knowing Ben's fate, and with June abandoning the mayor and her sister to be with him.

Slightly Scarlet is an unusual film right out the gate because it is clearly intended to be a film noir, but it's the rare one that's shot not just in color, but a really sophisticated Technicolor.  Legendary cinematographer John Alton (who won an Oscar for An American in Paris) plays with not only the beauty of his two leading ladies, but also with shadow, costume, and the elaborate set designs to create a really remarkable picture.  The oranges and pinks pop in your face, and I don't know that I've seen Fleming ever look so ravishing, with the shadow work highlighting her expressive face.  This is almost entirely the reason that this movie is remembered today, as otherwise it's a bit of a silly affair.  Jean-Luc Godard was a fan of the picture, proclaiming it one of the best films of 1956, but I feel like this is him indulging more in Alton's cinematography than trying to rescue a genre picture.  John Payne is a bit underwhelming in the lead, and the script is disjointed & usually more fun if you take the film as camp rather than a more grounded melodrama.

The two leading ladies achieve differing results.  The main reason that I picked Fleming as one of the 12 Stars of the Month this year (rather than someone like Dahl), was that she showed such promise in supporting parts, but largely dismissed her work as a leading woman, and critics did too.  There are no major scholarly articles about either of these women, but Fleming was more famous and worked with better directors so I figured she'd be the more interesting of the two to investigate.  I was right.  While she doesn't get as juicy of a part, she finds things to say about June that the script doesn't.  There's a pain in her eyes when she looks at the sister she has versus the one she knows she deserves, and you understand the betrayal of her sister better as the movie wears on.  Fleming was so good in short performances like Spellbound and Out of the Past, but she's also the best part of Slightly Scarlet, bringing a restrained glamour to June, someone who clearly never had to work for much in her life (men are going to hand it to her), but also grounded her decisions in a morality that feels innate, and not just a plot device.

Dahl, on the other hand, is kind of terrible, and only frequently in a fun way.  She plays Dorothy as an over-the-top vixen, unable to really contain herself, and her only really good acting opposite of Fleming in their big fight scene.  Dahl's career petered out almost completely after this, as she'd soon be suing Columbia for how she was depicted in 1956's Wicked as They Come (she'd have a second career act as a beauty guru years later), and I realized I'd only seen her in one other movie, 1964's Kisses for My President, where she was also laughably awful.  Dahl later bemoaned her career, but it's hard to blame Slightly Scarlet on a bad script alone-she's not adding anything of value to this movie other than glamour, and since she gets the most interesting character, it's hard to not fault her a bit for where the movie fails.  We'll continue on with Fleming next week, but I do want to acknowledge in the comments-if you have a favorite performance of Arlene Dahl's that could save my opinion of her, I'm all ears.

The Redhead and the Cowboy (1951)

Film: The Redhead and the Cowboy (1951)
Stars: Glenn Ford, Edmond O'Brien, Rhonda Fleming, Alan Reed
Director: Leslie Fenton
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Rhonda Fleming-click here to learn more about Ms. Fleming (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.


As I mentioned in our kickoff discussion of Rhonda Fleming, this is really the first time we've had a star of the month who had a significant, interesting film career prior to becoming a leading woman.  While other actresses we've profiled (save for Lizabeth Scott who just started at the top) worked their way up in the film industry, Fleming had significant supporting parts in films that are still widely seen today like Spellbound and Out of the Past.  As a result, though we're starting with The Redhead and the Cowboy, our first real look at her career as a leading woman, I want to make sure to plug that we're kind of already three chapters in with Fleming as a star.  The early parts of her career were tied to David O. Selznick, when she was a supporting player, but while she technically became a leading lady under Selznick, she became a star when she left him, heading over to the studio that would be her home for her biggest years in Hollywood, Paramount.


(Spoilers Ahead) The movie starts with Glenn Ford playing Gil Kyle, but really playing Glenn Ford because that's who Glenn Ford always played.  By that I mean he plays a stoic, honorable, but gruff (and handsome-can't forget handsome) cowboy who doesn't have time for politics, even though we're in the middle of the Civil War and everyone is taking sides.  He is joined by Edmund O'Brien's Maj. Dunn Jeffers, who is either a Union officer or a confederate spy (the last twenty minutes are so convoluted you'll be forgiven for never following which he ends up being).  Kyle is drawn to Candace Bronson (Fleming) who is a confirmed Confederate spy, trying to get to the Confederates information about a caravan filled with gold, which will be used to further the Civil War as it's 1865 and it's clear the South have the losing hand.  The movie follows them on their (brief-it's only 82 minutes journey), eventually coming across Fred Flintstone himself, Alan Reed, playing a bombastic Confederate colonel.

Reed's work here is arguably the most noted if anyone remembers this film at all today, as he's scenery-chewing fun as the colonel, clearly a double-crosser in a movie that needs him to liven up the picture.  The movie actually has a lot of promise as a historical curiosity even if it's not that good.  Taking place in 1951, the movie is not exactly friendly to the Confederate cause, but it doesn't really play every Confederate as morally bankrupt either.  Fleming's Candace, for example, is a double-crosser but she's also clearly destined to end up with our hero, so she can't be all bad.  It's interesting to see Reed come in as someone it's easy to see the audience rooting against to stop the grey areas we're getting with these characters-Candace isn't necessarily a good person, and we don't actually find out why she supports the southern cause, just that she does, but she's someone that we are expected to forgive because Gil does.

Fleming, unfortunately, doesn't do a lot with this plump material, unusual for a female role in a western circa 1951 (or, let's be honest, circa any era).  She plays Candace as a gorgeous object-of-desire, delivering her death stares with great gusto but not necessarily embracing the weird material for all its worth like she did in Out of the Past.  This might be because this is a standard western at Paramount rather than an auteur-esque film noir, but it's striking to see her not finding the same level of intrigue that she did with Meta Carson before her because Candace Bronson is a ripe opportunity for an actress as written.  Her work here is standard, trading on her beauty rather than her actorly abilities, and as she has the only properly interesting character in the film, the movie never rises above okay.

Saturdays with the Stars: Rhonda Fleming

Each month of 2019 we will be looking at the careers of leading ladies of Classical Hollywood who were never nominated for an Academy Award as part of our "Saturdays with the Stars" series.  Last month, our focus was on Lizabeth Scott, one of the forgotten leading ladies of the film noir era who had a remarkably vibrant off-screen life while crafting the femme fatale trope.  This month we will hit an historic moment in the series by profiling our first living actress, Ms. Rhonda Fleming.

Rhonda Fleming, known as the "Queen of Technicolor" in her day due to her vibrant red hair and unparalleled beauty, was discovered by noted Hollywood agent Henry Willson (who would become infamous years later for his representation of actors like Tab Hunter, Rock Hudson, and Guy Madison, as well as accusations that he would enforce "casting couch" requirements with these handsome young men).  Fleming was signed without a screen test to David O. Selznick, appearing in classic films throughout the 1940's in supporting roles, including Since You Went Away, The Spiral Staircase, Out of the Past, and Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, making her one of the last remaining actors to have had a significant part in one of Hitch's films.  In the late 1940's, Fleming got the one-two punch of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (her first Technicolor picture) and The Great Lover with Bob Hope, which cemented her as a star & leading woman.

In the 1950's she left Selznick to sign with Paramount, appearing opposite actors like Ronald Reagan, Dick Powell, Errol Flynn, Charlton Heston, and Fernando Lamas in a series of pictures.  3-D was a trend at the time, and Fleming made several pictures in the new format, perhaps pervertedly chosen for such movies considering her, ahem, "statuesque" physique.  Throughout the decade she appeared in a series of B-pictures, frequently thrillers like Slightly Scarlet (with one of her "redhead rivals" Arlene Dahl) and the noted Fritz Lang film While the City Sleeps.  As the decade continued, though, she was nearing forty and was largely a leading woman who had never really broken out in a major way with audiences, and eventually resorted to television and nightclub acts.  In her personal life, she managed to work her way through six husbands, including Oscar-nominated producer Hal Bartlett, and became an outspoken supporter of bringing prayer back into schools (dirty secret-most of your favorite classic Hollywood stars were far more conservative than the ones that populate Tinseltown today).

I've seen her in Spellbound and Out of the Past (I believe the only two of her films I've seen) and loved her in both, so I'm excited to give Fleming a chance.  Fleming's career is odd in that she worked with her best directors (people like Hitchcock, Robert Siodmak, and Jacques Tourneur) during her pre-stardom years, and years later opined that she went more for the money than in trying to create great films.  This month we'll see if Fleming was being too hard on herself, or if her best work was truly before she became a headliner.

Tab Hunter, and 18 Remaining Stars of Hollywood's Golden Age

Tab Hunter

A few years ago, I did a series of articles where I (for some reason that was likely related to a TCM screening or perhaps just my love of classic cinema nostalgia), I went through the American Film Institute's "100 Years...100 Stars" list comprehensively taking a look at my interactions with the stars, and which stars I was surprised to see on the lists, which stars I was happy were on the list, and which stars were still living from the list.

I was reminded of that this week when Tab Hunter, at the age of 86, passed away.  Hunter was hardly what one could consider a "master thespian," but was certainly a proper movie star, and one of the few Golden Age headliners of his era.  The blond Adonis, who would later lean into his camp factor with pictures like Polyester and Grease 2, gained a second act in his career when he wrote a bestselling memoir called Tab Hunter Confidential, and became one of the few men of his era to actually come out of the public during his lifetime.  In honor of Hunter, I thought it would be fun to revisit the articles I wrote a few years back with a look at specifically the actors and actresses who are still alive who were nominated for the list, including the three stars who actually made the Top 25: Sidney Poitier (#22), Kirk Douglas (#17), and Sophia Loren (#21).  Without further adieu.

The Living Actors...

Kirk Douglas (1916-Present)

Oscar Nominations: Douglas would receive a trio of Oscar nominations in his career, all for Best Actor, but would lose every time (he probably came the closest to winning for 1956's Lust for Life).  Douglas would deservedly win an Honorary Award in 1996 from the Academy.
Most Known For: Living forever?  Hopefully that's the case-it clearly helps your star exponentially to have some longevity around it.  Douglas has been one of those great, enduring links to Hollywood's classical age, and still frequently does interviews & appearances, oftentimes with his famous son Michael or his daughter-in-law Catherine Zeta-Jones.  During his career, of course, he was perhaps best known as Spartacus.
Is He Still Working?: He is not-Douglas retired in 2004, with his last film being an independent film called Illusion, though I always think of his last film being Diamonds, where he reunited with his Young Man with a Horn costar (and lifelong pal) Lauren Bacall.
My Favorite Performance: I'd pick either his iconic work in Spartacus, a truly spectacular feat of movie star-quality, or his sleazy performance as Whit Sterling in Out of the Past.
Glaring Miss in His Filmography: Though I'm slowly working my way through Douglas' filmography, as he was a star for so many years, I'd say Lust for Life would be toward the top of the list, as would Paths of Glory, both pictures I'll get to hopefully soon.

Sidney Poitier (1927-Present)

Oscar Nominations: Poitier received two Oscar nominations in his career, winning Best Actor for Lilies of the Field (becoming the first black man to win Best Actor).  Poitier also won an Honorary Award in 2002.
Probably Best Known Today For: Being an iconic and celebrated figure in the Civil Rights movement in the United States, and along with Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, and Harry Belafonte, being one of the very first black movie stars (he's also Ambassador from the Bahamas to Japan, as he actually has dual citizenship with both the Bahamas and the United States-random fact!).  Poitier is one of the most widely-respected actors in the industry, and one of its most enduring stars.
Is He Still Working?: Poitier quit acting in 2001, with the television movie The Last Brickmaker in America-his final theatrically-released film was 1997's The Jackal with Richard Gere & Bruce Willis.
My Favorite Performance: I know that some like to quibble about how Poitier never received an Oscar nomination for In the Heat of the Night, but part of me thinks it was more to do with vote-splitting (he also had Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and To Sir, with Love out that year) than racism.  Still, he certainly deserved an Oscar nomination for his iconic Virgil Tibbs.
Glaring Miss in His Filmography: I've never actually seen the movie that landed Poitier his Academy Award.  For whatever reason Lilies of the Field has never made it to the top of my queue, though I've seen a lot of Poitier films through the years.

Dean Stockwell (1936-Present)

Oscar Nominations: Stockwell has received one Oscar nomination, for 1988's Married to the Mob (he lost to Kevin Kline).
Most Famous For: The career of Dean Stockwell is a fascinating one, as he is one of those rare child actors who went on to have a very strong career as an adult, though in this case in character actor parts. Starting acting as a cherubic-faced youth in movies like Gentleman's Agreement and Anchors Aweigh, he eventually became a hit actor as an adult, dropped out of acting to get involved in the hippie subculture, reappeared in the 1980's in the art house cinema of David Lynch and Wim Wenders, and is most well-known today for playing Al Calavicci in Quantum Leap and Brother Cavil in the revival of Battlestar Galactica.
Is He Still Working?: Absolutely, and in a variety of different pictures (including Max Rose with Claire Bloom and Jerry Lewis, the late actor's final picture).
Glaring Miss in His Filmography: I've actually seen a few Stockwell pictures, and thought he was terrific if terrifying singing Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" in the exceptional Blue Velvet.  I'll go with his Oscar-nominated work as my missing piece, though I have always meant to watch the revived Battlestar Galactica.

Max von Sydow (1929-Present)

Oscar Nominations: Two nominations, one for Pelle the Conquerer, and another one for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (he lost both).
Most Famous For: Being a titan of acting.  He is frequently referenced by people who want to name check someone of great acting gravitas.  He is particularly well-known for his work in the films of Ingmar Bergman, but also has appeared opposite Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Susan Sarandon in recent years.
Is He Still Working?: Absolutely.  He's been in a bit of a blockbuster mode lately, with appearances in the Star Wars and Game of Thrones franchises (the latter winning him his second Emmy nomination).  He'll next be seen in Kursk with Colin Firth and Lea Seydoux.
Glaring Miss in His Filmography: I would do myself a disservice here if I didn't mention that I love von Sydow's work and he is one of my most beloved performers, particularly his films The Seventh Seal and Winter Light (Bergman being one of my all-time favorite directors).  Of the films I'm missing from von Sydow's filmography, I'd probably say The Emigrants would be the most egregious.

The Living Actresses...

Claire Bloom (1931-Present)

Oscar Nominations: Never nominated
Most Famous For: For her long and illustrious career on the British stage, as well as her many tabloid romances.  Ms. Bloom made her stage debut at sixteen opposite John Gielgud and a young Richard Burton, whom she had a passionate love affair with (Burton claimed he loved two women before Liz Taylor-his wife Sybil and Claire Bloom).  She would perform on in the West End for decades, and continue having tabloid-worthy relationships, including marriages to Rod Steiger and Philip Roth, as well as affairs with Laurence Olivier and Yul Brynner.
Is She Still Working?: Yes!  She actually appeared recently in the Best Picture winner The King's Speech, playing Queen Mary in the film, and will be playing Salvador Dali's sister in Spain's Miss Dali.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: With Bloom it's hard not to pick her first international starring role in Limelight, where she plays a suicidal ballerina in the only film that features both Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

Ann Blyth (1928-Present)

Oscar Nominations: 1 nomination (for Mildred Pierce)
Most Famous For: Portraying the selfish daughter from hell in Mildred Pierce.  Her work opposite Joan Crawford won her an Oscar nomination early in her career, and she eventually went on to become a major star of musicals, at one point being a rival for Kathryn Grayson at MGM.  She eventually moved completely away from the cinema, instead starring in a series of television guest spots, including a memorable turn as a potential murderer opposite longtime friend Angela Lansbury in Murder, She Wrote and as an actress with a secret on The Twilight Zone in "Queen of the Nile."
Is She Still Working?: Blyth quit working in film after her role in The Helen Morgan Story with Paul Newman.  She quit television in the 1980's, though she does occasional do interviews still.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I've actually seen Mildred Pierce and The Great Caruso, the two most important pictures in her filmography, so maybe Brute Force with Burt Lancaster, where she plays a woman dying of cancer whose husband is in prison.

Doris Day (1922-Present)

Oscar Nominations: Despite a dazzling career and being a major public draw for fifteen years, she only received one nomination in 1959 for Pillow Talk (she would lose to Simone Signoret).  Every year, though, like clockwork, the rumors spread that she'll win an Honorary Award.

Most Famous For: A Box Office superstar, she was all the public could demand from the mid-1950's to the mid-1960's and starred in a string of romantic comedy hits.  Even today her name is extremely well-known with audiences (even if her movies aren't necessarily) and everyone knows her as one of America's Sweethearts.

Is She Still Working?: No-while she did some TV appearances in the 1970's on her eponymous show, Day retired from movies in 1968 in With Six You Get Eggroll costarring alongside Brian Keith and a young Barbara Hershey.
My Favorite Performance: I've seen many Doris Day films through the years (my mom was a big fan of hers), so I'm going to go with a childhood favorite right now in Calamity Jane.  It doesn't age particularly well (some of the songs are pretty sexist), but the music and sets and in particular Day are incredibly game and "Secret Love" is heavenly (and an oddly resonant coming out song for anyone who reads between the lines).

Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: There's a few options here, but since I've seen some of the biggest pictures of her career, I'm going to go with one that intrigues me most: Move Over, Darling, where Day is united with James Garner and Polly Bergen.  The film was a huge hit and kept the lights on at 20th Century FOX after Cleopatra (not to mention I want to see how Day does in a role that was originally intended for Marilyn Monroe).

Olivia de Havilland (1916-Present)

Oscar Nominations: De Havilland would receive five Oscar nominations during her career, winning twice in 1946 and 1949 for To Each His Own and The Heiress, respectively.

Most Famous For: Certainly her best-known film is Gone with the Wind, and her work as Melanie Wilkes continues to be a career high-point.  Perhaps she's best known today as a last link to the classic age of Hollywood, which was highlighted once again when she sued Ryan Murphy regarding Feud where she was upset about her life being dramatized, though really she should have been angry at how awful Catherine Zeta-Jones was in portraying her.

Is She Still Working?: De Havilland still makes public appearances and does interviews (she became the oldest person ever to be named a Dame Commander by the Queen last year), but she has been away from cinemas for decades.  She did a spattering of TV work in the 1980's, including winning a Golden Globe for playing Dowager Empress Maria in a TV movie about Rex Harrison, but her final film performance was opposite Beau Bridges & Ursula Andress in The Fifth Musketeer

My Favorite Performance: I'm going to go cliche with her bravura work as Melanie Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, though I've always had a soft spot for her work as Catherine Sloper in The Heiress.

Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I have never seen The Adventures of Robin Hood, which is one of the few classic films of that era that I haven't caught yet that I'm genuinely looking forward to seeing, and I believe that it's actually toward the top of my Netflix queue, so we'll be getting there pretty quickly.

Rhonda Fleming (1923-Present)

Oscar Nominations: Never nominated
Most Famous For: Being the "Queen of Technicolor."  Along with Maureen O'Hara and Arlene Dahl (the latter of which oddly wasn't on the AFI ballot list, though she would have been eligible and is still alive, so clearly being a red-headed movie star is good for your longevity-hooray for Julianne Moore!), Fleming's red hair made her a major motion picture star, and one that photographed particularly well in Technicolor, which was very in fashion during the height of her fame.  Her best known films are probably from the 1940's, when she had supporting roles in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound and the brilliant Out of the Past, but she was a bigger headliner in the 1950's when she appeared opposite Dana Andrews, Ronald Reagan, Burt Lancaster, and Kirk Douglas.  Like a number of women on this list, she was an ardent Republican in her personal life, particularly as an advocate for school prayer.
Is She Still Working?: No-her most recent film would be 1990's Waiting for the Wind with Robert Mitchum, her Out of the Past costar.  She still frequently makes appearances, though, and has participated in the Turner Classic Film Festival.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I've seen Spellbound and Out of the Past, so I would probably go with the classic Western Gunfight at the O.K. Corral with Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday.

Mitzi Gaynor (1931-Present)

Oscar Nominations: Never nominated
Most Famous For: Being Krusty the Clown's go-to name drop?  Just kidding (Simpsons reference!).  Gaynor was in fact one of 20th Century FOX's biggest stars in the 1940's and 1950's, starring in a number of hit musicals.  While she could boast costarring roles with Bing Crosby and Gene Kelly, it was with Rossano Brazzi, a little-known Italian actor, that she enjoyed her biggest and most enduring cinematic success.  The movie?  Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific, with Gaynor as the main character of Nellie Forbush, forever washing that man right out of her hair before a very enchanted evening.  She also had one of the most famous numbers in Oscar history (though she wasn't nominated for or even in the film) when she got one of the longest-standing ovations in the history of the ceremony for her performance of "Georgy Girl" in 1967.
Is She Still Working?: While she no longer acts, she frequently is featured in documentaries chronicling the Golden Age of the musical, and actually won an Emmy for her 2010 documentary "Mitzi Gaynor: Razzle Dazzle!"
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I've come to really admire Gaynor's work over the past couple of years, but somehow am still missing her most famous performance, as Nellie Forbush in South Pacific.

Marsha Hunt (1917-Present)

Oscar Nominations: Never nominated
Most Famous For: Her politics.  You may be wondering where all of the Hollywood liberals are after so many conservatives highlighted on this list, but you're about to get one in Ms. Hunt, a star for both Paramount and MGM in the 1930's and 1940's who watched her career unravel during the 1950's as part of the blacklist.  Hunt was a vocal advocate for free speech and freedom to petition, and refused to denounce her activities protesting Congress on behalf of the blacklist...and therefore didn't work for most of the 1950's, extinguishing her career.
Is She Still Working?: Not really.  She made two random appearances in those films that only seem to exist on IMDB recently, but hasn't regularly worked in film since 1971's Johnny Got His Gun with Timothy Bottoms and Donald Sutherland.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I'm going to go with Born to the West, starring an extremely handsome John Wayne in his twenties, which gives Hunt an unusually robust screenplay to work with for a love interest role in the 1930's.

Angela Lansbury (1925-Present)

Oscar Nominations: 3 (for Gaslight, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Manchurian Candidate, as well as an Honorary Oscar she won earlier this year).
Most Famous For: Lansbury has enjoyed an incredible amount of succcess throughout her career, principally on Broadway (she has won five Tony Awards) and on television (as J.B. Fletcher on the long-running CBS show Murder, She Wrote).  Of course, Lansbury has had a plethora of film roles as well that have become part of her own personal lore.  Her work in John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate and Disney's Beauty and the Beast would be toward the top of the public consciousness.
Is She Still Working?: Yep!  She's in the hunt for her 19th Emmy nomination for the BBC's Little Women and will be seen later this year in Mary Poppins Returns.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: Here I've seen enough of her work (I've even seen her on-stage) to have a favorite performance (The Manchurian Candidate, though honestly I've loved almost everything-she's a personal favorite) and have all three of those Oscar-nominated roles done, so I'll go with the comic classic The Court Jester, which I have for some reason never gotten around to and in which she plays Princess Gwendolyn opposite Glynis Johns (who like Arlene Dahl didn't quite make the cut of the 250 finalists for the AFI Award, but is also still alive at age 94 and would have been eligible).

Piper Laurie (1932-Present)

Oscar Nominations: 3 (for The Hustler, Carrie, and Children of a Lesser God)
Most Famous For: We'll continue the list of actresses that you've actually heard of with Piper Laurie, who did make her first screen appearance in 1950 (just making the AFI eligibility cutoff), and who is most known to film audiences as the mother from hell in Carrie (oddly enough, Angela Lansbury arguably plays the cinema's other most famous mother from hell on-screen).  Laurie also was Paul Newman's love interest in The Hustler, and got a Best Actress nomination for it and was Catherine Martell on Twin Peaks.
Is She Still Working?: After an eight year absence, Laurie will be on movie screens once again later this year opposite Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Jason Leigh in White Boy Rick.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I cannot believe I am admitting this, but I have somehow never seen The Hustler, one of those great films from the 1960's and one of the most important roles of Paul Newman's (and of course Piper Laurie's) careers.  I should get on this quickly.

Gina Lollobrigida (1927-Present)

Oscar Nominations: Never nominated
Most Famous For: Look at the picture to the left and I'll give you one (err...two) guesses.  Lollobrigida was the Italian sex symbol, a counterweight to the American Marilyn and the French Bardot.  She did make a handful of films with the leading men of the era (Burt Lancaster, Anthony Quinn, Frank Sinatra), but quite frankly it was her incredible beauty and her bizarre change in careers late in life (she became a journalist, and eventually managed to land an interview with Fidel Castro of all people in the 1970's) that made her a household name.
Is She Still Working?: She is not acting, but she does still stay in the papers, recently auctioning off $5 million worth of jewelry to benefit stem cell therapy.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I don't know if I've ever actually seen a Lollobrigida film, so I would probably make it a bit of a marathon to catch up.  I'd start with her Golden Globe-winning work in Come September with Rock Hudson, follow it with her Esmerelda opposite Anthony Quinn in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and finish things with her Solomon and Sheba with Yul Brynner, which has the distinction of being King Vidor's final film.

Sophia Loren (1934-Present)

Oscar Nominations: Loren received two Oscar nominations in her career, winning for Two Women in 1961 (the first person to win for a foreign-language film).  She would go on to win an Honorary Oscar in 1991 for her body of work.
Probably Best Known Today For: For starters, thankfully being alive and still working (the only woman on the Top 25 still with us).  Loren's most recent film is Rob Marshall's Nine, but is probably best known for her enduring beauty.  Consistently considered one of the most striking and attractive women in the history of cinema, she was a major star at the height of America's fascination with foreign language cinema. (Completely Random Aside-I once had a car that I named after Loren because the car was so pretty...my brother still drives it).
Is She Still Working?: Other than a random voice spot in Cars 2, Loren seems to have ended her career with Nine.
My Favorite Performance: Is it terrible to say Houseboat?  I genuinely loved this movie as a kid, and it's the sort of film I suspect I'd still adore as an adult.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I am going to go with Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, which unites Loren with one of her favorite directors (Vittorio de Sica) and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Rita Moreno (1931-Present)

Oscar Nominations: One nomination (which she won for-Best Supporting Actress for 1961's West Side Story)
Most Famous For: For thoroughly enjoying life in Ame-RIC-a.  Moreno starred in one of the great American musicals in 1961, taking over the role made famous by Chita Rivera on Broadway and becoming a household name as a result (as well as an Oscar-winner).  Though at that time she had been featured in three of the best-loved musicals of all-time (she was also in Singin in the Rain and The King and I), she didn't star in a lot of high-profile films again (a Latina actress in the 1960's frequently had to rely on stereotypical roles, which Moreno refused to partake of).  Instead she forged a bold multi-platform career, winning an Emmy, Grammy, and Tony in the 1970's to complete her EGOT.  She is best known from this period for her work on The Muppets and The Electric Company (with Morgan Freeman).  Moreno also had a pretty spectacular personal life, being romantically involved with both Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley during her career.
Is She Still Working?: Absolutely-she can be seen on Netflix's critically-acclaimed One Day at a Time as Lydia.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I've seen her three iconic musicals, so I'm going to go with The Ritz, which earned Moreno a Tony Award on Broadway and a Golden Globe nomination on film.

Margaret O'Brien (1937-Present)

Oscar Nominations: None, though she won the Juvenile Academy Award in 1944.
Most Famous For: Being one of the biggest child stars on the planet.  Margaret O'Brien was to the 1940's what Shirley Temple and Judy Garland were to the 1930's.  She even appeared opposite Garland in the most famous of O'Brien's movies: Meet Me in St. Louis, where she played Tootie.  O'Brien was a major star, but couldn't jump to adult roles like Garland, whom she is oftentimes compared to, and instead only made the occasional television or film appearance.  If you ever want a fun story, read about O'Brien's Oscar and how she lost it for some fifty years before it finally returned to her.
Is She Still Working?: I think so-it looks like she has a relatively long recent IMDB cast page but it's not entirely clear if these are just clips of her in her youth or her actually playing a role.  If the 2017 movie where she stars opposite Mickey Rooney in a retelling of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde actually exists, I need to see it immediately.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I'd probably go with the film that made her a star, Journey for Margaret with Robert Young and Fay Bainter, as I've seen (and loved) Meet Me in St. Louis before.

Jane Withers (1926-Present)

Oscar Nominations: Never nominated
Most Famous For: Being insufferable.  Or rather, playing insufferable, in the Shirley Temple classic Bright Eyes, where Withers plays her bratty nemesis.  Withers became one of the biggest stars of the late 1930's, joining Shirley Temple as a major box office draw despite being a child star, and then eventually going into supporting roles, like her work in Giant (she and James Dean were good friends) and eventually commercials, taking on what would become her most famous role for the Baby Boomer generation: Josephine the Plumber in the Comet commercials (for comparison's sake, think of Flo from the Progressive commercials and her ubiquity).  And continuing our streak, she was in several episodes of Murder, She Wrote and appears to be politically conservative.
Is She Still Working?: From what I can tell her most recent work would be voiceover contributions to The Hunchback of Notre Dame and its direct-to-video sequel, so I'm going to go with no since that was 16 years ago, though who knows-she may still be willing to give it a go.
Glaring Miss in Her Filmography: I think Bright Eyes, Withers' most noted work, would probably have to be at the top of the list.