My top 20 favorite actresses

It seems like some of my readers wanted more after my Top 20 Favorite Actors post - and what can I do but obey? As usual I had to leave out some favorites after all (why can't they all fit in??), like Grace Kelly and Mae West. Well well. Here they are: My top 20 favorite actresses (in alphabetical order, of course):

1. Lauren Bacall

Favorite role: Slim Browning in To Have and Have Not (1944)

2. Ingrid Bergman

Favorite role: Alicia Huberman in Notorious (1946)

3. Joan Blondell

Favorite role: B. Maloney in Night Nurse (1931)

4. Clara Bow

Favorite role: Betty Lou Spence in It (1927)

5. Louise Brooks

Favorite role: Lulu in Pandora's Box (1929)

6. Olivia de Havilland

Favorite role: Catherine Sloper in The Heiress (1949)

7. Marlene Dietrich

Favorite role: Shanghai Lily in Shanghai Express (1932)

8. Greta Garbo

Favorite role: Anna Christie in Anna Christie (1930)

9. Lillian Gish

Favorite role: Rachel Cooper in The Night of the Hunter (1955)

10. Audrey Hepburn

Favorite role: Nicole in How to Steal a Million (1966)

11. Katharine Hepburn

Favorite role: Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story (1940)

12. Vivien Leigh

Favorite role: Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Names Desire (1951)

13. Carole Lombard

Favorite role: Maria Tura in To Be or Not to Be (1942)

14. Myrna Loy

Favorite role: Milly Stephenson in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

15. Marilyn Monroe

Favorite role: Sugar Kane Kowalczyk in Some Like It Hot (1959)

16. Jeanne Moreau

Favorite role: Catherine in Jules and Jim (1962)

17. Mary Pickford

Favorite role: Mary Carlton / Mary Marlow in Secrets (1933)

18. Barbara Stanwyck

Favorite role: Lily Powers in Baby Face (1933)

19. Gloria Swanson

Favorite role: Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. (1950)

20. Natalie Wood

Favorite role: Angie Rossini in Love with the Proper Stranger (1963)

Smoking women - part 5

Now with a header!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

I'm sorry, guys - I didn't realize that I hadn't supplied you with any gorgeous, smoking women since June. That's just unforgivable.

Part five of my Smoking Women series is completed with a smashing new wallpaper of my own creation, depicting the German femme fatale Marlene Dietrich (smoking, of course).

Fetch necessary tools and enjoy the ride! (Now, was I just too disgusting there, or what..? Please say a prayer for me, because I don't.)

And you know the drill - click on the photos to enlarge them. Duh.

Ann Dvorak (1917-1979)
(Natural causes)

[It is usually pictures like these that make my bofriend unusually interested in my passion for classic cinema. He would lean over my shoulder and yell "side boob!".]

For some reason this magnificent actress gave up her Hollywood career, making her last film in 1951. I will mention her role as the sister with an incestuous relationship to Paul Muni in Scarface (1932) and her role as the drug addict mother in Three On a Match (1932), and if you haven't seen her in them - be very ashamed. "Oh-oh..."

Also, this picture says everything about why I smoke.

Funny quote about how to pronounce her name:

"My name is properly pronounced "vor'shack." The D remains silent. I have had quite a time with the name, having been called practically everything from Balzac to Bickelsrock."

Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993)
(Appendicular cancer)

The greatest fashion icon of the 1960's. Why can't I be tall, slim and rich?

Danielle Darrieux (1917-)

Born in Bordeaux, I guess Mademoiselle Darrieux has fine wines mixed in her DNA, resulting in her astonishing beauty. She played opposite Charles Boyer in Max Ophüls' Madame de... (1953), a film I still find myself waiting impatiently to see.

Natalie Wood (1938-1981)
(Drowning)

Together in this picture with (no shit) Frank Sinatra, whom she made the war drama Kings Go Forth (1958) with. She died in late November 1981, at the age of 43, while sailing with her husband Robert Wagner and their friend Christopher Walken. She fell over board and drowned - according to some conspiracies she was murdered.

Harriet Hagman (1906-)

Heard of her? No? According to IMDb she only made two films in her career, including Thirteen Women (1932) [post], falling to her death in a trapeze act. Good looking woman, though. Can't find any date of death, so maybe she is 103 years old now?

Jeanne Moreau (1928-)

Like Ingrid Bergman, Moreau is that kind of beauty who looks best with almost no make up at all. Cool gal.

Joan Bennett (1910-1990)
(Heart attack)

The younger sister of Constance Bennett made no less than five films for German director Fritz Lang, more than any other American actor or actress.

Lauren Bacall (1924-)

One of the coolest on-screen personas in motion picture history, I believe. (I have her autograph!)

Norma Talmadge (1893-1957)
(Stroke)

[Side boob!]

The first one to put her footprints on the cement outside Grauman's Chinese Theater in 1927. By accident.

Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992)
(Kidney failure)

Click on your screen resolution below, and get a form fitting wallpaper from ImageShack.

16:10 - 1680x1050

5:4 - 1280x1024

4:3 - 1600x1200

Penelope (1966)

Penelope

Director: Arthur Hiller

USA 1966

97 min

Starring: Natalie Wood, Ian Bannen, Dick Shawn and Peter Falk, among others.

See it on YouTube here.

Penelope might not be a milestone in motion picture history, but it sure is a great example of the charming mainstream movies that were made in the 1960's, and one of the better ones in that category too. Think How to Steal a Million with Audrey Hepburn and Peter O'Toole from the same year.

This Natalie Wood vehicle beghins with the opening of James B. Elcott's (Bannen) bank, who proudly claims that money is more safe within the walls of his bank than if the Loch Ness monster itself had guarded it. Within a few minutes, the bank is being robbed by an old woman, who is soon revealed to us being Elcott's wife Penelope (Wood) in disguise.

Why did she rob the bank? Being the bank managers wife she certainly don't have any financial troubles. Penelope seems awefully pleased and relaxed about the robbery, changing outfits and wigs during taxi rides as if it was a childhood game of hers. During psychology sessions, with the eccentric and rather nutty Dr. Gregory Mannix (Shawn), Penelope's past is revealed through flashbacks, and an explaination to why she likes to steal begins to reach the surface.

Funny how hard it is to find anything but
black and white photos from a color film...

There isn't much to say about this film when it comes to analysis. This is pure entertainment, and it succeeds in its purpose. If you want to see Natalie Wood in different gorgeous 1960's outfits (what man or woman wouldn't?), watch it. Want an hour and a half light, but not stupid, entertainment? Watch it. But if you want Citizen Kane, look somewhere else.

As a little sidenote, I just realized something I actually like better in newer films than in older ones (!) - the development of entertaining introductions to films. Penelope is a lovely example of that. Even before the film has started, you have the film's theme stuck in your head.

"This... is... Penelope..."

See them for yourself, and tell me you don't feel like making a cup of tea, wrap yourself up in a cosy blankett and depart from this world for a little while!

And since I want to use some of the pictures filling my computer, here's Miss Wood!