A Little R-E-S-P-E-C-T
We asked 50 Tinseltown women to tell us what female characters they've admired in the movies--and why.
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When I set out to ask women who work in the movie business to name a female film character they have personally looked up to or admired I deliberately avoided using the word "heroine,' because it might only call to mind a limited type of film, i.e. one in which good triumphs over evil. Instead, I suggested they think back on "strong" women characters, ones they'd liked and remembered fondly, who had inspired some spark within them. Predictably, the answers include gals played by Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Meryl Streep and Jane Fonda. But also mentioned are Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, Ann-Margret's teen vamp in Bye Bye Birdie and...read on.
1. CARRIE FISHER (actress, When Harry Met Sally ..., novelist-screenwriter, Postcards From the Edge). "There are so many good heroines--and heroin is also so very good--that it's really hard to settle on one answer without a needle, but I guess my favorite is Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story. After all, once she got over being a cold-ass, critical, goddess brat, she got to make out with Jimmy Stewart and remarry Cary Grant."
2. LELA ROCHON (actress, Waiting to Exhale, Mr. and Mrs. Loving). "How about Tamara Dobson as Cleopatra Jones? She was this 6'2" black chick with 'Mod Squad' boots and fur coats. She was a detective busting drug dealers, doing karate through the airport, kickin' ass everywhere, I used to love her. I also loved Teresa Graves in Get Christie Love--she had beauty, brains and a badge."
3. SANDRA BULLOCK (actress, Two If By Sea, While You Were Sleeping). "I love the work of Whoopi Goldberg, and just the other night I watched Corrina, Corrina-- twice. It was a beautiful story, and she's so good in it. Besides, I just like what Whoopi represents, what she's accomplished, what she stands for. She has beaten incredible odds and has put the industry in a different place as far as how women are perceived."
4. ELIZABETH HURLEY (actress, Beyond Bedlam, Samson and Delilah). "I've always adored the title role in The Wicked Lady, played first by Margaret Lockwood and then, in the remake, by Faye Dunaway. What a great character--she was outrageously mad and bad and fiendishly dangerous to know. I think that's how all girls should be."
5. DENISE DI NOVI (producer, Little Women, Ed Wood). "My choice is Auntie Mame, a character with an incredible zest for life--she has a real commitment to being an individual, being who she is, without caring what other people think. I watch Auntie Mame whenever I get bogged down in terms of career or getting ahead and need to remind myself that you only live once so live it to the fullest. Of course, she was independently wealthy, which probably helps!"
6. ALICIA SILVERSTONE (actress, Clueless, The Crush). "I have trouble remembering movies two days after I've seen them, but I do remember Belie Davis in All About Eve. The way she held her cigarette, the way she talked--even though the movie wasn't basically a comedy, she was funny."
7. JACKIE COLLINS (novelist, Hollywood Kids, Vendetta: Lucky's Revenge). "The two characters in Thelma & Louise, as portrayed by Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, are true women of the '90s--they know how to kick ass and protect themselves. I also think that the character Sally Field played in Eye For An Eye is an incredibly strong woman. Revenge is the greatest, and more women should get it."
8. SAMANTHA MATHIS (actress, How to Make an American Quilt, Little Women). "Meryl Streep was just amazing in Silkwood. It was such a tremendous character: a woman who's fighting for something, even though she's afraid because she knows she's getting in over her head. Yet she keeps going despite all the warnings that she's heading down a dangerous path. She dies fighting for what she believes in."
9. ROBIN SWICORD (screenwriter, Little Women, The Perez Family). "I saw Roman Holiday when I was 12, when girls around me were suddenly shedding childhood and hastily assuming postures of inflated knowingness, coming to school in makeup, talking about sex and getting high. It was as if they'd all heard a group signal that I'd completely missed. Audrey Hepburn's innocence in Roman Holiday was tremendously reassuring to me. Her innocence was her power. When Audrey keeps her throne and gives up her romance with Gregory Peck you have the feeling it's the jaded journalist who will suffer the loss more."
10. GWYNETH PALTROW (actress, Seven, Emma), "My favorite is Alabama, the character Patricia Arquette played in True Romance, because she has this unbelievable strength next to the most breakable vulnerability, and you can barely tell which is which, I love that about her. I love it when the bad guy comes to her room and he says, 'Where's the coke?' She goes, 'We don't have any Coke but there's a Pepsi machine down the hall,' and then she just kicks the shit out of him."
11. LISA KUDROW (actress, "Friends," Mother). "I first saw Gone With the Wind when I was 12, and I thought Scarlett O'Hara was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen--I just loved her nasty little personality. Nobody was going to step on her."
12. ANTONIA BIRD (director, Priest, Mad Love). "I greatly admired Jodie Foster's role in The Accused. Here was a woman with little education and no social standing who took on the male establishment to prove that she had been wronged."
13. LAURA LINNEY (actress, Primal Fear, Congo). "I'd pick Amanda, the character Katharine Hepburn plays in Adam's Rib, for her smarts. Another choice would be Mary Boland as the much-married, much-divorced countess in The Women, for her passion and also her good sense of survival."
14. KATHLEEN SULLIVAN (co-anchor. "E! News Daily"). "I love all of Jane Fonda's work, and two characters who spring to mind are her loyal Lillian Hellman, the friend who would cross enemy lines for her best friend in Julia, and her reporter in The China Syndrome, who could see the truth through all the distractions. I am inspired by Fonda's vitality, on and off the screen--and her eagerness to learn, and the fact that Jane is inspired by life and life's events. She fires me up (and she silences Ted Turner)."
15. KIRSTIE ALLEY (actress, Look Who's Talking, Village of the Damned). "I love Bette Davis as Margo Channing. Doesn't everyone love Bette Davis as Margo Channing? I admired Bette Davis's performance in All About Eve, because her character managed to hold on to her dignity--which is always admirable. Davis was just the best of the best."
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