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."
16. DOROTHY MALONE (actress, Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels). "Firstly, Loretta Young remains my ideal woman/actress, both on and off the screen. Although I am always deeply moved by Greer Garson's valiant and gracious qualities, and, granted, Bette Davis etched her strong emotions on all our lives-- still, I must confess, Barbara Stanwyck's vivid, poignant, heroic and magnificent portrayal of Stella Dallas haunts my psyche to this day. It shaped my idea of motherhood, per-haps even shaped my own life. I experienced it first as a teenager, and, again, many years later--and I am still crying,"
17. ANNE BANCROFT (actress, Malice, Home for the Holidays). "One of my three favorite movies is The African Queen--I am always amazed by Katharine Hepburn in that. She's just superb in it. The whole idea of that film, two very different people on a road, slowly getting to know each other, reminds me of my own marriage. What are my other two favorite films? The Informer and Dumbo."
18. MARISA TOMEI (actress, Only You, My Cousin Vinny). "You know who comes to mind? Anna Magnani in Mamma Roma, What vitality she had, and what passion! What a woman!"
19. ALFRE WOODARD (actress, How to Make an American Quilt, Crosscreek). "I loved Geraldine Page in The Trip to Bountiful, because she had the balls to fill up a frame. Most stage-trained actors make the mistake of trying to be 'film actors'--they try to make tiny gestures and mumble their lines. But I loved Gerry Page in The Trip to Bountiful and also in every other film she made, because you always felt she entered the frame already at full tilt. And she left it that way, too."
20. JANET LEIGH (actress, The Fog, Psycho). "I adored Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz. Of course I'd already read all of the Oz books, so I was primed to love the movie, but I thought Judy was perfect as Dorothy--so grounded within the fantasy, yet so adventuresome and ready for anything."
21. ANNA HAMILTON PHELAN (screenwriter, Gorillas in the Mist, Mask). "One really strong woman character for me was Margaret Hamilton, as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. Maybe she didn't inspire or delight me growing up, but she sure scared the hell out of me, year after year. That face, that voice, that laugh--especially that laugh--resonated in many a child-hood nightmare. Years later, I had the pleasure of acting with her in the theater. In real life, she had the personality of Glinda (the Good Witch of the North), but even so, my childhood reaction to her performance in The Wizard of Oz remained. Even today when I watch it, I have fleeting moments of feeling six years old."
22. MARY-LOUISE PARKER (actress, Boys on the Side, Fried Green Tomatoes). "I was very impressed by Jane Campion's film An Angel at My Table. It was the story of Janet Frame, who was hospitalized for eight years as a schizophrenic and later became New Zealand's most famous novelist-poet. What an inspiring story, and Kerry Fox was great, just great, in the role."
23. VENETIA STEVENSON (producer, Dean R. Koontz's Servants of Twilight, Southern Comfort). "For me it would have to be Jane Fonda as Barbarella, because she was sexy as well as powerful."
24. MARILYN BECK (nationally syndicated columnist). "All the characters Rosalind Russell played were women of achievement at a time when many didn't feel it was women's place to achieve. She played career women in movies such as Take a Letter, Darling, a star reporter in His Girl Friday, an Australian nurse who initiated the treatment for cancer in Sister Kenny-- and, of course, who could ever forget her as the outrageous Auntie Mame, urging us to 'Live! Live!? What a role model."
25. GRETA SCACCHI (actress, Shattered, Presumed Innocent). "I think Debra Winger brings a strong presence to everything she does. I especially admired her character in Shadowlands with Anthony Hopkins. The way she faced death was heroic."
26. GLYNIS JOHNS (actress, The Ref, Little Gloria...Happy At Last). "I greatly admired Jessica Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy. It was a lovely role for an older woman, a very self-contained, thinking role, and she played it magnificently. When I was 14 years old, in a picture called Murder in the Family, Jessica played my sister."
27. PARKER POSEY (actress, Party Girl, Frisk). "I was crazy about Molly Ringwald when I was growing up. I especially identified with her Pretty in Pink character, because she made her own prom dress, and I was working in a dress shop. She was so cool in that film, I wanted to be just like her. Molly was the main reason I wanted to be an actress."
28. SHANNEN DOHERTY (actress, Mallrats, Heathers). "Jessica Lange has been amazing in every movie she's made, but I was especially affected by her performance in Blue Sky. She could be manic, show rage, everything, anything--what a great role."
29. MARGARET CHO (actress, It's My Party, The Doom Generation). "My favorite is Diana Ross as the nobody turned supermodel turned couture dress designer in Mahogany, because, as Anthony Perkins puts it, she's 'rich, dark, beautiful and rare.' But then, what else could she be considering she's named Mahogany?"
30. MARY HART (co-host, "Entertainment Tonight"). "I'll never forget Katharine Hepburn as Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter. She was a queen with as much intelligence, strength and passion as her king. Kate Hepburn, in her own life, has always been a premiere example of independence."
31. ANNA LEE (actress, "General Hospital," How Green Was My Valley). "I must mention two characters. When I was younger, I loved everything Ingrid Bergman did, but especially her Joan of Arc. She was my favorite character, a saint and a martyr, so strong and fearless. Then a movie character that has great meaning for me in later years, since I became paralyzed and must be in a wheelchair, is Irene Dunne in Love Affair. To see a woman so set on fighting her way back--so determined-- well, that has special meaning for me."
32. JOCELYN MOORHOUSE (director, How to Make an American Quilt, Proof). "I loved Bette Davis as Margo Channing in All About Eve. She's so great in that character; she just tells it like it is. I love her speech: 'Bill's 32. He looks 32. He looked it five years ago; he'll look it 20 years from now. I hate men!'"
33. CHRISTINE LAHTI (actress, Hideaway, "Chicago Hope"). "The most obvious choice is Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind. She knew what she wanted, and she went out and got it. She was a strong-willed woman who let nothing defeat her."
34. LEA THOMPSON (actress, Back to the Future, "Caroline in the City"). "My favorite movie heroine is Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude, because she just had so much gusto in her life--nothing ever got in the way of her enjoying each day."
35. RACHEL TICOTIN (actress, Don Juan DeMarco, Total Recall). "This may sound strange, but I admired the mother character JoBeth Williams played in the Poltergeist movies. She was brave and strong and funny and warm--she was everything a mother should be."
36. BONNIE HUNT (actress, Jumanji, Only You). "One of my favorites was Claudette Colbert in Midnight. She arrives in Paris with nothing but the evening gown on her back, and within a few hours she has turned the entire city upside town--people fall all over them-selves, just trying to make her happy. I thought she was just great."
37. TONI COLLETTE (actress, Muriel's Wedding, The Efficiency Expert). "Judy Davis in My Brilliant Career was a great inspiration to me. Her character there is so forthright and strong. I've always admired Davis in the choices she makes and the way she transforms into every character she plays--I guess I've always admired actors who can forget who they are and get into somebody else, leaving themselves behind."
38. MARY STUART MASTERSON (actress, Fried Green Tomatoes, Bed of Roses). "I just loved Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year. She was bright and funny, yet romantic too. But then I'm crazy about those romantic-style movies--that's why I did Bed of Roses."
39. CHRISTINA APPLEGATE (actress, Wild Bill, "Married...With Children"). "I'd have to select Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice. I don't think anyone has ever played a char-acter in so much unspoken pain. If we're talking about strong women, I must mention Elizabeth Taylor's character in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? There's a strong woman for you--she's amazing,"
40. JOELY FISHER (actress, "Ellen," I'll Do Anything). "My choice is Sally Field in Norma Rae. She is certainly what everyday women identify with. But isn't it interesting that in films today we haven't really tapped into what a true heroine is? The heroines I see in my life are women in the armed forces, and mothers. My mom [Connie Stevens] is my true heroine."
41. LAURA SAN GIACOMO (actress, sex, lies, and videotape, The Stand). "Katharine Hepburn was an early heroine of mine. What pictures? The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby, Adam's Rib, Woman of the Year, Pat and Mike--the list goes on and on. I guess she was a heroine to me because she was always playing characters who spoke their mind, yet she was also vulnerable enough to have her mind changed. She wasn't just arbitrarily sticking up for herself--she was going to learn from things, as well."
42. DIANE LADD (actress, Rambling Rose, Black Widow). "You know who really showed strength and vulnerability at the same time? Simone Signoret in Room at the Top. She showed sex and earthiness, too--I loved her for that, because she was really like the epitome of all women."
43. KATHLEEN QUINLAN (actress, Apollo 13, The Doors). "I think immediately of Luise Rainer in The Good Earth. She was absolutely translucent, a completely gentle fighting spirit. She reminds me of Meryl Streep, come to think of it."
44. CLEA LEWIS (actress, Diabolique, "Ellen"). "I liked the little girl who played Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, because she was enthusiastic and she knew exactly what she wanted--everything, right now. I also admired Audrey Hepburn's Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's, because she's elegant, self-created, yet vulnerable--a strange combination of street-smart and dreamer. Plus, she really knew how to dress for a walk in the park."
45. TALIA SHIRE (actress, The Godfather, Rocky), "I admired Barbara Stanwyck in just about everything, but Stella Dallas was extraordinary because of the range the role allowed her to show. Stanwyck could be tough, she could be ten-der, she could be anything. Once I met her, and I remarked how uncomfortable I felt with acting. She told me. 'I look at each role like trying on a new dress.' That helped me,"
46. NANCY TRAVIS (actress, "Almost Perfect," 3 Men and a Baby). "I wanted to become an actress because of Vivien Leigh's portrayal of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind. I admired how colorful she was, how she would fly in the face of decorum and what was expected of her. I admired her strength, too, her burning desire to have it all."
47. MARY STEENBURGEN (actress, Melvin and Howard, Nixon). "When I was growing up, I not only admired, I wanted to be Ann-Margret--she was always playing girls who caused a big fuss but could somehow handle all the extra attention. I bought a yellow dress which was a version of what she wore in Bye Bye Birdie. I put it on and stood in front of a full-length mirror: I was a flat-chested 10-year-old with kinky, dark hair, and somehow it just wasn't the same."
48. KATHY NAJIMY (actress, Sister Act, Hocus Pocus). "My favorite movie heroine is Sandra Bullock in Speed, because she went through bombings, fires, deaths, terrorists, medians and make-outs with Keanu Reeves--and never once smudged her makeup or wrinkled her miniskirt."
49. PATRICIA KALEMBER (actress, "Sisters," The Unspoken Truth). "I admired Barbara Stanwyck in a picture she made with Burt Lancaster called Sorry, Wrong Number. Stanwyck wasn't playing her usual tough cookie--she was neurotic, weak and afraid. That was a big departure for her, but you'd never have known it; she never made a comment on the character."
50. LONI ANDERSON (actress, Stroker Ace, Sorry, Wrong Number). "I especially admired Sophia Loren in Two Women. I certainly related to the mother-daughter relationship, though I've never been through that harrowing an experience. I was overwhelmed by Loren's portrayal of such a good mother."
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Bob Thomas interviewed women about their favorite screen villainesses for the April '95 issue of Movieline.