The spy in Salt was originally called Edwin, and Tom Cruise was in line to play him. Then Angelina Jolie became available, Edwin became Evelyn, and the studio still had somebody audiences would happily pay to see jump off a moving truck. After two Tomb Raider movies, Jolie had earned a particularly useful kind of clout. Even the action roles written for men were up for grabs. | © Columbia Pictures
For a stretch, you could turn on ABC on Thursday evening and spend three straight hours in Shonda Rhimes’ company. She created Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, then executive-produced Pete Nowalk’s How to Get Away with Murder. Giving an entire night to one producer was quite a vote of confidence. Giving the two later hours to Kerry Washington and Viola Davis changed who American audiences saw running the room each week. | © Shonda Rhimes
If MGM wanted The Philadelphia Story, it would have to take Katharine Hepburn with it. Branded “box-office poison” just a few years earlier, Hepburn had a Broadway hit on her hands and, crucially, control of the film rights. She negotiated approval over the cast and director. Imagine having to explain to the boss that yesterday’s supposedly unemployable actress now had a say in who else got hired. | © Katharine Hepburn
How long is seven years? At Warner Bros., the answer depended on how often an actor had annoyed the front office. The studio tried to add Olivia de Havilland’s suspensions to the end of her contract after she turned down assignments. She challenged it and won. The ruling established that the seven-year limit meant calendar years, giving other performers something considerably more useful than career advice: an exit date. | © Olivia de Havilland
Watch Cicely Tyson spot her husband coming home in Sounder. Recognition is barely visible on her face before her whole body breaks into a run. You understand what his absence has cost this family in the seconds it takes her to reach him. Tyson regularly turned down demeaning parts, even when it cost her work. Performances like this let audiences see the ordinary intimacies Hollywood had so rarely granted Black families. | © Island Pictures
An art dealer who solves crimes in her spare time sounds like a perfectly serviceable pitch for Sunday-night television. In 1951, the remarkable part was who got to play her. After years of watching Hollywood hand major Chinese roles to white actresses, Anna May Wong led The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong, the first American TV series with an Asian American star. Even the detective’s name came from Wong’s own Chinese name. | © Netflix
Three years before winning the Best Actress Oscar for Monster’s Ball, Halle Berry played Dorothy Dandridge, the first Black woman nominated in that category. That history went up onstage with her. Berry named Dandridge in her acceptance speech, alongside other women whose work had made her own career possible. In a ceremony generally remembered for who beat whom, Berry used the biggest moment of her career to tell people whom to remember. | © Warner Bros. Pictures
Whoopi Goldberg had already earned an Oscar nomination playing the painfully withdrawn Celie in The Color Purple when Ghost put her on the line with the dead. As Oda Mae Brown, a fraudulent medium appalled to discover she can actually hear a ghost, Goldberg made talking to thin air worthy of an Oscar. Then Sister Act cleared $139 million domestically with her in a habit. Quite a range for anyone trying to typecast her. | © Warner Bros. Pictures
Opera singer Marilyn Horne supplied Carmen’s singing voice in Carmen Jones. The sideways appraisal that makes Harry Belafonte’s soldier look doomed before he knows he’s interested? Entirely Dorothy Dandridge. She made Carmen funny, desirable and dangerous, earning the first Best Actress Oscar nomination for a Black woman. Hollywood’s imagination promptly failed it again. Having watched Dandridge carry a major musical, studios struggled to offer her another role anywhere near as good. | © Prime Video
Before American audiences met Michelle Yeoh as a Bond girl, Hong Kong audiences had watched her ride a motorcycle onto a moving train in Supercop. Decades later, Everything Everywhere All at Once found an even better use for that physical precision. Yeoh could shift from martial arts master to exhausted laundromat owner in the space of a cut and make you care desperately about the laundromat. She became the first Asian woman to win Best Actress. | © Majestic Film
American moviegoers knew Sophia Loren could trade wisecracks with Cary Grant in Houseboat. It took an Italian film about a mother trying to protect her daughter in wartime for the Academy to grasp what else she could do. With Two Women, Loren became the first performer to win an acting Oscar for a foreign-language role. One of Hollywood’s great leading ladies had given its voters a reason to read the subtitles. | © Universal Pictures
It was Viola Davis’ idea to have Annalise Keating sit at her dressing table and take off her wig. How to Get Away with Murder had introduced a defense attorney who could intimidate a lecture hall. Now a network drama was willing to spend precious airtime watching a Black woman quietly undo the work of getting ready to face one. The role made Davis the first Black woman to win the lead drama actress Emmy. | © Warner Bros. Pictures
In My Man Godfrey, Carole Lombard finds a man at the city dump during a society scavenger hunt, hires him as the family butler and falls for him. The joke is how sensible all this seems to her. Lombard gave screwball comedy a leading lady who could generate enough trouble for an entire picture, leaving William Powell the equally demanding job of standing still while she happened to him. | © Carole Lombard
Jane Fonda found the makings of 9 to 5 by listening to office workers, through her friendship with labor organizer Karen Nussbaum. Their grievances were real. The part where three employees get even with a spectacularly awful Dabney Coleman was considerably more fun to stage. Fonda helped turn workplace harassment into the subject of a hit comedy where the secretaries got the best jokes and the audience knew exactly whom to root against. | © Universal Studios
After nearly two decades at MGM, Joan Crawford agreed to a screen test for Mildred Pierce. You can appreciate the indignity and still be grateful she did it. Her Mildred waits tables, builds a restaurant business and discovers that all the money in California might never buy her daughter’s respect. Crawford won the Oscar playing a mother whose working life was every bit as gripping as the murder that opens the picture. | © Warner Bros.
Listen to how softly Meryl Streep speaks in The Devil Wears Prada. Anyone else who wants to be heard in that office has to lean in, which tells you more about Miranda Priestly’s authority than a shouting match ever could. Streep was in her fifties when she played Miranda and when she led Mamma Mia! Two very different hits gave Hollywood fewer excuses for overlooking actresses the minute they aged out of ingénue roles. | © Universal Pictures
Bette Davis made a dangerous proposition look awfully appealing to actresses: let the audience loathe you for a while. As Mildred in Of Human Bondage, she understood just how casually cruel someone can be to a person who keeps coming back. When the Academy left Davis off the ballot, she drew write-in votes. Playing a woman almost entirely devoid of charm had made Davis the actress people were willing to argue over. | © Bette Davis
One of Audrey Hepburn’s great movie makeovers costs her Roman Holiday princess the price of a haircut. Watching her urge a nervous barber to keep cutting, you see a young woman discover the pleasure of deciding what she looks like. Hepburn’s later partnership with Hubert de Givenchy turned movie costumes into fashion history, but that little scene explains much of her appeal. Her characters enjoyed getting dressed for themselves. | © Warner Bros. Pictures
“America’s Sweetheart” sounds like somebody a studio would send out to wave from a parade float. Mary Pickford could also tell you who was distributing the picture. In 1919, she founded United Artists with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith so independent producers could get their films into theaters while retaining control of their work. The curls sold tickets. Pickford understood the business well enough to know what happened to the money afterward. | © Mary Pickford
A U.S. senator took to the floor to condemn Ingrid Bergman over her affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini. Imagine catching up on Casablanca and deciding the actress who played Ilsa owed Congress an explanation about her private life. Within the decade, Bergman had won another Oscar, for Anastasia. The performances have aged considerably better than the outrage, as anyone watching her quietly calculate the danger of a missing key in Notorious can attest. | © 20th Century Studios
Ellen Ripley’s first great action-hero decision is refusing to open a door. There’s a quarantine procedure for a reason, as everyone aboard the Nostromo is about to learn in considerable detail. Sigourney Weaver gave Alien a heroine whose authority came from knowing her job. When Aliens handed her a pulse rifle and a power loader, the Academy followed with a Best Actress nomination for a performance that took sheer physical competence seriously. | © 20th Century Studios
Only one character sings in Yentl. The songs let us hear what a young Jewish woman has to keep to herself while posing as a man to pursue her education. That unusual choice belonged to Barbra Streisand, who spent years getting the film made and directed, co-wrote, produced and starred in it. The woman Hollywood already trusted to sell a soundtrack became the first woman to win a Golden Globe for directing a film. | © Columbia Pictures
A million dollars to play Cleopatra was an extraordinary measure of what Elizabeth Taylor’s name could buy. During the AIDS crisis, she discovered what it could get other people to pay attention to. Taylor helped found amfAR, raised money for research and testified before Congress when people living with AIDS still faced vicious public stigma. Reporters who had spent years asking whom she was marrying now had to listen to what she was asking of them. | © Touchstone Pictures
At the end of Queen Christina, Greta Garbo stands at the bow of a ship while the camera moves toward her. Director Rouben Mamoulian asked her to keep her face blank. Try watching that shot without supplying a dozen thoughts of your own. Garbo understood how much an audience would bring to a close-up if an actress trusted it enough to hold still. Her face became world-famous while her thoughts remained entirely her own. | © TCM
Check the production credit on The Prince and the Showgirl. Laurence Olivier directed it, but the company behind the picture bore Marilyn Monroe’s name. Fed up with the pay and parts on offer at Fox, she had started a business with photographer Milton Greene and secured a better studio deal. There’s an extra pleasure in watching Olivier’s terribly important prince underestimate the blonde who helped put him on the screen. | © United Artists
Mary Pickford was one of the biggest stars in silent movies when she helped found United Artists. Decades later, the woman audiences knew as Lucy Ricardo was running the studio that gave us Star Trek. It’s worth remembering both careers the next time someone describes an actress as “just the talent.” Across Hollywood history, these 25 women changed who got cast, whose scripts got bought, and what audiences got to see.
