Who are your favourite actresses?

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“Peeps said:
Geraldine Page was amazing–that spooky soft voice. Madame Medusa is one of the best of the Disney villainesses.The comparison with Julie Harris is really good!
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One of my favorite Geraldine Page performances is in Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice?, a sort of black comedy. Page is a wealthy widow who murders a succession of housekeepers for their savings accounts, and Ruth Gordon is her next prospective victim. I also love Page in three episodes of the old Night Gallery TV program. But it’s her Interiors performance that really stands out. There is one scene in the back of a taxicab: no dialogue, just the camera on Page, and somehow she conveys her deteriorating mental state through the use of her eyes alone. She doesn’t roll them around, or bug them out or anything like that. She just sits in the cab, occasionally glancing at a passing landmark, but the expression in her eyes is palpably that of a woman who has lost her grip on reality. It is an extremely subtle and affecting performance, my favorite of all her performances. She died in the late 1980s, but her husband, actor Rip Torn, is still living, I believe.
 
I’m rather fond of Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham-Carter.

I also am fond of Kathryn Joosten, a character actress who played Mrs McClusky in Desperate Housewives.
Acting was her second career, (she was a nurse until she was in her forties) and despite starting in acting well past the typical actress’ shelf-date, made a success of herself. She was a really funny comedienne
 
Modern day actresses…Amy Adams, Rebecca Ferguson and Emily Blunt are lovely. Seem like pleasant people too (off screen). But I don’t have that many favorites because I don’t watch much movies these days.
 
I’ve always had a fondness for Deborah Kerr; she did an amazing job in the otherwise incoherent ‘Casino Royale’.
 
Lea101 said:
Modern day actresses…Amy Adams, Rebecca Ferguson and Emily Blunt are lovely. Seem like pleasant people too (off screen). But I don’t have that many favorites because I don’t watch much movies these days.
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If I had any dealings with Emily Blunt, I would have to be constantly saying ‘let me be blunt, Miss Blunt’ until she finally punched me in the nose.
 
tomarin said:
I’ve always had a fondness for Deborah Kerr; she did an amazing job in the otherwise incoherent ‘Casino Royale’.
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She was also outstanding as the naïve, increasingly unbalanced governess in The Innocents, Jack Clayton’s beautiful adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. But my favorite film of hers is Black Narcissus, in which she leads a group of nuns to a new convent in the Himalayas.
 
An actress I neglected to mention in my first post is Mila Parély. Her quirkily pretty face and mercurial personality graced far too few films in the 1930s and 1940s. Her virtuoso outing as one of Belle’s wicked sisters in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast(1944) alone qualifies her for film immortality.
 
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One of my faves is Marjorie Main, one of the greatest character actresses who ever lived. People are surprised because of all the “common folk” characters she played that she started with a Shakespearean Rep Company. She was in over 70 films, including:
  • The Ma and Pa Kettle movies
  • Dead End (1937)
  • The Women (1939)
  • Dark Command (1940)
  • The Shepherd of the Hills (1941)
  • Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
  • Friendly Persuasion (1956)
She was also in numerous stage productions. Her career spanned the amazing period from 1916 (when she was 16 years old) to 1957.
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La Comtesse de Lave: (about her cowboy beau) Have you noticed the play of his muscles? Simply musical!

Lucy (Marjorie Main) Great Scott, you don’t mean to say his joints squeak!?
  • The Women
 
Among current actresses, I like Amy Adams. She was amazing in Arrival. Also enjoyed her performances in two family-oriented films, Enchanted and The Muppets.
 
Another great: Mary Wickes. Born in St Louis, her Broadway success in The Man Who Came to Dinner brought her to Hollywood for the film version, alongside Monty Woolley, Bette Davis and Ann Sheridan. Hollywood liked her and she decided to stay. Her hatchet face, with a nose that would put any Roman to shame, and voice like an unoiled garden gate delighted filmgoers for decades. Her appearances in Now, Voyager, Little Women, Sister Act, The Music Man and countless others were always events. She was even more popular on television, appearing in episodes of, among others, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, I Love Lucy(as Madame LeMond, Lucy’s demanding ballet teacher), The Night Stalker and The Beverly Hillbillies. Along with Barbara Pepper, Wickes was best friends with Lucille Ball. Final film role: a gargoyle in the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
 
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Most of my favorites come from classic film.

Doris Day - Love her comedy, especially with Rock Hudson and James Garner.

Ava Gardner - The most glamorous, smoldering beauty ever.

Bette Davis - No one played the bad girl like she did.

Irene Dunne - Just love her.

Lucille Ball - Perfect comedic timing.

Lauren Bacall - Love her.

Katharine Hepburn - My favorite, love her most in comedy.
 
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A few others come to mind:
Meg Ryan, in some of her early romantic films such as You’ve Got Mail.
Cher, in Moonstruck. Love that film!
Madeleine Stowe In The Last of the Mohicans. Does she still act–haven’t seen her at all in years.
Agree with Mary Wickes, as someone posted above! Such a great character actor, in so many films and TV shows of my youth.
Judy Garland
Shirley Jones, in musicals like The Music Man
Maggie Smith, especially in her early works, like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Ann Bancroft
Katharine Ross Not sure what happened to her either.
Carolyn Jones – Morticia on the Addams Family
Frances McDormand
Emma Thompson
Jessica Lange
 
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Maureen O’Hara.

Beautiful woman, great actress.

The Quiet Man is my favorite movie of hers, but she was in many others. She was hilarious in The Lonely Guy as John Candy’s mother.
 
Cate Blanchette

That French lady from Inception Marion Cotillard

Tara Strong, voiceover actress.

So many of the stars of the 30s through 40s.

Vivien Leigh.
 
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