Curated playlist
Best Actress Academy Award winners
- Vivien LeighVivien Leigh died on the night of the 7th of July 1967, alone on the floor of her Eaton Square flat in London. Her companion John Merivale had left her, as usual, to perform in a play. When he returned just before midnight and found her…
- Katharine HepburnKatharine Hepburn won four Academy Awards for Best Actress, a record no one else has matched. She wore trousers before women commonly did. She refused autographs, shunned the publicity machine, and once wrestled a camera from a…
- Meryl StreepMeryl Streep walked into a casting meeting with Dino De Laurentiis in 1976, hoping to audition for his King Kong remake. De Laurentiis looked at her and said, in Italian, to his son: "This is so ugly. Why did you bring me this?" What he…
- Elizabeth TaylorElizabeth Taylor was born on the 27th of February 1932 in Hampstead Garden Suburb, northwest London, in a family home called Heathwood. She died on the 23rd of March 2011 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Between those two…
- Joan CrawfordJoan Crawford, born Lucille Fay LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, built one of the most tenacious careers in Hollywood history from a foundation of almost nothing. Her father abandoned the family when she was ten months old. Her schooling…
- Gwyneth PaltrowGwyneth Kate Paltrow was born on the 27th of September 1972 into a family already at home in Hollywood: her mother, Blythe Danner, was a stage and screen actress; her father, Bruce Paltrow, a film producer and director. By the time she was…
- Emma ThompsonEmma Thompson holds a distinction that no one else in Hollywood history has matched: she has won Academy Awards for both acting and writing. In 1993, she sat in the same Oscar ceremony with two nominations in two different acting…
- Bette DavisBette Davis died on the 6th of October, 1989, at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, too weak to make the journey home after her cancer returned during a visit to Spain. Her tombstone reads: "She did it the hard way." That…
- Ginger RogersGinger Rogers was born Virginia Katherine McMath on the 16th of July, 1911, in Independence, Missouri, and she would become one of the most celebrated performers in the history of American cinema. By the time she died in 1995, she had made…
- Natalie PortmanNatalie Portman was born on the 9th of June 1981, in Jerusalem, at Hadassah Medical Center. She has spent most of her life navigating two worlds: the concentrated pressures of global stardom and the layered complexities of her…
- Brie LarsonBrie Larson walked onto the stage of the 89th Academy Awards, accepted the envelope, and deliberately did not clap during a standing ovation for the winner. The silence said everything she chose not to say. It was a moment that captured…
- Audrey HepburnAudrey Hepburn stood on a train platform in occupied Arnhem as a young girl, watching a boy in an oversized coat board a train bound for a concentration camp. "I was a child observing a child," she said later. That image never left her. It…
- Julie ChristieJulie Christie was born on the 14th of April 1940 on a tea plantation in Chabua, Assam, British India, and by the time she was twenty-five years old, Life magazine had named 1965 "The Year of Julie Christie." That is a remarkable sentence.…
- Julie AndrewsJulie Andrews stood on a beer crate to reach the microphone. She was not yet ten years old, performing spontaneously in wartime variety shows alongside her mother and stepfather, singing solos or duets while her mother played piano. That…