Skip to content
Curated playlist

Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress winners

  • Penélope CruzPenélope Cruz was fifteen years old in 1989 when she won an audition against more than 300 other girls. Only a short time earlier, an agent had sent her away three times because she was too young. Cruz kept coming back anyway, and she says…
  • Katharine HepburnKatharine Hepburn bought out her own studio contract after theater owners called her box office poison.
  • Meryl StreepDino De Laurentiis insulted Meryl Streep in Italian, not knowing she spoke it. She answered him in Italian too.
  • Kirsten DunstKirsten Dunst was ten years old when she shared a screen kiss with Brad Pitt, an actor two decades her senior, and her verdict was blunt. "I thought it was gross, that Brad had cooties. I mean, I was 10," she recalled. Dunst, an American…
  • Bette DavisBette Davis's tombstone reads, "She did it the hard way." A director suggested the epitaph after All About Eve.
  • Zoe SaldañaZoe Saldaña is the highest grossing actor in history, a title that sits oddly beside a childhood spent speaking Spanish at home in Queens. In 2023, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Her road to…
  • CherCher, the American singer and actress born Cheryl Sarkisian, first reached radio in 1964 with a record that programmers misjudged. The single was “Ringo, I Love You,” produced by Phil Spector and released under the name Bonnie Jo Mason.…
  • BjörkBjörk had a record deal before she finished primary school. A teachers' recording of her singing aired nationally.
  • Helen MirrenDame Helen Mirren was born Ilyena Lydia Mironoff on the 26th of July 1945, at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in the Hammersmith district of London. Neither the first name nor the surname on that record would last. The woman who…
  • Selena GomezIn 2016, Selena Gomez became the first person to reach 100 million followers on Instagram, a milestone Time later singled out in its Firsts series. Gomez is an American actress, singer, songwriter, businesswoman, and producer, born in…

Queue