#career longevity

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Two portraits of pioneering actress, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist and civil rights activist Ruby Dee, taken to promote the films A Raisin in the Sun (1961, Daniel Petrie) and American Gangster (2007, Ridley Scott) 

Read more about Ruby’s extraordinary life and contributions to the legacy of black womanhood on stage and screen here

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Women in Horror month

Ruby Dee as Mother Abagail Freemantle, the 106-year-old prophet leading plague survivors in a post-apocalyptic battle of good and evil in ABC’s Stephen King miniseries The Stand (1994, Mick Garris)

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S. Epatha Merkerson in her Emmy, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild award-winning role as Rachel “Nanny” Crosby in the HBO movie Lackawanna Blues (2005, George C. Wolfe; pictured with Marcus Carl Franklin and Hill Harper)

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Julianne Moore in her Oscar-winning role as Alice Howland in Still Alice (2014, Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland); pictured here with co-stars Alec Baldwin and Kristen Stewart. Some performance reviews: 

“Moore is a brave, conscientious and magnetic actress, who is on-screen in every scene and almost every frame of Still Alice. She follows her character, Alice Howland, a linguistics scholar at Columbia and the mom of a polite but convivial WASP family, through the heartbreaking and sometimes terrifying dissolution of her personality. In the film’s most fearless moments, its title feels less like a reassuring assertion than a question that has no clear answer... There’s nothing formulaic or rehearsed about Moore’s performance; her moments of midnight terror, fierce resolution, painful struggle and worsening confusion burn with passionate intensity. There’s a devastating and all too believable scene late in the film, when Alice comes across a video she made a few months earlier, instructing herself on what to do when she can no longer answer basic questions about her own life... She’s radiant and heartbreaking.” — Andrew O’Hehir, Salon (January 2015) 

“One pleasure of Still Alice at this early stage is the chance it gives us to see Moore playing a happy, well-adjusted woman. The actress is so good at aberrational characters — her unhinged Havana Segrand in David Cronenberg’s forthcoming Maps to the Stars is the latest example — that we don’t get enough chances to see her playing normal yet still involving, which is nowhere near as easy as it may sound... Moore is especially good at the wordless elements of this transformation, allowing us to see through the changing contours of her face what it is like when your mind empties out. When Alice says at one point “I feel like I can’t find myself,” it is all the more upsetting because we’ve already watched it happen.” — Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times (December 2014)

“In 1995, Julianne Moore, still relatively unknown at the time, essayed one of the great modern film roles in Safe, playing a suburban housewife who’s allergic to the world, a condition that results in her practically disappearing in front of our eyes. Almost 20 years later, now firmly established as one of our best actresses, Moore delivered another astounding performance about a different woman losing herself. Still Alice tells the story of a linguistics professor diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and the actress plays her as a bright, poised 50-year-old who quickly learns that her intelligence can’t save her from a disease that will ravage her memory. It’s a performance that’s powerfully internal yet expressed with incredible physicality: The woman’s fear, resignation and anger come through in Moore’s panicked, anguished eyes, but what’s especially remarkable is how she articulates the emptying out of a once-vibrant person. Alice is still there, and yet she’s not, and the star honors the mysteries of a body that’s lost its inner light and yet retained its ineffable soul.” — Tim Grierson, “Best Actress Oscar Winners Since 2000, Ranked Worst to Best”, Rolling Stone (February 2017)

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Michelle Pfeiffer photographed by Niko Tavernise on the set of mother! (2017, Darren Aronofsky)

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A final look at this year’s Emmy winner for Outstanding Actress in a Limited Series or Movie: Nicole Kidman playing Celeste Wright in HBO’s Big Little Lies (2017, Jean-Marc Vallée). Also pictured: Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley and Alexander Skarsgård.

“While I watched Kidman, it was impossible not to think of all her other roles. I first saw her in the terrifying Dead Calm, in which she faked love for her rapist in order to survive. Then, there was Eyes Wide Shut, about a woman whose tightly wound husband (played by her tightly wound then-husband, Tom Cruise) goes crazy, because he suspects that she once had a sexual fantasy — not even an affair! — about someone other than him. She was even better as the manipulator in To Die For, playing a girlish spider whose flies had no chance. In each role, there is something waxen and watchful and self-possessed about Kidman, so that, even when she’s smiling, she never seems liberated. While other actors specialize in transparency, Kidman has a different gift: she can wear a mask and simultaneously let you feel what it’s like to hide behind it. As Celeste, she keeps lowering her head and raising her eyes, always feminine, glamorous, and diplomatic. It makes it all the more powerful to watch Kidman’s eyes connect with someone else's whenever something big happens — when she realizes, over drinks, that Madeline is lying about her marriage, too; when she bubbles with taboo joy at the notion of going back to work. In one lovely scene, Jane tells her new friends how detached she feels, as if she were peering at them from far away rather than sitting with the two of them. As Madeline chatters, Celeste stays quiet, locking eyes with Jane. The camera holds on the two of them, capturing the early alchemy of a friendship — and the suggestion that, even in mean-girl world, women might choose to be allies instead of enemies.” —  Emily Nussbaum, New Yorker (March 2017)

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Katharine Hepburn in the third of her four Best Actress Oscar wins, as Eleanor of Aquitane in The Lion in Winter (1968, Anthony Harvey; pictured here with Anthony Hopkins and Peter O’Toole)

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Laura Dern in W magazine’s recent photo shoot recreating Princess Mombi’s head cabinet in Return to Oz