Number 44: Glenda Jackson as Gudrun Brangwen in "Women in Love" (Best Actress Ranking)

I don’t know what it is about Glenda Jackson that fascinates me so.

Her sharp acting style, her razor-like voice, her way of portraying strong women…she seems like a modern Bette Davis but without any sensual elements in her performances. There is always something unforgiving, tough and dangerous about her. You may even say that she is a limited actress because of that but there are few actresses who could so totally dominate the screen like her.

Women in Love is one big mess of a movie. Frankly, I can’t even say what it’s about. It’s so full of stupid symbolism, speeches about love in all ways, of over-the-top performances from almost the whole cast that it’s almost unwatchable but there is one redeeming factor – Glenda Jackson as Gudrun, one of two sisters who experience love affairs with two wealthy friends.

Everything that makes Glenda Jackson so fascinating and unforgettable is perfectly suited for the part of Gudrun – her sharp way of delivering every line, the feeling that there is something merciless behind her English façade. Glenda Jackson makes Gudrun a force to be reckoned with without even having to raise her voice. Her fascinated look when Gerald is torturing his horse, her constant struggle for power is fascinating to watch.

Glenda Jackson shows Gudrun as a woman who talks about love and seemingly wants to experience a lot – but there is also a feeling that she just feels like she has to do that. When we see her making love, she doesn’t really seem to like it. It’s like she wants to experience something else, but she doesn’t know what it is. She likes to go to the dirty parts of the cities where prostitutes work, she seems to be fascinated by primitive feelings and brutal force. It’s a really captivating performance that took me a while to fully appreciate because it is so unlike almost anything else you see in this category.

Glenda Jackson also gets a lot of bonus points for making her performance work despite all the awfulness that surrounds her. While all the other actors overact like crazy, Glenda is always in total control of her character and her precise, thoughtful performance contrasts sharply with everything around her.

And everyone who can make a dance scene in front of a cattle herd chilling deserves a large amount of praise!

YOUR Best Actress of 1939!

Thanks to everyone who voted!

Here are the results of the poll for Best Actress 1939:

1. Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind (64 votes)

2. Greer Garson in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (2 votes)

3. Greta Garbo in Ninotchka (1 vote)

4. Bette Davis in Dark Victory & Irene Dunne in Love Affair (0 votes)

Number 45: Julie Christie as Diana Scott in "Darling" (Best Actress Ranking)

Julie Christie took home a well-deserved Oscar for her star-making performance in Darling, as an immoral model who sleeps her way to the top.

Julie Christie is a real firework of emotions in Darling. She does everything you want an Oscar winner to do – she cries, she laughs, she shouts, she is subtle, she is over-the-top.

What is simple astonishing about this performance is how perfect Julie Christie is – she totally inhabits the character of Diana to the point that you're feeling like you are watching a documentary because she is so real. You never have the feeling that Julie is acting because it’s all so natural and she runs the gamut of emotions from A-Z flawlessly.

Diana is an awful human being – she is appearing nice and lovely but she has no morals and doesn’t care about other people. She always starts something new until she gets bored with it, leaves everyone and everything behind and starts something new again until she gets bored with that, too. But finally she does something new that she can’t get out again – she marries an Italian prince. And when she gets bored again, there is no way out for her anymore.

Diana never hurts anyone on purpose – she just doesn’t know any better. She never wastes a thought about other people, she is simple the kind of person who is only looking after her own interests.

Well, as I said, Julie Christie is pretty flawless in this picture and commands the screen like an old pro.

A minor complaint and my reason for not ranking her higher is that she is not able to keep me interested in Diana from start to finish. While she keeps me glued to the TV at the beginning, I am beginning to feel like Diana after a while – I get bored. That may be because Julie’s performance is very repetitively – she is charming and lovely, then gets bored, then angry, she starts to scream and to cry, then is charming and lovely again, then she gets bored, then she acts angry and then starts to scream and to cry. It’s all done very impressively but you have basically seen everything after 30 minutes while the movie keeps going for another 2 hours.

But still, a great performance with a rarely seen amount of talent and energey!

Number 46: Janet Gaynor as Diane in "Seventh Heaven" (Best Actress Ranking)

Of her three Oscar-winning performances in 1928, Janet Gaynor’s turn in Seventh Heaven is easily the most impressive.

In this case, it all fits wonderfully together as Janet Gaynor’s talent and the quality of the movie go hand in hand (in the case of Sunrise, the movie was better than Janet Gaynor and it was the other way around with Street Angel).

In Seventh Heaven, Janet Gaynor plays Diane, a poor young girl who lives with her evil sister until she is finally kicked out and almost killed but saved by a young man. They movie in together and fall in love.

Seventh Heaven is a real masterpiece. An incredibly romantic and lifting movie that makes you forget that there is never a spoken word because the whole story is so captivating. This is mostly due to the wonderful lead performances.

Janet Gaynor looks almost like an angel in this movie. She is (as always) able to show so much emotions without saying one word.

This performance again follows the formula “suffer – be happy – suffer a little more” and Janet Gaynor again knows how to make it convincing.

Her wonderful face lightens up the screen and her chemistry with Charles Farrell is amazing. All her close-ups, no matter if she is happy, sad or desperate, are unforgettable. She is completely natural in her performance. The scenes when she is begging for money or trying to kill her safe are incredibly moving.

She also astonishingly shows her characters arc, becoming a much more secure woman in the course of the movie. The love of a man had made her strong and she is now even able to stand up to her evil sister.

If anyone ever has doubts about watching a silent movie, I can only recommend Janet Gaynor who is a master in creating memorable characters without making a single sound.

Number 47: Luise Rainer as Anna Held in "The Great Ziegfeld" (Best Actress Ranking)

Today, Luise Rainer’s performance in The Great Ziegfeld would surely be campaigned in the supporting category.

I think it’s a borderline case where both categories are acceptable. One the one hand, Luise Rainer has maybe 40 minutes of screentime in an almost 3-hour movie and you could argue that she is only of secondary importance to the story since this is a movie about Florenz Ziegfeld. But on the other hand, you can't just leave her out since that would mean leaving out a big part of Ziegfeld's life.

Anyway, Luise Rainer is the heart and soul of The Great Ziegfeld. She enters the movie with the energy of a real whirlwind and whenever she is not onscreen, this whole epic loses something.

She plays Anna Held, a big star of the European stages who becomes the first wife of Ziegfeld.

Luise Rainer is a pure joy to watch in this movie. Her Anna Held is a totally unique creation. She is a real diva, knowing what she is worth, but also incredibly insecure and suggestible at the same time.

In the hands of a lesser actress, this character might have become very annoying, but Luise Rainer takes this difficult woman who changes her mind every five seconds and turns her into comedy gold and makes her totally loveable at the same time. Her temperamental outbursts that are always followed by a quiet desperation of not knowing what to do are simply brilliant.

The Great Ziegfeld is movie filled with big musical numbers and pretty girls - but a little French diva overshadows them all.

Luise Rainer is able to create a real, three-dimensional human being with only the tiniest amount of material to work with – Anna Held does almost nothing else than complain about a milk bath in this movie but Luise Rainer fills her part with much detail and passion.

Behind her temperamental diva lies the soul of a little, shy and insecure girl who is totally in love with Ziegfeld but is never sure if she can hold him. She always doubts everything in her life and is totally dependent from him. Luise Rainer turns her thin material into real gold.

And later in the movie, we only see her appear every now and then, but Luise Rainer creates an unforgettable character with her big sad eyes, her flamboyant, but also deeply unstable personality and her adorable French accent.

While she kept you laughing non-stop in her early parts of her performance, she just as easily breaks your heart with her later scenes, showing her sorrow over the loss of her husband and calling him to congratulate him on his second marriage while her heart is breaking.

I only wish that Luise Rainer had been given more to do overall. She made her character a thousand times better than it was supposed to be but Anna Held is still paper-thin.

Still, a wonderful, unforgettable performance from a great, forgotten actress.

Number 48: Grace Kelly as Georgie Elgin in "The Country Girl" (Best Actress Ranking)

Grace Kelly’s win for The Country Girl is mostly remembered today for the fact that she beat Judy Garland in A Star is Born rather than for Grace’s performance.

That’s too bad because Grace is simply wonderful as Georgie Elgin, the suffering wife of an alcoholic Broadway actor.

Grace Kelly’s win is often described as an actress hiding her beauty to show her talents. Well, it’s true that Grace doesn’t look like her normal drop-dead beautiful self, but her character Georgie isn’t ugly – she is actually very pretty as you can see in the flashback-scenes, but she has stopped caring about her looks. Georgie’s constant trouble with her husband, her worries and her life of desperation have turned her into a bitter woman.

Grace Kelly is excellent in showing Georgie’s broken side, a woman completely worn out by the burdens of her daily life. We never feel that we really get to know her character: Grace keeps Georgie at a distant from the viewer just as she keeps her at distance from the other characters. We never know if she is friendly or rude, if she loves or hates her husband. Georgie seems to be a mystery until we finally get to know her when Grace shows us a more emotional side.

Georgie seems to love her husband, but she has come to the point where she is only staying with him out of responsibility because she knows he would be helpless without her. She is taking care of him, acting like a mother and not like a loving wife. She tries all she can but his constant lying behind her back slowly destroys her. It’s a surprisingly honest and real portrayal of a woman who supports her husband but who also doesn’t know if she wants to anymore. When she asks him “When did you get these, Frank?” after she found two empty bottles of Whisky, her voice is completely rid of any emotion or energy, you can hear Georgie’s exhaustion, how she is not able to fight him anymore.

Her seemingly unloving appearence mixed with her sexuality hidden under her glasses and her frumpy clothes also turn William Holden’s character against her. In the scene in the dark alley when Bernie keeps insulting and accusing her, Grace is incredibly moving in slowly showing her character’s breakdown.

She knows her husband wants to be loved by everybody and would never complain about anything so she has to do it for him and also take the blame for him. When she tells Frank “Yes, they have respect for you.” she says it with a voice that seems to say: But not for me.

She also some other great scenes like when she can't handle her husband anymore and she yells at him to get dressed or she looks through his things, trying to find hidden alcohol. And she is just wonderful when she slaps William Holden after having been insulted by him and angrily says "Did I forget to tell you I'm proud?"

Grace Kelly completely hid her charm and beauty behind frustration and depression.

My reason for not ranking her higher is that I feel that Grace benefited a lot from the writing. The script for The Country Girl is actually rather weak and dated but the character or Georgie is a great one and gets a lot of opportunities to shine. While Grace surely did everything the part asked for, I think that she did not do anything beyond that. She played the part just as you would expect her to, you know when she’s about to sigh, you know when she’s about to cry and when she’s about to raise her voice. Her acting choices are all predictable and make hers a strong, but rather conventional performance. Another negative point is that her acting gets too melodramatic sometimes, especially at the end.

But it’s definitely a great performance from this underrated actress!

Number 49: Shirley MacLaine as Aurora Greenway in "Terms of Endearment" (Best Actress Ranking)

I never let the competition of an Oscar winner influence me in my decisions for this ranking. I only judge the actual performance. But this is very hard in the case of Shirley MacLaine since you have Debra Winger’s superior performance right in front of your eyes…

Anyway, Shirley MacLaine took home her overdue Oscar for her role as Aurora Greenway, an overbearing, dominant mother. During the course of the movie, we follow her stormy relationship with her daughter and her affair with the astronaut next door.

Shirley MacLaine takes no prisoners in this performance, she grabs the part and plays it as dominant and attention-seeking as possible. Her Aurora is a force of nature, but Shirley is also able to turn her into a real, three-dimensional human being.

In the beginning of the movie, Shirley MacLaine does an impressive job in handling drama and comedy. She is able to fill every funny moment with a certain sadness and every sad moment with a laugh (“Why should I be happy about being a GRANDMOTHER?”)

Shirley’s relationship with Debra Winger is excellent. Debra Winger and Jeff Daniels pay the more realistic part of the movie while Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson get to do the eccentric, a little-over-top storyline and it’s not hard to guess which one the Academy preferred.

Shirley and Jack work wonderful together, they are both stubborn, both strong and dominant and it’s great to see the two get used to each other.

Shirley MacLaine is always to able to keep the core of the character and despite her stern, aggressive, sometimes seemingly unloving appearance, she makes Aurora an enormously likeable woman with a big heart.

It’s obvious in every moment of the movie that Shirley MacLaine is always aware of what she is doing, it’s a very confident but also rather calculated performance and Shirley makes sure that not one second of her onscreen-time is wasted. But this works extremely well in the context of the movie since only a powerful, overbearing performance could bring this powerful, overbearing character to life.

Her shining moments come in the second part of the movie with various big dramatic scenes that she all handles beautifully. Her scene with the nurses, asking for her daughter’s pain shot, may be one of the greatest acted scenes you will find in this category and her final moments with Debra Winger are heartbreaking.

Even though Shirley MacLaine doesn’t really impress in this movie until the final third, she gives an unforgettable and strong performance in this classic tearjerker.