Miriam Hopkins

Raised in Georgia and trained as a dancer before a broken ankle turned her toward acting, Miriam Hopkins brought a Southern sharpness and a restless intelligence to the screen that made her one of the most exciting performers of the early 1930s. She was quick, sexually knowing, and unafraid to play women who were manipulative or morally slippery, qualities that flourished in the brief window before the Production Code clamped down.

Ernst Lubitsch adored her and gave her some of her finest hours: the con-artist lover matching wits with Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise (1932), and one point of the sophisticated romantic triangle in Design for Living (1933). She played Ivy, the doomed barmaid brutalized by Fredric March's monster in the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a performance of raw terror and pathos. In 1935 she made screen history as the social climber Becky Sharp in the film of that name, the first feature shot in the full three-strip Technicolor process, earning an Academy Award nomination and a permanent place in the story of color cinema.

Her reputation for professional combat was equally storied. Her feud with Bette Davis, forged when they played rivals in The Old Maid and Old Acquaintance, became Hollywood legend, complete with tales of scene-stealing tricks and off-camera warfare. Directors and co-stars found her brilliant and maddening in equal measure, a perfectionist who fought for her close-ups and rarely conceded a point.

As the Code-era studios grew wary of her difficult sexual edge, her film roles thinned, and she returned frequently to the stage, where her intelligence and technique had freer rein. She worked steadily in character parts through the 1950s and 1960s, an actress whose gifts outlasted her stardom. Sharp, sensual, and combative, Hopkins remains a favorite of connoisseurs precisely for the qualities that made her a handful: she was never dull, never soft, and never anyone's idea of a compliant leading lady.