actresses

Forbes’ 2023 list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women, which was released last week to rank the most successful female entrepreneurs and business leaders, features Golden Globe-winning actress and producer Reese Witherspoon in the 59th position and representing the only one in the entertainment category.  According to Forbes, Witherspoon sold a majority stake in her production company, Hello Sunshine, to a Blackstone-backed media company in August 2021.

Iranian actress Zahar Amir-Ebrahimi had to flee Iran in 2006 because of a leaked tape with private content of a sexual nature on it. Not only was she humiliated and harassed, she was also facing a prison sentence and 100 lashes for her ‘crime’.

She can be devastatingly funny, brilliantly smart, deeply emotional. She’s done theater, series, movies, and was highlighted by every award  - including several Golden Globe nominations.

Carrie Coon has been surprising us with her acting chops for a long time – ever since she suddenly appeared in Gone Girl as the sister of Ben Affleck in 2014, and at the same time became a key part of the success of The Leftovers, in which she played a woman who had lost her whole family in a strange global event. She had been preparing for a long time in the theater for that big debut on the screen: she received a nomination for a Tony for her work on Broadway in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where she also met her husband, Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Letts.

Anya Taylor-Joy plays fiercely independent characters in three movies this year: Emma Woodhouse in Emma directed by Autumn de Wilde from the 1815 novel by Jane Austen, Marie Curie’s daughter Irène in Radioactive by Marjane Satrapi with Rosamund Pike, and Marvel Comics' superhero Magik/Iliana Rasputina in The New Mutants.   She also plays teenage chess prodigy Beth Harmon in the limited series The Queen’s Gambit, created and directed by Golden Globe-nominated screenwriter Scott Frank from the 1983 novel by Walter Tevis.

Born in Sweden as Noomi Noren, Swedish actress Noomi Rapace lived in Iceland with her mother and stepfather in a town of people mostly afflicted with Down’s Syndrome. She caught the acting bug when she got a nonspeaking role in an Icelandic film at age 7, and moved back to Sweden to start her acting career when she was 15.

Outside of cinema historians and movie aficionados, the name Florence Lawrence is not likely to ring a bell, although she was in over 300 films, was considered Hollywood’s first movie star, and was known as “the Girl of a Thousand Faces. ”Florence Annie Bridgwood was born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada on January 2, 1886.

Anna May Wong was the first Chinese-American to become a movie star in Hollywood. Born in Chinatown, Los Angeles, in 1905 as Wong Liu Tsong, she worked in film, stage, and television and entered the film industry at a time of deep racism, when Caucasian actresses were cast as Chinese characters in yellowface.

This year’s Golden Globe awards saw Jodie Comer nominated for Best Performance by an Actress TV series Drama for her role as Villanelle in the groundbreaking series, Killing Eve. The same role brought her a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series as well as a BAFTA TV Award last year.

Michaela Coel’s incisive new show, I May Destroy You, is an uncompromising drama that deftly tackles themes of trauma, sexual consent, and relationships. Inspired by Coel’s own experience of sexual assault, the HBO series mixes devastating moments of distress with laugh-out-loud comedy and a searingly honest look at modern life in the UK.