By: Ingrid Schorr

Playing twins who change places, a teenager who swaps bodies with her mother, and a couple of appealing outcasts who find a way in, LINDSAY LOHAN (born 1986) once portrayed duality with an irresistible coarseness. […]

By: Jason Grote

My heart still skips a beat when I look at old Rolling Stone photos of GILDA RADNER (1946-89), an early childhood crush and, then as now, one of America’s greatest comediennes — and it still […]

By: Joshua Glenn

From Abbott, the courtly assassin in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, to the un-manly yet indefatigable Joel Cairo, in The Maltese Falcon, PETER LORRE (1904-64) mocked or otherwise subverted the very concept of […]

By: Greg Rowland

While it’s conventional to call Oliver Hardy a “straight man,” it would be more accurate to think of the character created by British comic actor STAN LAUREL (1890- 1965) as the duo’s “curved man.” Though […]

By: Mimi Lipson

With his casual athleticism and big white teeth, with his good-looking features that somehow fail to coalesce into good looks, BRUCE DERN (born 1936) is the dropout personified — the kid who had every advantage […]

By: Joe Alterio

PAM GRIER (b. 1949) was the Joan of Arc of late-night UHF-TV, when such a thing still existed. Starting with The Big Dollhouse (1971), a film which absolutely must be seen on drugs to be […]

By: Peggy Nelson

JIMMY STEWART (1908-97) endlessly reprised Everyman… yet his most iconic films are perfect set pieces of horror. Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, supposedly a Christmas classic, is a vicious exposé of the underpinnings of capitalism. […]

By: Mimi Lipson

We’ve fallen out of touch with TORI SPELLING (born 1973) lately. We haven’t read her best-selling autobiography or seen any of her three reality shows, but never mind. We’ll always have 90210. Her casting as […]

By: David Smay

Without question, YVONNE CRAIG (born 1937) had the coolest TV credits of the Sixties: Batman, Mission: Impossible, Star Trek, 77 Sunset Strip, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Wild Wild West. Even knowing that she was a […]

By: Mimi Lipson

JAMES MASON (1909–1984), actor, gave us Brutus, Captain Nemo, Hugo Drax. But above all, he gave us a Humbert Humbert who was elegant yet never effete, and through whose doleful, non-specifically European eyes we somehow […]

By: Mimi Lipson

Rest in peace, BEA ARTHUR (1922–2009). She was intelligent, decent, effortlessly funny, and she was old-school show-biz. We adored her as Maude in her signature smock-vests and slacks: broadcasting suburban liberal values with that trumpet-like […]

By: Peggy Nelson

An icon as much for her chin line and Ivy League drawl (which possibly she made up; they certainly didn’t talk like that at Cornell!), KATHARINE HEPBURN (1907-2003) was a strong and independent woman, perhaps […]

By: David Smay

The avuncular hillbilly par excellence.