🎭The Greats

In October 1741, Garrick debuted as Richard III at the unlicensed Goodman's Fields theatre, billed anonymously as "a gentleman who never appeared on any stage" to dodge both the licensing laws and the shame the profession still carried. His natural style was so startling that fashionable London jammed the streets to the East End with carriages; Alexander Pope came three times and pronounced that the young man never had his equal. Within months Garrick was the most famous performer in Britain — and in 1779 he became the first actor buried in Westminster Abbey.

In February 1915, aged seventy, Bernhardt had her right leg amputated above the knee after years of pain from an old stage injury. She refused a prosthetic, resumed performing within months, and in 1916 toured the Western Front in a sedan chair, performing for French soldiers close enough to the lines to hear the guns. She continued acting until the end — dying in 1923 during a break in shooting a film being made in her own Paris home.

For City Lights (1931), Chaplin shot the short scene in which the blind flower girl mistakes the Tramp for a rich man 342 times across many months — footage preserved in his archives shows him unable to articulate what he wanted, only that each take lacked it — and he fired and rehired his leading lady Virginia Cherrill along the way. The finished scene runs about three minutes, and the film's ending built on it is routinely called the most moving in silent cinema.

Named Best Actor for The Godfather at the 1973 Academy Awards, Brando refused the Oscar and sent the Apache activist Sacheen Littlefeather to decline it on live television, in protest at Hollywood's treatment of Native Americans and the standoff then underway at Wounded Knee. The audience booed and cheered; the moment remains the most famous refusal in the history of entertainment awards — an actor spending accumulated fame on something other than himself.

In 1946, demobilized and broke, Mifune applied for a job as an assistant cameraman at Toho Studios; his application ended up in the studio's "New Faces" acting audition instead. Asked to mime anger, he raged so convincingly that most of the jury found him unusable — until Kurosawa, drawn in from next door, later wrote that he was transfixed by "a young man reeling around the room in a violent frenzy." Kurosawa insisted the studio take him. Neither man's career made sense without the other again.

Auditioning for the 1976 King Kong remake, the young Streep listened as producer Dino De Laurentiis, assuming she could not understand, complained to his son in Italian about being brought something so ugly — "che brutta." Streep, who understood, answered him in Italian: she was sorry she was not beautiful enough to be in King Kong. She lost the part, told the story publicly decades later, and within three years of that room had won her first Academy Award.

Sridevi's range was built on a childhood spent entirely inside the industry: she debuted at four in the 1967 Tamil film Thunaivan, and at thirteen played a grown woman in Moondru Mudichu — a character who marries the widowed father of the hero played by Rajinikanth, making her his stepmother on screen while barely a teenager. After a fifteen-year hiatus at the height of her fame, her 2012 comeback English Vinglish — as a housewife mocked for her English — premiered to a standing ovation in Toronto.