Credit: Far Out / Alamy

Bob Dylan’s favourite golden age Hollywood actors

Mon 12 May 2025 1:30, UK

Timothée Chalamet found this out when portraying him in A Complete Unknown. Richard Gere, Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Ben Whishaw and Marcus Carl Franklin all didn’t just find out but demonstrated this fact in I’m Not There. The fact being that when you play Bob Dylan, you are playing a character first, created by Robert Zimmerman.

The idea of “Bob Dylan” has been one that the great man himself has played with from the very beginning of his career. From telling all and sundry that he’d run away from home as a kid to join a carnival, shrugging off in minutes the songs that he’d sweated over for months, the idea of being “real” or “legitimate” was one that Dylan had very modern thoughts about.

After all, today we’re all well familiar with the intricacies of dealing with a celebrity’s “identity”. On the one hand, it’s all cobblers built with the help of a billion dollar marketing industry to sell a vision of their carefully curated brand to the most amount of people. On the other, the question arises, is the most authentic version of ourselves the one we create and present to others?

Dylan was having these thoughts in the late 1950s and early 1960s, so it’s really no surprise that he’s been a fan of actors and storytellers his entire life. In an article for Interview Magazine, he talked about his favourite movie actresses. In it, he almost exclusively picks performers with the same connection to the spotlight that he played with in his early career.

Who were Dylan’s favourite actors?

Chief among them is the prototypical blonde bombshell and one of the few people who’s cultural impact dwarfs that of Dylan himself, Marilyn Monroe. In particular, Dylan singles out her breakout performance in 1950’s, The Asphalt Jungle, as his favourite. Perhaps he sees her as more than a mere actor, and someone whose experience he could actually relate to.

After all, he has spent his entire working life running from any attempt by the public eye to define him. Maybe that’s inspired by what he saw happen to Monroe. On the surface, both of them hid their “true” identities behind pseudonyms, but then, you get to another question: Were they hiding their true selves, or defining it?

Dylan’s other favourites included Jane Russell, for her work in The Outlaw. Then, there’s Dorothy Dandridge for a movie whose name seems to escape Dylan, saying that it was one she “really needed, with Trevor Howard”. All signs point to it being Moment of Danger (also known as Malaga, depending on the territory). Dylan’s memory really does seem to be outdoing itself on this list because he can’t remember the movie he loves most for his first pick on the list, Hedy Lamarr.

Charmingly, though, his final pick is saved for Darla Hood, who makes the list for her work on Our Gang, a series of children’s film serials that gave the world The Little Rascals. After all, we can cultivate the most refined and sophisticated taste possible, but what we loved as a child stays with us a whole lot longer than anything else.