Oliver Stone’s five favourite female actors: “Whatever she does rivets my attention”
Though most of his movies deal with overtly masculine topics, Oliver Stone has worked with some of the greatest female performers of all time.
Meg Ryan in The Doors, Cameron Diaz in Any Given Sunday, Angelina Jolie in Alexander, the list goes on. Sure, those women were basically the only female characters in their respective films, but that’s an issue for another time.
When he spoke to Deseret News in 2012, Stone was asked about some of the most talented women he hadn’t had the pleasure of working with. He gave several examples of exceptional ladies from across history, but wanted to make one thing very clear before he got underway.
“I’m going to exclude every movie that Meryl Streep has ever done,” he revealed. “Whatever she does rivets my attention.”
Strangely, these two titans of Hollywood have never crossed over. The closest they ever got was on 1996’s Evita. Stone penned the film’s screenplay while Streep was initially in the running to play Eva Perón before Madonna got the part.
After he’d gotten that out of the way, Stone devoted two of his picks to the great Marlene Dietrich. First of all, he paid tribute to her performance in the 1931 movie Dishonored. “She talks with her eyes, undresses men and makes them give her what she wants,” he said of her performance of a sex worker-turned-secret agent. “A portrait for all time.”
He also shared his affection for a film that came out three years later, The Scarlet Express. Dietrich plays a young Catherine the Great.
From a similar time period, Mildred Pierce is the story of a divorced woman who must support her two children on her own. The title role was something of a comeback for Joan Crawford, as she had left her previous studio, MGM, under a cloud some years earlier. She won ‘Best Actress’ at that year’s Oscars ceremony, famously accepting the award from her bed. Stone described her as “unbelievably good” in this role.
Skipping forward in time, we find ourselves talking about another ‘Best Actress’ winner – Faye Dunaway in Network. In this tale of an unhinged news presenter who accidentally becomes a messianic figure, Dunaway plays a young, hungry executive who struggles to balance her personal and professional lives. Stone referred to her as “one of the coldest bitches of all time,” which I think is meant to be a compliment.
In a beautifully meta moment, he also singled out Dunaway’s performance as Joan Crawford from the utterly bonkers biopic Mommie Dearest.
Finally, for his most intriguing pick, Stone went for somebody much more recent and much younger than any of his previous choices. A 13-year-old Hailee Steinfeld became an instant sensation off the back of her performance in the Coen brothers’ remake of True Grit. A young woman whose father is murdered by a gunslinger-for-hire, Mattie Ross joins a group of lawmen on the hunt for the outlaw killer.
“She plays a 14-year-old girl with a great moral center and moves mountains in her quest,” Stone remarked. “She grows into the heart and soul of a wonderful movie.”
