The Most Famous Actresses of All Time

1. How acting fame is judged

Acting fame among women is judged on the same four tests as among men: recognition, range, influence and endurance. But the history is different, because for most of the twentieth century women were given narrower parts, shorter careers and less control over their work. An actress who survived the studio system, reinvented herself after forty, or built a career on her own terms did so against the structure of the industry, not with its help. That is part of why the great actresses are remembered with such admiration: their careers were achievements of will as well as of talent.

The numbers tell part of the story. Katharine Hepburn won four Best Actress Oscars, more than any other actor in any category. Meryl Streep has twenty-one Academy Award nominations, more than any other actor, man or woman. Bette Davis and Ingrid Bergman were each nominated ten and seven times respectively. But numbers are only a starting point. Some of the most famous actresses — Marilyn Monroe, Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn — won few competitive awards and are remembered instead for performances and images that became part of the culture itself.

This article treats fame as a global question. Hollywood dominates the lists, but Indian cinema has its own queens — Nargis, Meena Kumari, Sridevi, Waheeda Rehman — and European cinema has Sophia Loren, Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau. The most famous actresses of all time come from many traditions, and no single list can hold them all.

2. The studio-system queens

Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) won four Academy Awards for Best Actress — for Morning Glory (1933), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968) and On Golden Pond (1981) — from twelve nominations, a record in any acting category that still stands. She was famous for her independence: she wore trousers when the studios wanted gowns, she bought out her own contract, and she played women who were clever, difficult and unapologetic. Her partnership with Spencer Tracy in nine films, from Woman of the Year (1942) to Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, is one of the great screen pairings.

Bette Davis (1908–1989) won two Oscars, for Dangerous (1935) and Jezebel (1938), from ten nominations, and built a career on playing women the studios did not know how to handle: ambitious, angry, ageing, unsympathetic. Her performance in All About Eve (1950) as the ageing star Margo Channing is one of the most quoted in film history. Ingrid Bergman (1915–1982) won three Oscars — for Gaslight (1944), Anastasia (1956) and Murder on the Orient Express (1974) — and became the most beloved screen actress of her generation in Casablanca (1942), before a scandal over her private life drove her out of Hollywood for most of a decade. She returned, and the public forgave her.

Audrey Hepburn (1929–1993) won the Best Actress Oscar for her first leading role, in Roman Holiday (1953), and was nominated five times. Her image — the gamine in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), the flower seller of My Fair Lady (1964) — became a fashion ideal, but her later life mattered as much as her films: she spent her final years working for UNICEF, travelling to famine-stricken countries as a goodwill ambassador. Elizabeth Taylor (1932–2011) won two Best Actress Oscars, for Butterfield 8 (1960) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), and was the first actress whose private life was followed as closely as her films — a template for modern celebrity that she never chose and never escaped.

3. Marilyn Monroe: the myth

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) is the most famous actress who was never an awards favourite. She was nominated for only one Golden Globe as an actress and never for an Oscar, yet her image is the most reproduced in the history of film. Her comedies — Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), The Seven Year Itch (1955), Some Like It Hot (1959) — showed a comic timing that directors and co-stars praised, and her dramatic work in Bus Stop (1956) and The Misfits (1961) showed what she could have done with better parts.

Monroe's fame rests on a paradox. The studios sold her as a blonde bombshell, and she fought the image for her whole career, studying at the Actors Studio in New York and demanding serious roles. Her death at thirty-six, from an overdose of barbiturates, turned her into a myth before her work could be properly judged, and the myth has grown ever since: her dresses, her photographs, her breathy voice, her marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller. The serious reassessment of her acting began decades after her death and is still under way.

Monroe matters to this list because she shows that fame is not only about awards or even about films. It is about an image that a culture cannot let go of. No other actress has been so widely imitated, parodied, painted and quoted. Whatever the judgement on her acting, her place in the public imagination is secure — and it was earned in a career that lasted barely fifteen years.

4. The record-breaker: Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep, born in 1949, holds the record for the most Academy Award nominations of any actor, with twenty-one, and has won three: Best Supporting Actress for Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and Best Actress for Sophie's Choice (1982) and The Iron Lady (2011). Her reputation rests on range: she has played a Holocaust survivor, a British prime minister, a fashion editor, a chef, a witch, a nun and a suffragette, in American, British, Polish, Italian and Danish accents, and critics have run out of ways to say that she is good at it. Her eight Golden Globe wins and three Primetime Emmy Awards add to a record no other actor matches.

Streep's career is also a model of longevity. She has been a leading actress for five decades, moving from film to television — winning Emmys for Holocaust (1978) and Angels in America (2003) and starring in the hit series Only Murders in the Building — and back again, without ever seeming to chase fashion. Her performances in The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Doubt (2008), Julie and Julia (2009) and The Post (2017) introduced her to new generations who had not seen her early work.

In 2026 she remained as busy as ever. The Devil Wears Prada 2, in which she returns as the fashion editor Miranda Priestly alongside Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt, was released in cinemas on 1 May 2026. In September 2026 it was announced that she would voice four roles in the film Lincoln in the Bardo, with Tom Hanks as Abraham Lincoln. And she is the voice of Aslan in Greta Gerwig's The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician's Nephew, scheduled for cinemas on 12 February 2027 — a casting choice that drew wide attention, since the lion had previously been voiced by Liam Neeson. At seventy-seven, Streep is not a legacy act. She is a working actress still taking the most interesting parts on offer.

5. The modern greats

Cate Blanchett, born in 1969, has won two Academy Awards — Best Supporting Actress for The Aviator (2004) and Best Actress for Blue Jasmine (2013) — from eight nominations, and is widely regarded as the finest actress of her generation. Her range runs from Elizabeth I to Bob Dylan, and her stage work in London, Sydney and New York is as celebrated as her films. Judi Dench, born in 1934, won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Shakespeare in Love (1998), in which she appears for about eight minutes, and has been nominated eight times; her career on stage and screen spans seven decades.

Viola Davis, born in 1965, has won the Triple Crown of Acting — an Oscar, an Emmy and two Tony Awards — and is the youngest person and the first Black actor to achieve it. She won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Fences (2016) and has been nominated four times. Frances McDormand, born in 1957, has won three Best Actress Oscars — for Fargo (1996), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) and Nomadland (2020) — and a fourth Oscar as a producer of Nomadland. Jodie Foster, born in 1962, won two Best Actress Oscars before she was thirty, for The Accused (1988) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and has since become a respected director.

Kate Winslet, born in 1975, won the Best Actress Oscar for The Reader (2008) after five nominations, and has seven nominations in all. Emma Thompson, born in 1959, is the only person to have won Oscars for both acting and writing — Best Actress for Howards End (1992) and Best Adapted Screenplay for Sense and Sensibility (1995). Helen Mirren, born in 1945, won the Best Actress Oscar for The Queen (2006). Together these actresses show what the modern profession looks like: long careers, control over material, and honours earned across film, television and theatre.

6. Beyond Hollywood

Sophia Loren, born in 1934, won the Best Actress Oscar for Two Women (1961), the first ever awarded for a performance in a language other than English, and received an honorary Oscar in 1991. Her career, from Naples to Hollywood and back, made her the most famous Italian actress in the world. Catherine Deneuve, born in 1943, has been the face of French cinema since The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and Belle de Jour (1967), and was nominated for an Oscar for Indochine (1992). Jeanne Moreau (1928–2017) was the defining actress of the French New Wave, in Jules et Jim (1962) and The Lovers (1958).

Indian cinema has its own history of great actresses. Nargis (1929–1981) played the mother of modern India in Mother India (1957), the first Indian film nominated for an Academy Award. Meena Kumari (1933–1972), known as the tragedy queen, dominated the 1950s and 1960s with performances of extraordinary emotional depth. Waheeda Rehman, born in 1938, starred in Pyaasa (1957) and Guide (1965) and received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, Indian cinema's highest honour, in 2023. Sridevi (1963–2018) was the first female superstar of Hindi cinema, a comic and dramatic actress whose career spanned five decades and four languages; she died in Dubai in 2018 at the age of fifty-four.

These careers matter because they show that the greatest actresses are not all made in Hollywood. A list that ignores them is not a list of the most famous actresses in the world. It is a list of the most famous actresses in America.

7. What the lists miss

Every list of great actresses is incomplete, and the gaps are instructive. The early lists ignored Black actresses almost entirely: Hattie McDaniel won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Gone with the Wind (1939) and was the first Black actor to win an Academy Award, yet she was seated apart from her white co-stars at the ceremony and found few good parts afterwards. Dorothy Dandridge was the first Black woman nominated for Best Actress, for Carmen Jones (1954). It took until 2002 for a Black woman, Halle Berry, to win Best Actress, and until 2017 for Viola Davis to complete the Triple Crown.

The lists also ignored actresses who worked mainly in television, in theatre, or in languages other than English — and they undervalued comedy. Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball and the Indian comic actresses who carried whole films on their timing rarely appear on lists of great screen actresses, though millions of people know their work by heart. Comedy has always been the hardest acting to take seriously, and the easiest to love.

The best use of a list like this one is not to settle arguments but to start them: to watch a film by an actress you have never seen, to read about a career you had not heard of, and to notice whose names are missing and ask why. The most famous actresses of all time are not a finished group. Every generation adds to it, and the additions say as much about the generation as about the actresses.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Katharine Hepburn
• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Meryl Streep
• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Marilyn Monroe
• Wikipedia — Meryl Streep
• Wikipedia — Viola Davis
• Wikipedia — Sridevi
• Wikipedia — List of actors with Academy Award nominations

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• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.