Entertainment icons of the century

October 29, 2005
Marilyn Monroe: One of the greatest entertainment icons of the past
100 years.

Marilyn Monroe: One of the greatest entertainment icons of the past 100 years.

Variety magazine editors Steven Gaydos, Carole Horst and Steve Chagollan explain how they compiled their list of 100 greatest entertainment icons.

PARING an Enter­tainment Icons of the Century list to a mere 100 was a daunting task. We measured our icons by creative, commercial and social impact, weighing factors such as international recognisability but also taking account of innovation, emulation and odds against success.

We polled the entertainment community, Variety's far-flung editorial team and our readers via www.Variety.com and the result was the Beatles took out the top spot.

We learnt along the way the difference between "iconic" and "impactful". Some of the greatest figures in entertainment history changed the way we think about and relate to their art form and our world.

But they weren't icons.

Some remarkable artists from decades ago were iconic in their day, but unlike Chaplin, their artistic impact waned or virtually disappeared. So they were icons for a while but their iconic status hasn't endured. Some working in the past decade or so show great promise, but they're not yet iconic.

Finally, there were individuals who were iconic, impactful and enduring but there was another figure from their particular field who outshone them.

Here's to the symbols of the past century of entertainment. May they inspire, intimidate and motivate everyone toiling in the biz today to make the list 100 years from now.


A lifetime's assemblage of neurotic New York Jewish eccentricities has concealed a polymath who's worked brilliantly in several careers. Woody Allen's literary output alone would put him in the pantheon of great American humor writers such as Robert Benchley and S.J. Perelman. He's been a top standup comedian and TV comedy writer. And as actor, director and screenwriter, he's absorbed the influences of Bergman and Fellini, among other greats, in making movies - including Annie Hall - that have won eight Academy Awards, either for themselves or the people who appear in them.


Spaniard Pedro Almodovar films from the gut, directly, about large issues: unrequited passion, maternal love. But his feminist, radically tolerant cinema could only flower in a democracy.


His smile alone would captivate millions around the world, but it was Armstrong's distinctive trumpet playing and singing style that set him apart from virtually every American musician who came before and after. The songs Armstrong made between 1925 and '29 include some of the most important recordings in the history of jazz, which was then breaking out as America's most popular music and would become its greatest export to the world. His solos were the models for millions of musicians' solos that followed over the next eight decades.


"Fred and Ginger." Shorthand for dancing. "He gives her class. She gives him sex," quipped Katharine Hepburn. Paramount dismissed Astaire with "Can't sing. Can't act. Slightly balding. Also dances." So he went to RKO, where he clicked with actress Rogers in 1933's Flying Down to Rio. The duo shot to superstardom in their nine subsequent films, injecting Depression-era America with carefree ballroom and tap-dance numbers set to sophisticated songs.


The "Creole Goddess" exploded onto the Paris stage in the 1920s, thrilling the haute bourgeois with her unique mix of song, dance, sex, satire and comedy - and a skirt made of bananas. African-American Josephine Baker thrived in France as she could not do in her native US, where she was viewed askance as an exotic novelty act. But she was a woman of substance, using her wealth and fame to mask World War II espionage work and adopting a Rainbow Tribe of 12 children in her fight against US segregation.


The red hair, the giant eyes, the rubber face: Those were the physical tools that Lucille Ball used to ply her comic craft so expertly. When she died in 1989 at 78, the White House issued a statement noting that, "No television program in history was better-named than I Love Lucy ... she was Lucy, and she was loved."


With pouty lips and a lush mane of blonde hair, Brigitte Bardot's beauty and body created a sensation when, at 18, she starred as the wardrobe-challenged Girl in the Bikini. She created further fuss at 22 in And God Created Woman as an amoral girl who just wanted to have fun. She became a jet-set superstar after that, but, after some 40 films, retired in 1974, devoting her time to animal rights' activism.


If any band can be said to epitomise an era, then the Beatles will be forever identified with the '60s. They took up rock 'n' roll from where Elvis Presley left off, and synthesised it with a myriad of other musical styles, breaking new ground with each succeeding album. Melodies became more inventive, harmonies defied all known rules, rhythms and time signatures became complex, and lyrics became insightful and addressed serious topics never before tackled in popular music. For all these reasons, even long after the Fab Four went their separate ways, the Beatles remain the greatest entertainment icon of the past 100 years.


If drollness as a mode of modern expression has a godfather, it's Jack Benny. Forget your Letterman, Maher, even Carson. No, the master of the long, ironic pause, the exasperated retort, the fixed glare is Benny, the once and future king of comedy. The celebrated cheapness and bad violin playing were Benny's trademarks.


He lived the American Dream, this Russian emigrant born Israel Baline. Raised poor on New York's Lower East Side, he would soon write a pop song that made him famous, Alexander's Ragtime Band. Its success was followed by a long list of equally beloved songs, including the anthemic God Bless America. His contribution to the movies included Top Hat, White Christmas.


Berry duck-walked, played a chiming guitar and leered but, most important, was the "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" who subtly addressed racism in his lyrics while unsubtly proving that an African-American rocker (this was the '50s, remember?) was as witty, elegant and perceptive as Cole Porter and Noel Coward.


After a major break in The Petrified Forest the formerly suave male ingenue had morphed completely into a major Hollywood tough guy, an image solidified by roles in High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon. By the time of Casablanca, Bogart was a bona fide screen icon, but it was after his death in 1957 that he was rediscovered by the rebellious youth of the '60s and made a perfect college-kid poster boy for the timeless virtues of principled rebellion, world-weariness and romantic pessimism.


When Marlon Brando died on July 1, 2004, the obits were filled with praise for the seismic shift he brought to acting and remorse for the squandered talent that reflected Brando's ambivalence toward his own profession. What added to Brando's mystique went beyond his leather-clad pose in The Wild One and his authoritative rasp as The Godfather - his obsessive need for privacy, his activism on behalf of Native Americans, and his ability to turn the tables on Hollywood.


Lenny Bruce's iconic status was pretty much assured even before his death by heroin overdose in 1966, but lost in the reverence for "Saint Lenny" is the fact that he was damn funny. Bruce was to comedy what the Beats were to literature. He riffed on pop culture, movies, race relations and had a lovely way with a phrase. He questioned authority.


Cagney brought such bantamweight energy to his Depression and World War II era movie roles that it's hard to tell whether the cinematic rise of the urban underclass would have had as much pizzazz without him. No film retrospective fails to include the breakfast scene in 1931's The Public Enemy, where he jams a grapefruit half into his yappy girlfriend's face.


Though she called Rosa Ponselle, another American-born soprano, "the greatest singer of us all," many would beg to differ with Maria Callas, diva of divas for legions of fans and undoubtedly the most recognised female opera star of the 20th century. True, Callas' early death (at 53), her beauty, tempestuous love life (epitomised by her affair with Aristotle Onassis) and stormy career all contribute to her legend.


When Carson took his final Tonight Show bow May 22, 1992, more than 50 million viewers showed up to see the King of Late Night practice his craft one last time. Carson spent an astounding 30 years on the talk-show throne, inspiring a generation of comedians, broadcasters and hosts.


From the beginning of his career with Sam Phillips' Sun label in the mid-'50s, Cash, rough-hewn as a pine log, was only ever "himself". I Walk the Line and Folsom Prison Blues boomed out his distinctive bass register and no one mistook Cash for anyone else. Loyal followers of the "Man in Black" refused to accept his banishment from country radio and be consoled by the embrace of those discovering Cash as the guy who covered a Trent Reznor song.


The immigrant comic genius who would make America laugh through the Great Depression, Charlie Chaplin arrived in Hollywood in 1914, at the right moment in history to ride an emerging mass medium into immortality. He had a gift for creating images and scenarios that resonated across the social strata, and spanned some 70 films. The coming of sound - against which Chaplin stubbornly held out through the making of his classic Modern Times in 1936 - diminished the magic of his art.


When Charles unveiled his uniquely passionate version of America the Beautiful, he came mighty close to creating a new national anthem. Charles was the first performer to bring the music of the church into the secular world. He altered America's R&B tastes, driving away from blues-based material and ballads and toward the music that became the roots of rock 'n' roll.


Without a doubt the most reluctant rock star ever to scale the music's highest peaks, Kurt Cobain sang as if he were trying to rip his heart out of his own chest. Unfortunately, he also lived his life that way. Nirvana's frontman was obsessively true to the ideals of underground rock - ideals that informed the way he went about subverting "the biz" and the way he played his music.


Tall, lean, handsome, modest, decent - no other movie star personified the American male ideal like Cooper. But the Montana native's intellect and subtle sophistication and rough glamour - he was friends with artists like Picasso and writers like Hemingway - informed the deeper layer of his acting. Coop's pure physical presence also marked him indelibly in audience's minds and his delivery of Lou Gehrig's farewell speech in can still make grown men - and women - weep.


Cosby was a popular and original comedian (he was the rival of Newhart, Winters and Carlin in his day) with a decent TV background, including a starring role in the hip espionage series I Spy, but The Cosby Show propelled him to the upper echelons of stardom.


Famously known at one point as the "Most Trusted Man in America," Cronkite was the face of broadcast news for a generation. Invited into Americans' houses each night, Uncle Walter served as a solid, reliable presence during difficult times.


"Fasten your seatbelts; it's going to be a bumpy night," she declared as Margo Channing in All About Eve. Moviegoers were happy to go along for the ride when this bug-eyed spitfire was dealing out the bon mots. Never a beauty, Bette Davis managed to crash the Hollywood party with talent and sheer force of personality, dominating the late '30s and '40s with 10 Oscar nominations and two wins.


Miles Davis loomed as the Picasso of modern jazz. Schooled at Julliard, mentored by Charlie Parker and the most influential band leader of the '50s and '60s, Davis embodied all the ideals that made Picasso immortal. From the Birth of the Cool to the modal musings of Kind of Blue, Davis was a trailblazer.


Dean brought such a contagious rash of quirks, tics, pauses and eccentricities to his roles that whole succeeding generations of young male actors have been considered at risk - most virulently those who've come out of the Actors' Studio. He made only three movies, but his style has been so diluted through imitation that it's almost impossible to describe the meteoric impact he had on his contemporaries and pubescent boomers. Dean was 24 when he was killed in a car crash, fixing his image in our irretrievable past.


At 28, Dietrich still had some baby fat when she served notice in Europe's first talkie, The Blue Angel. But as a teenager she'd lived through the ghastliest war in human history. She made some good and important American movies - Judgment at Nuremberg, Witness for the Prosecution - but was never fully a part of Hollywood. She was too international, and looked as glamorous in men's clothes as she did in slinky gowns, which didn't sit well with the heartland.


Douglas exhibited an intensity and forcefulness on screen that is inimitable, even by son Michael. As testament to his incredible range the cleft-chinned leading man with the athletic build received AFI's Life Achievement Award in 1991 and an honorary Oscar in 1995.


Before folk icon Dylan could rest on the laurels gained from penning some of the key anthems of his generation, including Blowin' in the Wind, he heard the Beatles and Stones and morphed into a lean and mean rocker who was to transform music - and the world - with songs such as Like a Rolling Stone and albums like Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. After Dylan hit his stride, no one stopped anymore at Tin Pan Alley.


He could have begun coasting a long time ago, through westerns or Dirty Harry spinoffs - the definitive, intractable loner. Eastwood's lean, leathery figure kept striding into new territory, middle age being the most difficult and dangerous - especially in Hollywood. Over the past decade, as actor, director or both, he's reached deeper levels of affecting work.


This one man managed to write or co-write an estimated 2,000 compositions - about a 100 of which landed in the Great American Songbook - creating an instantly recognisable sound that could not be duplicated, kept a big band running continuously for a half-century, toured compulsively, and carried on a busy social life.


Fellini's formula for creating his masterpiece 81/2 was a hero named Guido, a director who wants to make a movie and is being stopped by not knowing what movie to make. So thank heavens 21st-century Hollywood filmmakers are finding inspiration in comic books and not in Fellini films, as did American directors of the '60s and '70s.


Revered by millions of fans as the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin's ascension to the throne was practically pre-ordained. She grew up singing in her father's Baptist church, and in her mid-20s began recording with Southern R&B musicians. The result was an electrifying run of late '60s classics - Respect, I Never Loved a Man, Chain of Fools, Do Right Woman, Think and Natural Woman, among others.


Undershirt sales crashed after he appeared without one as a tart-tongued newspaperman in 1934's It Happened One Night and his "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" dismissal of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind is one of cinema's immortal moments. Clark Gable radiated a jaunty self-assurance and roguish masculinity.


"We had faces then," Gloria Swanson says in Sunset Boulevard of filmdom's early stars. Few fit the line as well as Garbo. With her porcelain skin, arched brows and long lashes, the lithe Swedish beauty captured the public imagination in the '20s and '30s as the epitome of movie star glamour. Last seen onscreen in 1941, her famous reclusiveness only added to her myth and mystery.


She started in showbiz at three and died before extricating herself from its suffocating hold. In the interim, she gave her adoring fans Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz; the Andy Hardy movies, with Mickey Rooney; Meet Me in St.Louis; The Harvey Girls; Easter Parade; and A Star Is Born - to say nothing of plenty of amazing records. When the pics petered out, she faced her public by singing to them in person. Her decline was precipitous, yet her death, at 47, was somehow still a shock.


Grant's leading-man good looks - he's still the benchmark for polished sophistication - played counterpoint to his comic gift, in classics like Bringing up Baby, Arsenic and Old Lace, Philadelphia Story and His Girl Friday. The face and the comedy often overshadowed his dramatic turns.


The movies had already become a popular entertainment medium by the time David Wark Griffith made Birth of a Nation in 1915. He brought so many innovations to filmmaking that instead of listing them it would be easier to say that every subsequent movie has either been an homage to or reaction against his discoveries.


How different would America be if at every sporting and social event its citizens gathered and sang Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land, celebrating their country's natural wonders and the common ownership of its land and government instead of a ditty extolling warfare and pyrotechnic munitions? Guthrie's career was stifled first by his leftist politics, then the ravages of the disease Huntington's chorea.


Playwright Vaclav Havel led the "Velvet Revolution" that freed Czechoslovakia from the Soviet yoke, and become that nation's first president under freedom.


Edith Head remains the most recognisable costume designer in the world with 35 Oscar nominations, eight statuettes and 750 film credits.


What set Hendrix apart was the combination of fear and anticipation from audiences who couldn't be certain whether he was going to strum his six-string, make love to it or set it on fire. The Seattle-ite backed up his peacock strut with jaw-dropping technique that remained rooted in the blues tradition.


From her inspired film performances (Sabrina, Roman Holiday, Breakfast at Tiffany's, My Fair Lady) to her work as a UNICEF ambassador, Audrey Hepburn brought a singular level of class and grace to Hollywood. With her penchant for couture, she became a groundbreaking style icon in an era of sexpot starlets.


A revelation when she burst on to the Hollywood scene in 1932 with her inimitably patrician voice and impeccable bone structure, Katharine Hepburn personified the independent American woman. Combining a tomboy spirit, fierce beauty and no-nonsense intelligence, she managed to be funny, touching and a lady - and made it work through seven decades and 12 Oscar nominations, four of which she won.


Stepping into the shower never again seemed safe after his Psycho ushered in a new era of modern, psychological horror films. Cinema's acknowledged master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock was also a master of self-promotion, and one of the few filmmakers in history whose name above the title guaranteed a hit.


Billie Holiday came to personify the dark side of the jazz life but she was a courageous, extraordinarily communicative singer, never afraid to take a stand such as the anti-lynching anthem Strange Fruit.


On paper it looked like one of the most improbable match-ups in show business. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby were already legends in the making when they teamed up in 1940 to make The Road to Singapore. The duo fell right in step, like an amiable golf pairing who left their egos at the clubhouse.


Houdini excelled at thrilling, death-defying escapes. An immigrant, he became a household word and one of the most popular entertainers in the world from 1899 to his death in 1926.


Despite all the bizarre behavior and courtroom drama of recent years, Michael Jackson's status in the pop pantheon cannot be dismissed. He led the Jackson 5 to sales of more than 100 million records, and repeated the feat as a solo artist with such hit-producing goldmines as Off the Wall.


Though he recorded fewer than 30 songs over a single seven-month period in the 1930s, Mississippi's Robert Johnson changed the world. His earthshaking blues would help ignite a cultural revolution with rock 'n' roll in the 1950s.


A white man in black face singing Mammy puts our racially sensitive nerves on edge, but Lithuanian-born Asa Yoelsen came up through the hurly-burly of Tin Pan Alley and the immigrant experience to touch the deep nostalgia and old-country longing that gripped so many people in the new land, especially in New York.


Janis Joplin exploded at the Monterey Pop Festival during 1967's Summer of Love, propelled from anonymity to superstar with songs like Ball and Chain, Me and Bobby McGee and Piece of My Heart. Joplin lived as hard as she sang, dying of an overdose in 1970 at age 27.


Gene Kelly's megawatt smile and athletic grace injected the movie musical with new vitality in the 1940s and '50s. An American in Paris, which contains a 17-minute ballet sequence; and Singin' in the Rain, with its numerous eye-popping dance numbers put him on the road to stardom.


Kelly's classic, aristocratic beauty and cool demeanor rocketed her to stardom in the 1950s after a string of hits including High Noon, Mogambo and The Country Girl, for which she won an Oscar in 1954. She captured the imagination of the public with her fairytale wedding to Prince Rainier. The world mourned her death in a car accident in 1982.


People love dogs, and none is as beloved as Lassie. She's been a pop-culture star since 1938, when the courageous collie first appeared in a short story. She made her 1943 film debut in MGM's Lassie Come Home, co-starring Roddy McDowall and Elizabeth Taylor. Part of the key to her success is her breed: She's a work dog, so she is smart and loyal, and beautiful.


Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy made their debut together in Forty-Five Minutes From Hollywood. They became arguably the funniest comedy team in movie history, with a slow-build slapstick style that no one has been able to duplicate.


Before Jackie Chan and Jet Li there was Bruce Lee, the rather mysterious but wildly popular action hero whose kung fu moves birthed the martial-arts genre in American film. Lee's untimely death (he was 32) catapulted him to legend status.


He shot to fame in the '50s as the wisecracking, spastic funnyman to suave, crooning straight man Dean Martin. His over-the-top physical comedy and rubber face became his trademarks, and later led to health problems.


"Awopbopaloobopawopbamboom." Fifty years ago last month, Little Richard "got down with it" and cut Tutti Frutti. His records scared the daylights out of 1950s America and inspired the Beatles and Bob Dylan to "tell Aunt Mary about Uncle John."


At 19, she made her film debut and quickly became a star in her home country. Hollywood came knocking, and she conquered the world with her earthy sensuality. In 1961, she became the first lead actor to win an Oscar for a foreign-language performance (Two Women).


McQueen enrolled in the Actors' Studio in 1952 and went to Broadway in A Hatful of Rain then into films such as The Great Escape and Bullitt. The King of Cool, he had the most economical, diamond-hard, all-of-a-piece style of any actor of his generation. McQueen lost his battle with cancer in 1980.


Her polished, stylish videos of dance-influenced, catchy pop propelled Madonna into instant icon status. She had 17 consecutive top 10 hits starting in 1984, and millions of fans worldwide adopted her looks.


Through anthems of revolution and swaying lullabies about love, Bob Marley rose from Third World poverty and gave a voice to under-represented people the world over. A Rastafarian who died of cancer in 1981 at 36, Marley's music had an international reach.


Groucho Marx eclipsed his other brothers, Zeppo, Chico, Harpo and Gummo, as the headmaster of their chaotic brand of comedy. The musically gifted brothers turned out insanely anarchic films where nothing was sacred and no pun was left unsaid.


He epitomised the world-weary lover - the very image of the charming European that American women dreamed about encountering near the Trevi Fountain. He was Federico Fellini's alter ego, a partnership that kicked off famously with 1960's La Dolce Vita and continued with 81/2 - a film that cemented his onscreen Latin lover persona.


The ripe blonde who was supposed to be both ornamental and negligible became a Hollywood cliche. But the moviegoer's eye kept drifting her way. There was something about her that altogether exuded luminous sensuality. She became the most voyeuristically photographed and written-about woman in America.


The Nation magazine once termed the Walt Disney Co. "a national entertainment state," but in fact it's a global empire. As a company, it owns one of the top 50 economies in the world. "I hope that we never lose sight of one thing," said founder Walt Disney. "It was all started by a mouse."


CBS-based Murrow was a newsman who forged his beliefs and reporting in the fires of World War II, heroically broadcasting radio reports during the Battle of Britain in 1939 to an America still hiding behind an isolationist wall. He helped end Joseph McCarthy's crusade against Communism.


Newman gave the world the callous, womanising cowhand of Hud; the hard-headed rebel prisoner of Cool Hand Luke; and the self-destructive pool shark of The Hustler. Like few of the method-acting legends of the '50s he made his career last a lifetime with extensive charity work and a good marriage.


The charismatic Jack Nicholson holds the centre of many of the iconic films of the '70s and '80s. But it was as Randle McMurphy, the swaggering nonconformist who up ends a mental ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - perhaps the most daring, outsider film ever to sweep the Oscars - that the actor truly blew the minds and won the hearts of his sophisticated generation (and the first of three Academy Awards).


He was a consummate thespian, dashing and intense in his youth; stalwart, serious and yearning in his middle years; and sage and a bit wry at the end. His finest screen achievements were documents of his stage successes: the Oscar-winning Henry V (1944) and Hamlet (1948), Richard III (1956) and The Entertainer (1960).


This little yellow guy from Japan ushered in the videogame era, taking the nation by storm in 1981. Pong hit the market first, but Pac-Man - with a permanent grin and boundless appetite - gave games a personality.


Nothing says absinthe, Gauloises and steak frites like Edith Piaf. When she sang La Vie en Rose, a chanson of her own composition became her signature tune. She was a survivor of an unhappy childhood, troubled times and unhappy romances which translated into her raw singing style. Cancer killed her at 47.


As a 24-year-old, Pickford portrayed a 12-year-old in 1917's The Poor Little Rich Girl. The rise of "America's Sweetheart" dovetailed with the explosive popularity of American films around the world. The Pickford-Douglas (Fairbanks) pairing still plays in the public imagination as unspeakably glamorous.


His ardent disenchantment as a priest in 1951's Cry, the Beloved Country was a pitch-perfect reading of South Africa's hope and despair. You could almost smell the anger, fear and desperation he felt as a convict on the run, handcuffed to a white man in The Defiant Ones. He was tougher than any of the classroom hoodlums in Blackboard Jungle.


With his recordings of That's all Right for Sun Records through to Heartbreak Hotel for RCA Presley changed the look and direction of American popular music. He was the first artist to synthesise the energy of jump blues, the sentiment of country music and the passion of gospel into one unique package and then dress it up with a pompadour, a curl of the upper lip and a swivel of the hips. The King is the bestselling solo artist in US history, having sold 117.5 million albums.


No actor has made a greater art of restraint. His film choices have been for the most part impeccable and include a number of classics, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Way We Were, The Sting and All the President's Men. His debut as a director landed him an Oscar for Ordinary People, but unlike Eastwood and Costner, he's kept his work in front of the camera and behind separate.


In a partnership with Lorenz Hart, Rodgers had written the music for some of the wittiest and most sophisticated songs ever penned. Hammerstein had been the moving force behind the enormously influential Show Boat (1927). They collaborated first on the seminal Oklahoma! (1943), then on Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951) and The Sound of Music (1959), among others.


The Oklahoma-bred humorist, newspaper columnist and "cowboy philosopher" became one of the most famous and beloved Americans of his time. So freeflowing was his repartee that studio boss Sam Goldwyn hired a scribbler to follow him around the lot, recording pearls of wit that could be used in his movies.


The distinction of "the world's greatest rock 'n' roll band" is hard to dispute when it comes to the Rolling Stones. Their career ran parallel to the Beatles and virtually every other hall-of-famer who hailed from the rock renaissance of the late '60s/early '70s. And yet the Stones are still recording and performing like a well-oiled machine. Everyone from Patti Smith to Aerosmith owes a debt to the Stones and their outlaw image, but nobody can tout their staying power.


Offscreen, he married as often as Elizabeth Taylor; the first of his eight wives was Ava Gardner. A hardworking child actor, when he teamed up with fellow MGM baby Judy Garland, movie magic happened. Their irrepressible "Let's put on a show!" energy made them enormous stars, which Rooney parlayed into the beloved Andy Hardy series. .


They talked the talk but also walked the walk, terrorising media mavens and little old ladies alike with foul-mouthed screeds about anarchy and spilled bodily fluids. That sensationalised image may have burned the band into the collective consciousness back in the '70s, but their legacy endures thanks to the unshakable immediacy of those buzzsaw anthems.


A stint as a dancer for smut-hop kingpins Digital Underground let him get in touch with his inner pimp. His raps usually stayed closer to the former blueprint, laced as they were with incendiary, often violent imagery that was mirrored by his lengthy arrest record.


He was first called The Voice, then the Chairman of the Board, Il Padrone and Ol' Blue Eyes - and each of these nicknames evokes one or more facets of Frank Sinatra's colossal impact on popular culture. His screen career was spotty, but his Oscar for From Here to Eternity paved the way for fine work in such films as The Man With the Golden Arm and The Manchurian Candidate. Ultimately, as Sinatra's magnetic presence fades into memory, his artistry prevails.


Ocean swimming would never be the same after stunned movie-goers watched the shark attack in Jaws in the summer of 1975. Spielberg became a household word and the most popular filmmaker of his era with movies such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Jurassic Park and Schindler's List.


He represented America's most ideal view of itself. In movies like The Philadelphia Story Stewart built his stardom and he has a permanent place in our hearts for his role as self-sacrificing George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life. He also shone in dark Westerns like Winchester '73 and courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder.


Russian-born, cosmopolitan composer Igor Stravinksy was a primitivist, neoclassicist, even a reluctant atonalist. But more than anything, he was an iconoclast, breaking music's rules early on with The Rite of Spring (1913), which so startled its first audience that it provoked a riot.


She took the supper clubs and cabarets of Gotham by storm, then unleashed her amazing pipes on Broadway. Streisand used her saucy sexuality to comic acclaim and won an Oscar in 1969 for Funny Girl. She produced, directed, and used her voice on the political campaign trail.


The Supremes represented the culmination of all the girl groups that came before them and the business model for those who came after. Led by Diana Ross' cooing soprano, The Supremes worked with their label's A-list writers, arrangers, musicians and choreographers to create polished, lasting pop gems such as You Can't Hurry Love and Baby Love.


Tarantino has elevated pulp and pop sensibilities to their own kind of genre: the hipster homage from his 1992 directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs, to the recent Kill Bill volumes 1 and 2.


Despite her two Oscars and landmark AIDS charity work, violet-eyed Liz - who went from breathless child star in National Velvet to sultry sex siren in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and one of the most beautiful women to grace the silver screen. She was the first star to be paid $1 million for a film, Cleopatra, where she launched her jet-set romance with Richard Burton.


This almost sinfully adorable, curly-haired, tap-dancing, bedimpled tot was acting by three and Hollywood's top star by eight. She remarkably dodged the pitfalls that befell so many others, instead retiring from films graduating to a life of public service as ambassador to Ghana and the former Czechoslovakia.


When Rudolph Valentino died in 1926 crowds of up to 100,000 caused a riot at his Gotham funeral; millions mourned worldwide. Valentino was the first matinee idol, the first movie star, the first sex symbol.


Long before he cemented his status as a Hollywood hawk with the pro-Vietnam politics of The Green Berets, John Wayne was known as the Duke. The Oscar for True Grit might have been dismissed as a career achievement award, but the saddle-weary stance, that deliberate way of spitting out words like "Pilgrim" and that trademark furrowed brow were vintage Americana.


No one since D.W. Griffith brought more innovation to movies than Welles did in 1941's Citizen Kane, which many critics consider the best film ever made. He panicked the nation into thinking Martians had landed in New Jersey with his radio broadcast of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds.


West personified the sexually liberated woman at a time when that could get you arrested - and she was, for her play Sex. She became a celluloid smash. She made only a handful of films, but they not only launched the career of Cary Grant, they gave us snappy double entendres.


In the 50-plus years since his untimely death, country music legend Hank Williams' influence has only deepened. But sadly the current country music scene he helped create shows no sign he ever existed. The mournful melodies and lyrics of songs like I Can't Help It and I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, wouldn't attract one bland country radio programmer today.


Oprah turned a childhood proclivity for public speaking into a career centred on talk. And that talk is not cheap - the daytime doyenne is worth more than $1 billion. After 21 years, the her daily chatfest still rules the airwaves. Her empire has expanded into a line of Oprah magazines and prolific production company Harpo Prods, which birthed syndication hit "Dr. Phil" as well as a number of acclaimed telefilms and features.


Since his debut as Motown's "12-year old Genius," Stevie Wonder's virtuoso gifts as a composer, vocalist and musician have achieved a ripple effect on R&B ever since. His voice - elastic, rangy, emotional, breathtaking - can achieve more than a whole phalanx of instruments.

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