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Starring Claudette Colbert
1 season
With her heart-shaped face, casual elegance, and natural charm, Claudette Colbert was one of the most effortlessly sophisticated, easy-to-love stars of Hollywood’s golden age. While her deep saucer eyes could generate real pathos in tear-jerking melodramas like TORCH SINGER and IMITATION OF LIFE,...
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Starring Nicole Kidman
1 season
One of the major screen artists of our time, Nicole Kidman combines movie-star magnetism with the transformational performance style of a dedicated character actor. Whether revealing the sociopathy behind the mask of suburban “normalcy” in Gus Van Sant’s TO DIE FOR, turning her own marriage to To...
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David Bowie Changes
1 season
As a chameleon who continually reinvented his musical persona, David Bowie was a natural actor who lent his singular yet slippery presence to a number of carefully chosen, always surprising film projects. While his first major screen role in Nicolas Roeg’s hallucinatory science-fiction epic THE M...
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Starring Ida Lupino
1 season
The formidable Ida Lupino lent a defiant toughness and intelligence to some of classic Hollywood’s most unforgettable female characters. Born into a celebrated English family of music-hall artists, Lupino was initially cast in movies that showed off her charm and musical flair, but less of her un...
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Marcello Mastroianni at 100
1 season
Born one hundred years ago this September, Marcello Mastroianni made being a movie star look effortless, wearing his suave good looks and worldly sophistication with a sly, self-deprecating lightness that was perhaps only matched by his American counterpart, Cary Grant. Though he will forever be ...
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Starring Gena Rowlands
1 season
Gena Rowlands forever changed the face of screen acting with her raw emotional realism and immersive approach to performance, which blurred the lines between actor and character to the point of no return. Fearlessly exploring the extreme edges of human relationships and emotion in films like the ...
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Starring Alain Delon
1 season
The beautiful boy of French cinema whose steely, ice-blue gaze betrayed more than a hint of danger, Alain Delon was a favorite of modernists like Luchino Visconti, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Michelangelo Antonioni, all of whom were seduced by his impossible good looks and air of cool detachment. T...
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Starring Michelle Yeoh
1 season
As she reaches new heights of acclaim for her dazzling, Oscar-nominated performance in the breakout smash EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, now is the perfect time to revisit the sensational career of Michelle Yeoh. Before conquering Hollywood, the Malaysian-born actor established herself as one...
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Starring Harold Lloyd
1 season
One hundred years ago, Harold Lloyd gave the movies one of their most meme-able moments—the anxious, thrilling, clock-hanging climax of SAFETY LAST!, a film that still stands as a high-water mark of slapstick invention. Though often overlooked in favor of his more famous silent-clown contemporari...
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Starring Isabelle Huppert
1 season
Seemingly ageless even as she turns seventy this March, the incomparable French actor Isabelle Huppert is something of a paradox: an enigma who lives in front of the camera, inviting our gaze while maintaining a sense of deep, unknowable mystery. Specializing in portrayals of complex women who tr...
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Starring Bob Hoskins
1 season
A unique and blazing talent, Bob Hoskins was one of the most versatile and consistently riveting actors Britain ever produced. “Five-foot-six cubic” in his own words, Hoskins combined a brawny physicality with a vast emotional range, leading to a series of indelible performances: as a beleaguered...
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Jeanne Moreau
1 season
With her smoldering magnetism and fierce intelligence (likened by Patti Smith to “a barbed-wire fence on fire”), French screen siren Jeanne Moreau breathed unforgettable life into some of the most complex women in all of twentieth-century cinema. Already a successful stage actor when she came to ...
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Starring Monica Vitti
1 season
With her coolly magnetic performance in L’AVVENTURA, Monica Vitti (1931–2022) became the face of a new era of Italian cinema. Vitti lent her regal, striking beauty and effortless allure to three more films by director Michelangelo Antonioni, translating his ambitious ideas about modernity and ali...
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Starring Setsuko Hara
1 season
No actress represents the golden age of Japanese cinema more fully than Setsuko Hara, whose radiant, compassionate presence made her nothing less than the living symbol of the changing role of women in Japanese society. Beginning her career at age fifteen, she appeared in more than one hundred fi...
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Starring Laurence Olivier
1 season
Heralded by many as the greatest actor of his generation, Laurence Olivier wed the gravitas of a classically trained thespian with the dashing charisma of a modern movie star. After conquering the London stage in the 1930s, he went on to cement his reputation as the leading Shakespeare interprete...
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Alec Guinness
1 season
Heralded by Peter Ustinov as “the outstanding poet of anonymity” for his virtuosic ability to disappear into a role, British cinema icon Alec Guinness was the ultimate example of character actor as movie star, renowned for his nuanced, fully inhabited performances and dazzling range. Beginning hi...
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Starring Jackie Chan
1 season
Marrying the daredevil physical comedy of Buster Keaton with the martial-arts mastery of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan is an international icon whose awe-inspiring stunt work and acrobatic grace set a new standard for action spectacle. Working his way up through the Hong Kong film industry of the 1970s ...
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Starring Jean-Louis Trintignant
1 season
Intense, handsome, and gifted with a rare capacity for conveying inner turmoil and doubt, Jean-Louis Trintignant was one of the greatest actors of European art-house cinema, bringing intelligence and passion to carefully crafted performances in a number of all-time classics. After early success a...
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Starring Jean Gabin
1 season
Exuding a gruff, jaded cynicism, Jean Gabin became the defining face of pre–New Wave French cinema, embodying its downtrodden, working-class heroes with a mix of smoldering charisma and sardonic ennui. His renowned collaborations with leading directors like Jean Renoir (GRAND ILLUSION, LA BÊTE HU...
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Starring Juliette Binoche
1 season
Incandescent muse of the French cinema, Hollywood movie star, and international art-house icon: Juliette Binoche has been all of the above in her extraordinary career. Bringing nuance, intelligence, and a radiant screen presence to each of her performances, she has delved fearlessly into a wide r...
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Starring Delphine Seyrig
1 season
One of the most mesmerizing presences in European art-house cinema, Delphine Seyrig was a favorite of visionary directors such as Chantal Akerman (JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES), Marguerite Duras (INDIA SONG), and Luis Buñuel (THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE), bringin...
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Starring Toshiro Mifune
1 season
Akira Kurosawa once said, “The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression. Toshiro Mifune needed only three feet.” However, the filmmaker certainly gave Mifune—born on April 1, 1920—a lot of space: over the course of sixteen indelible collaborations, the actor...
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Starring Marcello Mastroianni
1 season
Marcello Mastroianni made being a movie star look effortless, wearing his suave good looks and worldly sophistication with a sly, self-deprecating lightness that was perhaps only matched by his American counterpart, Cary Grant. Though he will forever be remembered for his immortal collaborations ...
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Starring Wendy Hiller
1 season
British stage and screen legend Wendy Hiller was renowned for her supremely controlled, unsentimental performance style and her ability to imbue strong-willed heroines with intelligence and vigor. Though she concentrated primarily on theater for much of her career, Hiller left behind a small but ...