Bonjour! Robert Balkovich here. As the 70th Cannes film festival kicks off let's take a stroll down memory lane and revisit some of the most bold, daring, and 100% correct Best Actress awards the festival has given out.
When you look at the list of names all together it's hard to argue that it isn't one of the best collection of actors ever grouped. The festival's penchant for awarding the best-of-the-best, started early...
Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn were early winners for All About Eve and A Long Day's Journey Into Night, respectively. Early non-English language giants awarded included the beloved Soviet actress Tatiana Samoilova for The Cranes Are Flying and Sophia Loren for Two Women, the latter of which would go on to be the first non-English language performance to win an Academy Award.
One thing the festival has always done is award incredible iconoclastic performances that get ignored by mainstream award institutions. Shelley Duvall's fast talking, shape shifting work in Robert Altman's 3 Women, Isabelle Huppert's terrifying study of desire in The Piano Teacher, and brilliantly unhinged Julianne Moore in Maps to the Stars are all career best works by brilliant actresses that were, for one reason or another, snubbed in the US. Lars von Trier has made a cottage industry of directing Best Actress winners. Björk, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Kristen Dunst all won for challenging, brave, and in the case of Gainsbourg, extremely controversial performances. Only Björk got mainstream attention via a Golden Globe nod.
One of my favorite decisions was in 2006 when the entire female cast of Pedro Almodovar's Volver won Best Actress. Penelope Cruz, former multi-Razzie award nominee, went on to get her first Oscar nomination for her leading roleand was able to brush off the rocky start to her US film career.
The festival also has a strong history of recognizing great performances that did go on to awards recognition in the US. Sally Field and Holly Hunter won both the Cannes award and the Academy Award for Norma Rae and The Piano, while Meryl Streep got her Cannes notice for her Oscar nominated work in A Cry in the Dark (in my opinion, the second best performance of her career behind Sophie's Choice).
That's just a smattering of some of the most recognizable "best" from Cannes. The entire list of winners contains some of the best performances every committed to screen by actresses the world over. Who are some of your favorites to win the award?