"65"

Today, the name Jennifer Jones is largely lost to history, but in her prime, this raven-haired beauty was one of Hollywood’s most bankable female stars. And her personal story may be more dramatic than any of her movies.

Eli Wallach was known as one of our most versatile performers. Though Jewish, he played Mexican, Italian, and assorted other ethnic characters with the same fluency and assurance.

Never a big star but a welcome fixture in westerns and film noirs over three decades, Dan Duryea specialized in playing the heel. In those kinds of parts, no one could touch him.

With the gradual passing of opening movie credits, we also lost a vital element that distinguishes many so-called “classic” movies: the original music score, including a heroic, memorable opening theme. What’s the last film you remember that had a score you could hum while walking home from the theater — a piece of music you knew you'd always remember and associate with the film?

Sir Anthony Hopkins, the scarily brilliant actor who played the scarily brilliant Hannibal Lecter in 1991’s “The Silence of the Lambs,” turns 80 this New Year’s Eve.

If you look around at what’s coming out in movie theaters today, you’ll notice a lot of fantasy titles, superhero installments, high-tech animation, over-the-top action films and a few broad (usually very broad) comedies. Whatever happened to serious drama?

It’s sad but true that the bygone film directors we tend to remember are those associated with specific types of films (think Hitchcock for suspense and John Ford for Westerns), while the more versatile players somehow get lost in the fog.

The actress who in 1938 came out of nowhere to win the most coveted role in Hollywood once said: “I'm not a film star; I am an actress. Being a film star is such a false life, lived for fake values and for publicity… Actresses go on for a long time and there are always marvelous parts to play.” Vivien Leigh was first and foremost a creature of the theater who only made twenty films. Still, over the course of her career she managed to win two Best Actress Oscars, becoming the first British player to do so.

In 1947, a successful young radio actor named Richard Widmark arrived at Twentieth Century Fox in Hollywood to try out for his first film. His hope was to be cast in “Kiss of Death,” another in a series of dark crime dramas popular after the Second War which would eventually become known as “film noir.”