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By the age of thirty, Montgomery Clift seemed to have everything: youth, beauty, talent, and the prospect of a lucrative film career with limitless possibilities. Along with his friend and colleague Marlon Brando, Clift was the most visible and gifted of a new generation of movie star who’d been trained in “the Method” at Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio. The Studio’s fundamental goal was to help actors inhabit their characters more fully in order to achieve greater realism and intensity in their performances.

Reading about Jane Fonda, you quickly recognize that there’s enough incident and achievement in her 78 years to fill three lives. She was in fact famous for three things: acting, activism, and launching the fitness craze that’s helped countless baby boomers stay fit and healthy into their senior years.

Any list of the twentieth century’s finest actors is incomplete without Alec Guinness. Yet it’s a name some might overlook because there was never anything remotely showy — or even particularly magnetic — about him.

I vividly recall seeing Robert Redford on the streets of New York City at the height of his stardom in the early seventies, moving quickly but unfettered by security. I called to him once from across the street (what did I have to lose?). He looked over, waved at me and said: “Hello!” My week was made.

Henry Fonda once confided that the characters he played on-screen bore little resemblance to himself.  Rather, they were who he’d like to be, if he could.

The automobile and its various offshoots, those gas-guzzling, defining innovations of the twentieth century, are as integral to movies as they are to our daily routines. Since films are the magic mirror held up to our everyday lives with, as Hitchcock said, “the dull bits left out,” this only makes sense.

Ever have a bad hair day? Sure you have. You do everything you can to make things right, but nothing seems to work. “Oh, well,” you think. “At least it’ll be better tomorrow.”

The attention always goes straight to her violet eyes, and why shouldn’t it? Violet eyes don’t show up every day, and when magnified on screen, they will knock you off your feet. But Elizabeth Taylor was so much more than those mesmerizing irises, and her beauty did not hold her back from delivering passionate, believable performances.

Once famous, Bob Dylan didn’t wait long to put his poetic, socially rebellious, cage-rattling persona on film. In the words of former girlfriend Joan Baez, he “burst on the scene already a legend” in 1961, and had only been recording for three years when he became the subject of documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker’s groundbreaking tour diary, “Don’t Look Back” (1965).