Through the 1940s, this Swedish import was the American movie industry’s go-to gal for noble heroines: Joan of Arc, a tubercular nun and of course Ilsa in Casablanca. In 1949, she went off to Italy to make a little art movie — and a lot of whoopee — with director Roberto Rossellini, deserting her husband and Hollywood in the process. It was the domestic melodrama that the film establishment publicly condemned but secretly loved. So when Bergman and Rossellini split, and she starred as the would-be princess of the Romanoffs in 1956′s Anastasia, Hollywood welcomed her back with tears of forgiveness and an Oscar for Best Actress.
He was just 47 when the movie came out, but by the time of The Godfather Brando had exhausted many careers: the bright lights of Broadway in the 1940s, the man whose probing style and galvanic sexuality changed movie acting in the ’50s, the wanderer through eccentric film challenges in the ’60s. In the 1972 Francis Ford Coppola film, Vito Corleone was a supporting part, and a bit of a stunt (the cotton in his mouth), but it again showed that Brando could will himself to do anything he tried. He won the Best Actor Oscar, famously sending a faux-Native American to accept the statuette, then immediately topped that role with the brazen vulnerability of his ex-pat romancer in Last Tango in Paris — another Oscar nomination.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
