Read more about Ruby’s extraordinary life and contributions to the legacy of black womanhood on stage and screen here

Ruby Dee as Mother Abagail Freemantle, the 106-year-old prophet leading plague survivors in a post-apocalyptic battle of good and evil in ABC’s Stephen King miniseries The Stand (1994, Mick Garris)

S. Epatha Merkerson in her Emmy, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild award-winning role as Rachel “Nanny” Crosby in the HBO movie Lackawanna Blues (2005, George C. Wolfe; pictured with Marcus Carl Franklin and Hill Harper)

“In 1995, Julianne Moore, still relatively unknown at the time, essayed one of the great modern film roles in Safe, playing a suburban housewife who’s allergic to the world, a condition that results in her practically disappearing in front of our eyes. Almost 20 years later, now firmly established as one of our best actresses, Moore delivered another astounding performance about a different woman losing herself. Still Alice tells the story of a linguistics professor diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and the actress plays her as a bright, poised 50-year-old who quickly learns that her intelligence can’t save her from a disease that will ravage her memory. It’s a performance that’s powerfully internal yet expressed with incredible physicality: The woman’s fear, resignation and anger come through in Moore’s panicked, anguished eyes, but what’s especially remarkable is how she articulates the emptying out of a once-vibrant person. Alice is still there, and yet she’s not, and the star honors the mysteries of a body that’s lost its inner light and yet retained its ineffable soul.” — Tim Grierson, “Best Actress Oscar Winners Since 2000, Ranked Worst to Best”, Rolling Stone (February 2017)

Michelle Pfeiffer photographed by Niko Tavernise on the set of mother! (2017, Darren Aronofsky)

“While I watched Kidman, it was impossible not to think of all her other roles. I first saw her in the terrifying Dead Calm, in which she faked love for her rapist in order to survive. Then, there was Eyes Wide Shut, about a woman whose tightly wound husband (played by her tightly wound then-husband, Tom Cruise) goes crazy, because he suspects that she once had a sexual fantasy — not even an affair! — about someone other than him. She was even better as the manipulator in To Die For, playing a girlish spider whose flies had no chance. In each role, there is something waxen and watchful and self-possessed about Kidman, so that, even when she’s smiling, she never seems liberated. While other actors specialize in transparency, Kidman has a different gift: she can wear a mask and simultaneously let you feel what it’s like to hide behind it. As Celeste, she keeps lowering her head and raising her eyes, always feminine, glamorous, and diplomatic. It makes it all the more powerful to watch Kidman’s eyes connect with someone else's whenever something big happens — when she realizes, over drinks, that Madeline is lying about her marriage, too; when she bubbles with taboo joy at the notion of going back to work. In one lovely scene, Jane tells her new friends how detached she feels, as if she were peering at them from far away rather than sitting with the two of them. As Madeline chatters, Celeste stays quiet, locking eyes with Jane. The camera holds on the two of them, capturing the early alchemy of a friendship — and the suggestion that, even in mean-girl world, women might choose to be allies instead of enemies.” —  Emily Nussbaum, New Yorker (March 2017)

Katharine Hepburn in the third of her four Best Actress Oscar wins, as Eleanor of Aquitane in The Lion in Winter (1968, Anthony Harvey; pictured here with Anthony Hopkins and Peter O’Toole)

Laura Dern in W magazine’s recent photo shoot recreating Princess Mombi’s head cabinet in Return to Oz