Lindsey Graham's Complicated Legacy (and the Future of His Senate Seat)

Senators Darline and Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

I've been so out-of-practice in writing political articles in recent memory that I have largely been foregoing any discussion of it here, and I think that while I'm fully in the "writing quotas are not a part of this blog" era post 2024 as I'm focusing on other writing tasks...there's too much going on in the world of politics right now, and I want to talk about it.

The biggest story of the past week (now exactly one week ago) was the untimely death of US Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.  I've talked about how, with me having followed politics since the mid-1990's, that there are very, very few politicians in DC who have basically been part of my vernacular since I made this a hobby (i.e. I have no memory of following politics where they weren't players), but Graham was one of them.  My first memories of Graham were probably during the Clinton impeachment trials, where Graham was the only Republican on the House Judiciary Committee to vote against at least one of the four articles of impeachment against Clinton (in Graham's case, it was that Clinton had committed perjury during the Paula Jones case, one of the two articles of impeachment that did not have enough votes to get to the US Senate which is why it might not sound familiar).

Being a Clinton impeachment manager was something of a curse on most of the 13 men who did it from the House.  Within five years of the trial, Ed Bryant, George Gekas, Bill McCollum, & Bob Barr would all lose continued bids for Congress, and eventually Chris Cannon & Steve Chabot would follow (Steve Buyer just a few weeks ago required a presidential pardon, proving this curse is still alive-and-well).  But not Lindsey Graham.  Graham skated through easily into the Senate (despite polling showing a closer race against University President Alex Sanders), and never struggled to win reelection.  He spent much of his career straddling a strange line between moderate (he regularly supported judges nominated by Democratic presidents, including Elena Kagan who spoke about Graham during a House testimony this past week) and almost sycophantic devotion to Donald Trump, a man of whom he once said "if we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed...and we will deserve it."  Graham's legacy is odd-his slavish devotion to Trump followed a career where he was often compared (favorably) to the maverick nature of John McCain, and was very popular amongst his colleagues.  I once was at an event with a US Senator (whom I'm going to not name because it was related to my job, and I don't think it'd be appropriate to name as a result) and someone asked her (she was a Democrat) who her favorite Republican was.  She replied pretty much instantly, saying "Lindsey Graham...he's great to work with, he just plays a crazy person on TV."

Graham's legacy is one that is severely tarnished by Trump, and one wonders if he (in part) figured he'd outlive the Trump Era and could rebrand after it.  He was running for reelection this fall, for a term that would extend not just outside of the Trump presidency but likely outside of Trump's expected life range, and like many Republicans, one wonders if he figured the stain of his devotion to him would disappear in the same way much of the Bush administration's worst elements have disappeared from public memory.  But that is not to be the case, though the Graham legacy is very much alive in his sister Darline, who became the first woman to ever represent South Carolina in the US Senate on Tuesday.

Despite what Twitter (heaven forbid they look up something before tweeting) may think, it's relatively common in the United States for a family member to succeed a member of Congress to complete their term, and while it is unusual for a sister to succeed a brother (it's never happened in the US Senate, in fact), Graham was a lifelong bachelor (which invited a lot of speculation about his sexuality, which also may have been a part of his lasting legacy) and didn't have a wife or children who could step in, and had indicated during his 2016 presidential run that his sister would have served as his First Lady had he won, so it makes sense she'd succeed him for the remaining months of his term.

What I did not expect with Darline Graham was that she planned on running for a full term, which was indicated when President Trump (who pushed for her appointment) endorsed her publicly and encouraged her to run.  Now-Senator Graham is not a practiced politician like her brother.  She has worked with people with disabilities and has a Master of Arts, but the extent of her political tenure is literally just involving her brother, doing ads and speeches for his various runs.  Her running was not expected, and is clearly riling up South Carolina Republicans, who haven't had an open seat for the US Senate in 22 years.  Already Rep. Ralph Norman has jumped in, and Rep. Nancy Mace is actively exploring a bid.  I wouldn't doubt LG Pamela Evette might also look at the contest.

Norman, Evette, & Mace, though, are coming off of losses in the gubernatorial primary, where Trump's endorsement mattered, and all of them running against even a novice like Graham will be hard to beat if she has Trump's full backing given the state does not have ranked-choice voting.  This seat is not expected to be competitive even if the Democrats have a relatively quality nominee (Dr. Annie Andrews), as only Mace would put this into "Lean R" territory, and honestly Andrews might've had a better shot against the late senator than most of these other contenders.  If my belief that Lindsey Graham was planning on trying to outrun Trump's legacy by reforming after he left office is to be believed, the only possible way that could happen is through his sister...who seems likely to try and follow in those footsteps by doing what her brother did best in the past ten years: clinging as hard as possible to President Trump.

Jesse Jackson and the Politics of Lying in Honor

Rev. Jesse Jackson (D-IL)

This past week, Rev. Jesse Jackson passed away.  Jackson only held elected office once, winning a term as the shadow senator from Washington DC from 1991-97 (essentially an honorary lobbying position, given that, unlike the Delegate position currently-held by Eleanor Holmes Norton, the senator position does not serve on committees, cannot introduce legislation, and cannot speak on the floor of the US Congress, making it arguably the most powerless position in the federal government), still had a remarkable hold on national politics.  He was one of the key figures in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s civil rights organization (with his death, only former Rep. Andrew Young is a major player left of King's movement), and was by many definitions the heir apparent to his movement, serving as a significant civil rights leader for the decades that followed, particularly through his Operation PUSH and Rainbow Coalitions.  While Shirley Chisholm was the first Black person to run a serious campaign for president in 1972, Jackson was the first to win multiple states, first in 1984 and then again in 1988, where he placed second to Michael Dukakis.  Jackson, by many measures, was one of the most important figures in American politics in the 1980's, and arguably the most important living figure in the African-American Civil Rights movement before his death.

As a result, it was always likely that major politicians would move to pay tribute to Jackson's life.  I would not be surprised if Democratic Party luminaries like the Clintons, Obamas, Bidens, and Kamala Harris were to attend some of the services in the coming days regarding his life.  They will not, however, be seeing him lying in honor in the US Capitol, despite a request from Jackson's family to do so.  This has levied a lot of criticisms from Jackson's supporters at House Speaker Mike Johnson, including calling him racist for ignoring Jackson's family's request, and I thought it would be interesting to look at this (as it's the sort of historical political minutia that I specialize in on this blog), and whether or not Jackson's family or Johnson has history on their side even as both sides inevitably play a bit of politics in this moment of grief.

First off, it's worth noting that the request from Jackson's family is that he lie in honor, which is not usually the term Americans hear when they hear about this at a state funeral-the most common term is "lying in state."  There is a difference, though, and it points a flashlight into Johnson's potential thinking on the matter.

Lying in state is something that is done exclusively for members of the federal government, as well as high-ranking military officials.  Traditionally this is something that is basically guaranteed for former presidents (Abraham Lincoln being the first), but can also be for members of Congress (Henry Clay was the first, but others that have done so include John McCain, Daniel Inouye, & Harry Reid), Supreme Court justices (Ruth Bader Ginsburg did this, though not in the Capitol rotunda), and even key members of the armed services (Generals Pershing & MacArthur both received this honor).  Though the rooms may change (Elijah Cummings & Don Young were National Statutory Hall, Robert Byrd & Frank Lautenberg in the Senate chambers), the distinction is clear-these are members of Congress, presidents, Supreme Court justices, and military officials.  Jackson, for all his accomplishments, was none of these things.

Which would mean that in order for Jackson to be in the Capitol rotunda, he'd need to lie in "honor," which is a distinction held for individuals who do not qualify under those definitions.  This is a very small list of individuals.  Essentially it is just Capitol police officers killed in the line of duty (specifically three separate events near the capitol in 1998 & 2021), the last living Medal of Honor recipients from World War II and the Korean War, and two distinguished individuals: Rosa Parks and Billy Graham.  Jackson, if you were to include him, would be the third civilian on this list who did not die in the course of duty.

Here's where things get tricky, because I don't know that I'd include Jackson on the same list as Parks and Graham.  It's not that Parks or Graham weren't political-Parks was heavily involved in the initial congressional campaign for John Conyers, and worked for him for years, and Billy Graham maintained a personal relationship with Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon (and actively campaigned against John F. Kennedy in 1960, and for Mitt Romney in 2012).  But neither of them ran for public office (like Jackson did), and Jackson's more scandalous personal life (most notably his affair with a staffer that resulted in an out-of-wedlock child despite Jackson being married to another woman) feels quite contrary to the squeaky clean public personas that Parks & Graham maintained.

As a result, I'm going to be honest-I kind of get where Johnson is coming from here.  Johnson is not without fault of course.  I take more umbrage at his refusal to allow Dick Cheney the opportunity to lie in state, which (given Cheney's history as a Vice President, Secretary of Defense, and member of the US House) probably should've been considered more fully, and feels more so about not wanting to anger President Trump given Cheney refused to endorse him in the 2024 presidential race.  But Jackson probably doesn't earn this honor, and while it might be something a Speaker Jeffries would've done, I don't disagree with Johnson on this.  I think it would make more sense for Jackson's funeral to be attended by political luminaries, or for him to have tributes placed in terms of speeches or a moment of silence on the floor of the House, than to receive lying in honor distinctions.

One thing before we close because a lot of people are making the comparison incorrectly-Charlie Kirk never lied in state in the Capitol Rotunda.  There was a movement at the time by members of Congress (like Nancy Mace) to have him receive that honor, but it didn't happen and Johnson (who would've had the power to do so) did not make it happen.  Kirk did have a funeral service in Arizona that was attended by major figures in the government (including President Trump and Vice President Vance) and was given a moment of silence on the floor of the House, but he was not afforded this honor, and given how often I've seen that stated as fact, I just wanted to point out that it out.

Robert Duvall (1931-2026)

Robert Duvall is one of those actors whose career was longer than you think at first blush.  Watching The Twilight Zone marathon this past New Year's Eve, as I do every year, I was struck by this as I got to the episode "Miniature."  The episode is not famous in the way "To Serve Man" or "Eye of the Beholder" are, and likely only known to the most devoted of Twilight Zone aficionados because for parts of its syndication it wasn't even available (if you ever want to get into a strange Wikipedia wormhole, look up the history of The Twilight Zone in syndication), but it is notable because it starred future Oscar winner Robert Duvall, who passed away yesterday.

I bring this up because it's oftentimes forgotten just how long Robert Duvall's career has been.  Duvall, like many actors of his generation, got his start in stage (and before that, the military), but his screen work begins earlier.  Watch old reruns of not just The Twilight Zone, but Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits, or even The Mod Squad, and Duvall will pop up in an episode or two.  That was the thing about Duvall-he's the kind of actor who switched seamlessly from lead roles, including Oscar-nominated turns in stuff like Tender Mercies, The Great Santini, & The Apostle, to being in supporting parts where he added depth like Apocalypse Now, A Civil Action, & Network.  And given he made his screen debut as the memorable Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, his costars numbered Gregory Peck, Steve McQueen, John Wayne, & Burt Lancaster...but also Colin Farrell, Reese Witherspoon, Christian Bale, & Adam Sandler.  He served, like many actors of his New Hollywood ilk (he was once roommates with Gene Hackman & James Caan, who preceded him in death), as a bridge between Classical Hollywood and a generation of movie stars dwarfed by special effects, his sturdy, lasting presence a continual reminder that generational talent will always find a way of pushing itself forward.

For me, and for many, though, he will perpetually be Tom Hagen.  It seems glib to reduce a filmography as diverse as Duvall's down to one role, but if you do...it's gotta be the sturdy, steady-handed Tom at the center of the storm of The Godfather series.  Watch it again (because it's always a good time to watch The Godfather again), and notice it from Tom's perspective.  The quiet resolve in Tom's character, a man without a family, trying to prove to his surrogate brothers that he belongs (even if he knows on some level he never truly will).  Duvall got his first Oscar nomination for this performance, and man is it deserved-it's a testament to how much he adds to the series that even Francis Ford Coppola admitted that The Godfather, Part III was a lesser movie without Duvall present.  In recent years we've lost Duvall, Caan, and Diane Keaton from the storied cast of the defining film of New Hollywood, adding yet another melancholy air to a film upon which these actors already had richly bestowed so much gravitas already.

The Dwindling Lights of Classical Hollywood

In the past week, two centenarian actresses (June Lockhart and Maria Riva) both passed away at the age of 100.  Lockhart is best-known for her work in television, playing lead roles on Lassie and Lost in Space, while Riva is arguably best-known today not for any of her acting work (which resulted in two Emmy nominations), but instead for being the glamorous daughter of an even more glamorous movie star mother, Marlene Dietrich.

One of the pastimes I think is interesting to talk about on this blog, which does talk about classic cinema when it's not doing elections analysis (I'm aware it's been a bit one-sided as of late...my personal & professional life has had a series of highs & lows and I am running pretty dramatically behind on my movie screenings as a result), is when an era of Hollywood ends.  These two actresses, relatively minor figures in film, dying indicates something really remarkable-they were both two of the last of their kind in terms of acting, and mark the end of something storied in the annals of a fast-fading Classical Hollywood.

Let's start with June Lockhart.  Lockhart started her career in 1938, playing one of the children of Bob Cratchit in a 1938 MGM production of A Christmas Carol.  In the film, Lockhart played the daughter of her real-life mother Kathleen and her real-life father Gene, the latter being an Academy Award-nominated actor (i.e. both Lockhart & Riva were very much what we would now consider to be NepoBabies).  Just 13 when that film was made, Lockhart would quickly graduate to key supporting roles in classics like Sergeant York and Meet Me in St. Louis before getting her first lead role in She-Wolf of London in 1946.  Lockhart was one of the actors we profiled in our article about the last-living Stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood, a list where after her passing only 25 actors still remain.

But it is She-Wolf of London that stands out as a true end of an era.  A relatively forgettable horror film (I reviewed it here, and I wasn't super kind), She-Wolf of London was one of 35 films that are generally to be considered to be the classic run of the Universal Monster movies, stretching from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1913 to The Creature Walks Among Us in 1956 and including the quintessential onscreen inhabitations of Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, & the Wolf-Man.  Lockhart's death is notable in relation to these pictures because it means that every single above-the-line actor in all 35 of these films has now died.  While not all of the actors in these films have died (we'll talk about one of them in a second, but a far more famous one, Clint Eastwood, had a bit part in Revenge of the Creature in his screen debut), there are no living lead actors in any of these films.  Several performers in these movies made it well into the early 21st Century, dying just in the past ten years like Lupita Tovar (Dracula), Ricou Browning (in all three of the Creature of the Black Lagoon films he played the creature), and Julie Adams (Creature from the Black Lagoon), but Lockhart was the last remaining one.  Fitting, a week before Halloween, that she would pass.  If you're looking to mark this occasion, I suggest you find one of these 35 pictures you've never seen before and indulge tomorrow night after the trick-or-treating has finished.

It's worth noting that Lockhart did not get screen credit for her film debut (universal screen credit for all speaking parts in films was not common until the 1960's-before then you'd regularly end up with movies where only a few actors would get credit, while others, even those with speaking parts, might be ignored).  Her first screen credit was in 1940's All This, and Heaven Too with Bette Davis & Charles Boyer.  That means that while she appeared in films of the 1930's, she didn't get credited for them, and in fact it is an extremely small list of actors that are still alive who did receive screen credit for their work in a movie of the 1930's.  This is because, unless you are over 104-years-old, you had to be a child actor to have appeared in a 1930's film, and most child actors of that era, unless they were playing key roles in a picture, didn't get onscreen credit.

One of the few that did was Maria Riva.  The daughter of Marlene Dietrich was credited solely as "Maria" when she played a younger version of her mother in The Scarlet Empress, but, to quote Whoopi Goldberg on 30 Rock "it still counts."  While as recently as the past ten years we saw proper leading ladies of the 1930's like Mary Carlisle, Jane Withers, and Olivia de Havilland pass away, as far as I can tell, Maria Riva may be the last living actress to have received onscreen credit for a Hollywood movie released in the 1930's.  I did a pretty extensive deep dive into actresses of the era (and I am open to amending this if someone corrects me in the comments), but I can't find any woman who is still alive from that era who got an actual credit onscreen rather than just extra or bit work.  The closest I got were figures like Priscilla Montgomery, Valerie Lee, & Caren Marsh Doll (all of whom were in The Wizard of Oz as extras or stand-ins but none of whom got true onscreen credit...Doll also was a background extra in the barbecue scene in Gone with the Wind, but again wasn't credited even though she is the last living person to have been known to have starred in that movie in any capacity).

Weirdly, there are at least a couple of men who are still with us (this is weird because if you look at that list of 25 living leading actors of Classical Hollywood, only 2 of them are men...men statistically die sooner).  June Lockhart's costar in A Christmas Carol Terry Kilburn was, unlike June, credited onscreen for his work as Tiny Tim and is currently 98-years-old (he'd also star in Goodbye, Mr. Chips the next year, making him the last credited member of a 1939 Best Picture nominee).  Donnie Dunagan also received screen credit in two films of the era, both 1938's Mother Carey's Chickens with Anne Shirley & Walter Brennan, and 1939's Son of Frankenstein (circling us back to the Universal Monster movies).  It is possible that there is a third that I am aware of in Sidney Kibrick, who appeared in a number of Our Gang shorts; he is the last surviving member of the Our Gang films, having played Woim, the sidekick to the series' main villain Butch, but given that short films rarely had credits at all in this era, I can't find evidence that he actually was credited in a formal way in these films, though his part would've been significant enough he would have been credited if they had them (even as a child actor, he would've gotten billing as his part would have been too big).

And as far as I can find-that's it-just three actors left from the 1930's, and all of them men.  This feels like a passing of an era, but also an opportunity for some of you to prove me wrong.  If you know of anything that contradicts what I shared here (I researched, but am not infallible), please join me in the comments (and I'll amend the article and give you credit).

Diane Keaton (1946-2025)

Perhaps the question I get most as a cinephile is "what made you love the movies?"   The answer varies depending on the situation and the person who asked it.  Every true movie-lover knows the breakthrough film, the one that made them realize this was no longer something casual, but a lifelong obsession, something that can only be captured in a darkened room, popcorn in your lap, marveling at the majesty and richness of the story in front of you.

But perhaps a better question is "what keeps you in love with the movies?"  What makes a flight-of-fancy as a child, the kind of thing that children usually give up alongside pretending to be pirates and princesses, and keeps you inspired, sustained, nurtured for decades to come.  There are many answers to this, but if you ask me to pinpoint with a movie, one particular title & scene is always going to come up.  Near the end of Reds, Diane Keaton is walking along a train platform, trying to find out if Warren Beatty has lived or died.  She sees men being celebrated upon their return, and the audience is meant to be hopeful, and then we see a stretcher holding a clearly dead body, and you can feel your heart sink.  Finally, Keaton's gaze looks up from the covered corpse with dread, and she sees Warren Beatty, disheveled and tired, but still very much alive.  Their complicated relationship, and nearly three hours of cinema in front of it, is etched onto their movie star faces.  They don't run to each other, but instead walk slowly, and then embrace, with Beatty whispering in Keaton's ear "don't leave...please don't leave me."  Whether or not these characters will ultimately live or die before the credits fall, they have achieved a reunion-they will be together whatever comes next.  And for every audience member, most teary-eyed, these actors have shown them something true, honest, and real.  From the ephemeral, we have witnessed love, if only for an instant.

I have seen countless Diane Keaton movies, and fallen in love with many of them.  The manic screams of Something's Gotta Give, the frustrated declaration of an abortion in The Godfather, Part II, the la-de-da perfection of her singing "Seems Like Old Times" in Annie Hall, but for me, when I think of Diane Keaton, I always think of her on that train station.  A singular actor, a singular talent, a singular human being, Reds is not the Keaton persona that most of the public associate with her, the neurotic, suited-up feminist trailblazer that Annie Hall would perfect.  But with Reds, you see best what made her so breathtaking in every role she would inhabit-that vulnerability and raw commitment to making each of her characters feel full of truth, timeless, even immortal.  Life is not fair, and death comes for us all, even the immortal, but as long as there are projectors in darkened theaters, and people willing to be moved by the floating lights on a projector, there will always be a Diane Keaton, wandering on a train platform, inspiring us all.

Joan Kennedy (1936-2025)

On Wednesday, Joan Bennett Kennedy passed away at the age of 89.  Kennedy's death wasn't just the end of the life of a longtime public figure, but also the unofficial end of Camelot, the nickname for the roughly 1000 days that John F. Kennedy, Joan's brother-in-law was in the White House.  President Kennedy is oftentimes evoked now, even nostalgically by Republicans (some of whom incorrectly state he'd be a Republican if he was alive today, which pretty much defies all sense of logic), as a time of impossible hope, optimism, and above-all-else glamour, in Washington, something that in the Trump Era feels like a completely different world, so it feels somewhat fitting that Camelot couldn't survive Trump's second term in office.

For me, the Kennedys really were an entry point into a certain type of politics-as-hobby, and so there's an odd sense of sadness over her death that I didn't quite expect.  I have always had a fascination with presidents.  When I was about seven-years-old, my mom bought a book about the presidents (which I still have-it's actually on a shelf in front of me as I'm typing this) from the supermarket, which sounds more rudimentary than it was as it was as it was a proper reference book (for those who are too young to know this, supermarkets in small towns used to have the opportunity to sell things like encyclopedias and reference books from Funk & Wagnalls during certain times of years that you now would find exclusively online, or online as far as you would buy reference books at all, and were why so many of your grandparents ended up owning encyclopedia sets despite them being overall quite expensive).  I poured over that thing, learning everything about the presidents, memorizing their names quickly and the years that they served.

But it was the Kennedys, with their aura of glamour, sophistication, and unspeakable tragedy that was the real entry point for me into thinking about politics the way I do now-not just through facts & dates, but as a rounded story, something with a lot of characters.  Every presidency, if you look at it objectively, comes with countless supporting players like a novel or a TV series, and the Kennedys, with their expansive family tree was something that I couldn't get enough of.  I collected (and still do) magazines about the family, complete with family trees & a look at what not just President Kennedy and his senator brothers accomplished, but their family history of service, scandal, & power.  In eighth grade I couldn't have told you the starting lineup for the Minnesota Timberwolves or the members of most rock bands, but I could name every single one of the Kennedy cousins, and their far more famous aunts & uncles.

All of those aunts & uncles are largely gone now.  While many of the Kennedy cousins still make news despite their age and depleting numbers (particularly First Daughter Caroline Kennedy and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.), Joan Kennedy's death leaves only one of their aunts, Vicki Kennedy (Ted Kennedy's second wife) behind.  And while the former US Ambassador to Austria is accomplished and one of the family's most prominent members now, she only entered the family in 1992, and so had no real connection to the time when the family was the most powerful in America.

However, Joan did.  Married to Ted Kennedy after a whirlwind courtship, Joan Kennedy was the "loose cannon" of the Kennedy wives.  While Jackie and Ethel were placid, forever perfect in the public eye and in many ways a strange combination of intense formality and emerging modernity in the 1960's, Joan Kennedy always felt to me as far more willing to buck the norm.  You could see this with her fashion-there's a famous picture of Joan Kennedy meeting President and Mrs. Nixon a few months after they won the White House.  Pat Nixon looks regal in a mother-of-the-bride silk dress, but it's Joan in a mod, well-above-the-knee mini skirt with mountains of blonde hair & flashy pumps that steals focus.  As the 1960's were ending, the wife of the most prominent Republican in America looked like Loretta Young...the wife of the most prominent Democrat looked like the far hipper Julie Christie or Nancy Sinatra.

Joan Kennedy, unlike Pat Nixon, would never become First Lady, despite her husband's attempt at the office in 1980, and they would divorce not long after Ted's presidential ambitions clearly would never be realized.  She had endured mountains of tragedy by then.  Repeated miscarriages in the 1960's were coupled with her husband's very public infidelities, most notably involving the death of Mary Jo Kopechne (Sen. Kennedy has publicly denied having a romantic involvement with Kopechne, but many think this strains credulity given his acknowledged affairs at the time).  Joan would attend Kopechne's funeral despite doctor's warnings...and soon after suffer her third miscarriage.  She would have three children grow to adulthood, all of whom would suffer health problems, particularly her daughter Kara who died 14 years before her mother from a heart attack.

When people think of Joan outside of her connection with her marriage into the Kennedy clan, they likely associate her with her struggles with alcoholism.  Though it's de rigueur now, in the late 1970's and early 1980's it was incredibly unusual for famous people to talk about drug addiction publicly.  Kennedy, along with Betty Ford & Elizabeth Taylor, was one of the first really famous people to open up about their struggles with the disease, talking about it in national magazines while her husband was the most well-known man in Congress.  This showed an incredible bravery, though she doesn't always get credit for it given that, unlike Ford & Taylor, she frequently relapsed in the years that followed, with drunk driving arrests, probation, and medical issues following.  In 2005, at one point one of the most famous women in America was found lying in a street with a broken shoulder, eventually being put in the care of her children.

But anyone who knows the Kennedy Myth and has followed the family knows that it comes with equal parts fame and sorrow, and few embodied that quite like Joan Kennedy.  While the Kennedys continue to be a part of the national conversation, her death marks the end of a chapter for the family and America's obsession with it, the last of the major figures of Camelot to finally reach Avalon.

Robert Redford (1936-2025)

When I was a kid, we went to church every Sunday, and though I don't remember every sermon, one (because it was about film actors) stands out to me.  The pastor was talking about life not being fair, and his analogy was "if all of life was fair, all the men would look like Robert Redford and all of the women would look like Bo Derek."  At that point in my life, I didn't quite know who Bo Derek was (it was a conversation topic for the drive home), but Robert Redford...I knew about Robert Redford.  Even for a 10 or 11-year-old, I knew that Redford was synonymous with the concept of male sex appeal, a "perfect ten," if you will.

Redford's surreal, almost mythical beauty is the stuff of legend now (with that Mike Nichols' anecdote being mentioned on repeat the last 48 hours on social media), but it's worth noting that, even when he didn't need to do so (plenty of pretty people have no talent & have successful film careers), he's always had an ability to act.  Think of that terrific Twilight Zone episode of a 26-year-old Robert Redford appearing as death opposite Gladys Cooper, a triumphant performance from both.  Or his sexy newlywed in Barefoot in the Park charming everyone in his path even if he's not sure how to navigate it himself.  Redford's always been a brilliant actor, and was a fixture of my childhood through three films that were regulars in our Saturday Family Movie night rotation (The Sting, Sneakers, & The Natural, for the record), but even when he took the backseat, such as his haunting narration in A River Runs Through It, he was still captivating despite being deprived of those looks.

Redford, though, seemed to think he had something to prove, and did so (twice).  First, he made the jump to directing, making the Oscar-winning masterwork Ordinary People, and then continuing to make confident, interesting pictures as varied as Quiz Show, The Horse Whisperer, and my personal favorite (the aforementioned) A River Runs Through It.  In fact, Redford's off-kilter filmography coincides with his long championship of thoughtful, independent cinema, which his Sundance Film Festival has championed for nearly 50 years.  While other actors today bemoan the state of cinema, that we don't have a place for new voices to emerge and we are drowning in a sea of IP and blockbuster CGI, Robert Redford actually did something about it, yet another pioneering moment in a career filled with him proving that he was more than a pretty face.

Maggie Smith (1934-2024)

Truly great actors always have an entry point for cinephiles, and with Maggie Smith, it really depended on your age.  For a generation of children, she was Minerva McGonagall.  A generation before that, she was Mother Superior or an aging Wendy in Hook.  And still before that, she was known for singing and dancing with Carol Burnett in one of the most memorable guest spots on Burnett's series.  But for me, she was always Jean Brodie.

I almost certainly had seen Sister Act and Hook before I saw The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie given the timeline of my life, but watching Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie changed something inside of me on a cerebral level.  It was one of those movies that you point to as being quintessential to your cinematic journey, one of those performances that is impossible to deny.  In perhaps the first witty rejoinder I ever made in a review, I remember once writing "she made fascism fashionable," and indeed, Smith did in that role.  The way she pronounced words, the callousness and broad hand she had, armed with the knowledge that she was always right, is such a specific character choice that Smith herself would never really top this performance...but to be fair, few actors could.  Other than those performances given by Vivien Leigh & Marlon Brando, I'd argue this is the finest performance that any Oscar winner has ever given onscreen...Smith is that good.

But let's face it-Smith was always good.  And she was always so specific.  For an actress that frequently played a trope (initially a sexually-aware woman-of-class, then eventually prim dowager types with a barbed tongue), she always brought such depth to her work.  There's a reason that so many people felt her as being one of "their actresses," and it wasn't just that she worked in series that were insanely popular like Sister Act, Harry Potter, and eventually Downton Abbey (the show that would become her chagrin as it made her more famous than she had ever wanted...and therefore the work most cited in her obituaries).  It was that she made them popular-she could deliver every line with such specificity that you knew only she could make it work.  She was nominated for six Academy Awards...which never felt quite like enough.

She was also one of those actresses it was impossible to imagine film without.  She worked constantly, starring in a film as recently as last year with Kathy Bates & Laura Linney called The Miracle Club, and like her contemporaries Judi Dench & Ian McKellen, was such a treasure you wanted to believe that the world would keep her around forever.  But even the most immortal of beings have to drift to the other side someday, and this week, to paraphrase the song that her character made famous, Smith came out to the meadow.

Chita Rivera (1933-24)

I am a midwestern gay boy who (literally) grew up down the street from a cornfield, and so I didn't see my first Broadway show until I was 25 (Promises, Promises with Kristin Chenoweth & Sean Hayes).  But I loved live theater, and like most young, closeted men, the way that I found an opening into the world of theater was through cast albums, including the original cast album of West Side Story.  This was the first time that I would become familiar with Chita Rivera, one of the grand dames of the New York stage in the latter half of the 20th Century, who passed away this week at the age of 91.

Born Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero Anderson (which was never going to fit on a marquee), she was already on Broadway at the age of 18, doing chorus work before reaching stardom a few years later as the original Anita in West Side Story, which would make her a headliner on Broadway.  While she would not play the role in the movie (which would win Rita Moreno an Academy Award), she spent most of the next few decade's being one of the signature actresses on Broadway.  Like Mary Martin or Barbara Cook, her time in cinema was limited (her most noteworthy role was opposite Shirley MacLaine in Sweet Charity), but she'd originate countless musicals, including Bye Bye Birdie, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and Chicago, playing Velma Kelly (yet another role that would win the actress playing the part an Oscar).

Rivera was a singular star.  In an era where Broadway feels like they're all about who can belt the loudest (even if that becomes hopelessly generic over time), Rivera wasn't the best singer on Broadway (she wasn't Barbara Cook), but instead belonged to a group of actresses like Carol Channing, Elaine Stritch, & Angela Lansbury who used their distinctive singing styles to make magic on the stage.  I thankfully would eventually get to see said magic, watching her as Princess Puffer in the Studio 54 imagining of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  She was sublime, watching one of the true greats light up the stage that felt made for her.

The 31 Last Living Stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood

A little over a week ago, actress Piper Laurie passed away.  Laurie was best-known as an actress for two films, both of which got her Academy Award nominations: as Paul Newman's love interest in The Hustler and as Sissy Spacek's domineering mother in Carrie.  Laurie had worked in movies since the 1950's, and had starred opposite everyone from Ronald Reagan to Jimmy Durante to Rock Hudson.  She was one of the only living people that had been submitted for the 1999 TV special AFI 100 Years...100 Stars's ballot.

Laurie's death means that another figure from the Golden Age of Hollywood (roughly from the 1920's through 1959, though that date varies greatly depending on who you ask) had passed away.  In recent years stars such as Kirk Douglas, Rhonda Fleming, Sidney Poitier, & earlier this year Gina Lollobrigida have died, giving us very few actors who are connected to this era, which is one of the primary points-of-conversation on this blog and is the frame-of-reference when you refer to something as "Old Hollywood."

So I decided to do some sleuthing, and understand exactly how many "stars" are left from Classical Hollywood.  The definition is hard to clarify, to be fair.  I've heard everyone from Elizabeth Taylor to Lauren Bacall to Olivia de Havilland being called the "last living star" of Classical Hollywood when they died, and still there are other figures from the era that seem like they would make the grade.  So I decided to make a definition, and see how many were left.

Our definition below, for the actors & actresses I have highlighted, is pretty simple.  We're using 1959 as the cutoff, and so each of these actors either A) got above-the-line billing in at least three Hollywood studio, feature-length, live-action films in 1959 (or earlier) or B) were listed on the AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars ballot (which now only consists of six living actresses).  By my count (and I could've missed someone-the comments are there for a reason), this includes just 31 actors.  I have listed them below.

Before we get into the list, I want to call out perhaps my biggest learning here.  This list runs the gamut from Oscar-winnings actors who are pretty much universally-known to anyone that talks about Old Hollywood to actresses that basically just played love interests in a couple of films and never took off in their careers.  What's remarkable though, is when I started to look at the lists of stars that they had played opposite.  I listed the names below, and I was drawn to two things.  One, for the next few years (and only for the next few years, as the youngest of these performers is 86), we still have a real connection to the Hollywood of lore.  These actors stood on soundstages with Bette Davis, with Fred Astaire, with Marilyn Monroe...icons that make up the foundation of Hollywood.  And not just as extras-they were their peers and love interests and costars.  And so for a brief time, we're still allowed at least a glimpse into that world.

The other thing that I noticed was that so many of the films they starred with with these actors are not well-known.  I list north of 100 movies below, many of them I'd never heard of starring the most famous actors of all-time.  It's a humbling moment to see so many movies, many forgotten to time, left to discover, knowing that I'll never get to all of them.  It's a good reminder that for all of these stars, including Piper Laurie, though they won't be with us forever, they will always be with us as long as there are movies to be seen.

Honorable Mention #1: If we use 1959 as the cutoff for the "Golden Age," we run into a lot of actors that are in a grey area.  First is getting hung up on the title of "Star." All 31 of the below actors were either proper headliners in at least three studio films on or before 1959 (or were in the AFI Stars ballot).  This means that there are a few living actors who were either character actors, supporting stars, or who weren't yet getting major roles in the 1950's (but were definitely a part of the era, sometimes in crucial or even Oscar-cited parts) that won't be on the list.  This is not a conclusive list, but some actors that meet that criteria include: Lee Grant, Earl Holliman, Patrick Wayne, Marion Ross, James Hong, Ann Robinson, Russ Tamblyn, Ursula Andress, Richard Beymer, Diane Baker, Connie Stevens, France Nuyen, Karen Sharpe, & Dolores Hart (Ann Robinson, for the record, comes really close getting leads in two films of the era (The War of the Worlds and Gun Brothers), but just misses the cutoff without a third one).

Honorable Mention #2: On the flip side, there are actors who are indisputably stars in movies or TV in the years that followed, some of the biggest stars of New Hollywood who were definitely working in movies during the 1950's...but weren't headlining films yet.  They have their connections to the era, but just miss the cut from this list, in some cases by a few years.  This would include Clint Eastwood, Tippi Hedren, Gena Rowlands, Barbara Eden, Julie Newmar, Fabian, Tina Louise, & George Hamilton.

Honorable Mention #3: This list only includes people who appeared in films in 1959 or earlier.  There are several actors (Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty, Robert Duvall, Paula Prentiss, & Nancy Kwan all come to mind) who made their screen debuts in the early 1960's, which is why they aren't listed at all here, but are generally associated with the Golden Age because they did star with a number of famous actors of that era in the period before New Hollywood started later that decade.

Honorable Mention #4: Finally, this list is focused on Golden Age stars in Hollywood.  We have a few actors like Glynis Johns, Brigitte Bardot, & Claudia Cardinale who would eventually become crucial names in movies, even starring in some Hollywood films...but not in the 1950's.  As a result, you're not going to see names of actors not largely associated with American cinema prior to this, since the whole "Old Hollywood Glamour" thing has a geographic definition.

Editor's Note from John: All of these actors were living as of October 26th, 2023.  However, I have noted the death date of some of these performers below if they have since passed and you are finding this article years after-the-fact, specifically the age they died.  I am not updating the other stars ages in real time (you know how to do math, and their birth dates are living).  All other parts of the write-up remain as is.

And with that, it's time to see stars!

Carroll Baker

Age: 92 (May 28th, 1931)

Screen Debut: Easy to Love (1953)

Best Known For: Her proto-Lolita work in Elia Kazan's Baby Doll

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: She was nominated for Best Actress for Baby Doll, losing to Ingrid Bergman's comeback role in Anastasia

Famous Costars: I thought it'd be fun to do a smattering of each of these living names connections to lost legends, proving how we still have not only stars of this era, but links to some of its biggest icons (I'm only listing deceased actors here-though of course many of these actors, including Baker, starred alongside each other during this time frame).  With Baker you have James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, & Rock Hudson (Giant), Gregory Peck & Charlton Heston (The Big Country), Jimmy Stewart (Cheyenne Autumn), and Clark Gable (But Not for Me)

Are They Still Acting?: No.  We're going to focus primarily on film with final roles here, given this is a film article, but if they're still acting in TV I'll call that out.  Baker hasn't worked in decades-her last film was The Game with Michael Douglas & Sean Penn.

Claire Bloom

Age: 92 (February 15th, 1931)

Screen Debut: The Blind Goddess (1948)

Best Known For: The stage.  Bloom is probably a questionable inclusion here if I'm skipping Glynis Johns, to be honest.  She did work regularly in the 1950's & 60's, but in British cinema, not in American pictures as often (though she was in them).  In American film, her best known work was as Cliff Robertson's love interest in Charly.

AFI Nominee?: The reason I'm including her is that she is one of only six living stars from the AFI's "100 Years, 100 Stars" list, which automatically got you into this compendium.

Oscar Nominations: No Oscar nominations, though she was given a CBE in 2013 (why they didn't just trot out the "Dame" is anyone's guess, and should be rectified immediately.

Famous Costars: Charlie Chaplin & Buster Keaton (Limelight), James Mason (The Man Between), Richard Burton (Alexander the Great, Look Back in Anger, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold), Laurence Olivier (Richard III, Clash of the Titans), Paul Newman & Edward G. Robinson (The Outrage), and Charles Boyer & Charlton Heston (The Buccaneer)

Are They Still Acting?: Yes.  She had a small role in the 2019 miniseries Summer of Rockets with Toby Stephens & Timothy Spall.

Ann Blyth

Age: 95 (August 16th, 1928 - June 24, 2026)

Screen Debut: Chip off the Old Block (1944)

Best Known For: Playing Joan Crawford's spoiled daughter Veda in Mildred Pierce

AFI Nominee?: Yes, Blyth is one of the six living actresses still left from the AFI list

Oscar Nominations: Blyth was cited for one Oscar, for her work in Mildred Pierce, but lost to Anne Revere in National Velvet.

Famous Costars: Blyth is so famous for her supporting role in Mildred Pierce that it's frequently forgotten she had a career in the early-1950's as a proper leading lady.  She starred opposite not just Crawford but Mickey Rooney (Killer McCoy), Charles Boyer (A Woman's Vengeance), William Powell (Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, Bing Crosby (Top o' the Morning), Claudette Colbert (Thunder on the Hill), Gregory Peck (The World in His Arms), & Paul Newman (The Helen Morgan Story)

Are They Still Acting?: No-Blyth's last film was The Helen Morgan Story, for some reason quitting pictures before she turned 30, and her last television appearance was opposite Angela Lansbury on Murder, She Wrote in 1985.

Pat Boone

Age: 89 (June 1st, 1934)

Screen Debut: Bernardine (1957)

Best Known For: Boone is far more famous today as a singer than as an actor.  In the late-1950's, he was a serious rival to Elvis Presley as the most popular singer of the era.  Some of his hits included "April Love," "Love Letters in the Sand," and "Ain't That a Shame,"...none of which have had the lasting pop culture impact of Presley, proving that every era gets their Jessica Simpson.

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: Never nominated for an Oscar or a Golden Globe, though Boone is currently 0-for-6 at the Grammys.

Famous Costars: Janet Gaynor (Bernardine), James Mason & Arlene Dahl (Journey to the Center of the Earth), Bobby Darin & Alice Faye (State Fair), Tony Curtis & Debbie Reynolds (Goodbye Charlie), 

Are They Still Acting?: If we're being honest, the thing that Boone is best-known for is not music or film, but for his religious & political beliefs.  The actor is a devout evangelical Christian, staging rallies for school prayer as far-back as the 1960's.  He is famously homophobic, and is actively involved in Republican politics, campaigning for figures like Donald Trump, Ernie Fletcher, & Mike Huckabee.

Leslie Caron

Age: 92 (July 1st, 1931)

Screen Debut: An American in Paris (1951)

Best Known For: Probably Gigi?  Honestly, Caron was a major star in movie musicals in the 1950's, so she might just be famous without needing a qualifier, but if there's a movie, it's Gigi.

AFI Nominee?: The cutoff needing your screen debut to be before 1950 means that Caron, who surely would've been a lock for inclusion otherwise, didn't get cited on the ballot.

Oscar Nominations: She received two-one for Lili which she lost to Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday (it's a movie I love, and I was shocked to find recently I'm by myself on that front) and then ten years later was a presumed frontrunner for The L-Shaped Room, but missed to Patricia Neal in Hud.

Famous Costars: The only living person to have danced with both Gene Kelly (An American in Paris) and Fred Astaire (Daddy Long Legs) onscreen.  In addition to those two, she also costarred with Maurice Chevalier (Gigi), Henry Fonda (The Man Who Understood Women), Charles Boyer (Fanny, A Very Special Favor), & Cary Grant (Father Goose)

Are They Still Acting?: Yes, though not steadily-her most recent film was a voiceover work in a British adaptation of A Christmas Carol.

Joan Collins

Age: 90 (May 23rd, 1933)

Screen Debut: Lady Godiva Rides Again (1951)

Best Known For: Her turn as Alexis Carrington in the 1980's soap opera Dynasty.  She also was a tabloid staple for decades along with her late sister, novelist Jackie Collins.

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: No, though she won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Emmy Award for her work on Dynasty.

Famous Costars: Bette Davis (The Virgin Queen), Richard Burton (Sea Wife), Jayne Mansfield (The Wayward Bus), Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge, & Joan Fontaine (Island in the Sun), Paul Newman (Rally Round the Flag, Boys!), Edward G. Robinson (Seven Thieves), and Bing Crosby & Bob Hope (The Road to Hong Kong)

Are They Still Acting?: Yes.  She made a guest spot in 2019 on Hawaii Five-O, and has done quite a bit of theater in recent years, including one-woman shows as herself.

Kathryn Crosby

Age: 90 (November 25th, 1933 - September 20th, 2024)

Screen Debut: So This is Love (1953)

Best Known For: Crosby's screen name wasn't actually Crosby (or at least it wasn't for the bulk of her acting career)-she was billed as Kathryn Grant for most of her acting career (if you're googling her, she's Crosby on Wikipedia & Grant on IMDB/Letterboxd...we're going with Crosby as her name because that's what she prefers).  As a result, she's best known as Bing Crosby's second wife; the couple remained married for twenty years, until the actor's death in 1977.

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: No

Famous Costars: Ginger Rogers & William Holden (Forever Female), Bob Hope & Joan Fontaine (Casanova's Big Night), Jimmy Stewart & Grace Kelly (Rear Window), Ginger Rogers (again) & Edward G. Robinson (Tight Spot), Anthony Quinn (The Wild Party), Jack Lemmon (Operation Mad Ball), Tab Hunter (Gunman's Walk), & Jimmy Stewart (Anatomy of a Murder)

Are They Still Acting?: Crosby largely retired from acting after her marriage, though she randomly appeared in the 2010 independent comedy Queen of the Lot.

Audrey Dalton

Age: 89 (January 21st, 1934)

Screen Debut: My Cousin Rachel (1952)

Best Known For: I don't know that Dalton is super well-known for anything today.  This happens sometimes, and will for stars today too-where someone gets regular work leading forgettable pictures, or getting prominent supporting work in movies, but as a star she doesn't click with pop culture at large.   But she definitely led 3+ films in the 1950's, so she qualified for this list (I'll happily take recommendations of how to familiarize myself with her in the comments, as she's the one star totally unknown to me before I wrote this).

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: No

Famous Costars: Richard Burton & Olivia de Havilland (My Cousin Rachel), Clifton Webb & Barbara Stanwyck (Titanic), Bob Hope & Joan Fontaine (Casanova's Big Night), Rita Hayworth & Burt Lancaster (Separate Tables), & Lana Turner (The Prodigal)

Are They Still Acting?: No-Dalton retired in 1978, appearing on Police Woman with oddly enough the next star on this list.

Angie Dickinson

Age: 92 (September 30th, 1931)

Screen Debut: Lucky Me (1954)

Best Known For: Dickinson was a sex symbol star of the 1960's, but a modern one in the mold of Jane Fonda & Faye Dunaway, rather than the more exaggerated looks of Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield, with her most famous film being in the original Ocean's 11.  In the 1970's, she was a huge star on television playing Pepper Anderson on NBC's Police Woman.  She also had a high-profile marriage at the peak of both of their fame with singer Burt Bacharach.

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: No Oscar nominations, but she won two Golden Globes and was nominated for three Emmy Awards, most of these for Police Woman.

Famous Costars: Doris Day (Lucky Me), Robert Mitchum (Man with the Gun), Randolph Scott (Shoot-Out at Medicine Bend), James Mason (Cry Terror!), John Wayne & Dean Martin (Rio Bravo), Richard Burton (The Bramble Bush), The Rat Pack-Frank Dean, & Sammy (Ocean's 11), Maurice Chevalier (Jessica), Troy Donahue (Captain Newman, MD), Marlon Brando (The Chase), & Kirk Douglas (Cast a Giant Shadow)

Are They Still Acting?: Dickinson quit acting in 2009, her last TV movie being Mending Fences, while her last theatrical film being Elvis Has Left the Building with Kim Basinger.

Peggy Dow

Age: 95 (March 18th, 1928)

Screen Debut: Undertow (1949)

Best Known For: She played the main nurse (who is in love with her doctor) in the Oscar-nominated Jimmy Stewart classic Harvey.

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: None

Famous Costars: In addition to Stewart, she also acted opposite Rock Hudson (Undertow), Ida Lupino (Woman in Hiding), Dick Powell (You Can Never Tell), Dana Andrews and Dorothy McGuire (I Want You)

Are They Still Acting?: No-of all of these actors I believe that Dow has had the longest period of inactivity, retiring in 1952 when she married her husband Walter Helmerich III (a wealthy oilman), and has devoted her life to philanthropy, specifically around funding libraries & literacy-related causes.

Felicia Farr

Age: 91 (October 4th, 1932)

Screen Debut: Big House, USA (1955)

Best Known For: I hate to say it this way, but similar to Kathryn Crosby, what Farr is best-known for today is her celebrity marriage.  Farr was married for almost fifty years to screen legend Jack Lemmon, with whom she occasionally worked.

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: No

Famous Costars: Glenn Ford & Ernest Borgnine (Jubal), Joel McCrea (The Last Texan), Andy Griffith (Onionhead), Dean Martin (Kiss Me, Stupid), & Walter Matthau (Kotch, Charley Varrick), 

Are They Still Acting?: After a decade away from film, she made a random independent film called Loser's Crown in 2014. The last studio film where she didn't play herself was 1986's That's Life! with her husband Jack Lemmon & Julie Andrews.

Mitzi Gaynor

Age: 93 (September 4th, 1931 - October 17th, 2024)

Screen Debut: My Blue Heaven (1950)

Best Known For: Her big claim-to-fame was as Nellie Forbush in the Rodgers & Hammerstein smash hit South Pacific.  If you follow this blog closely, you'll know that she was one of our Stars of the Month during its first season.

AFI Nominee?: Yes, Gaynor was one of the six actresses cited by the American Film Institute.

Oscar Nominations: Weirdly no, but she was nominated for Best Actress at the Golden Globes for South Pacific, and I have to assume she was pretty close.

Famous Costars: Betty Grable (My Blue Heaven), Marilyn Monroe & Ethel Merman (There's No Business Like Show Business), Bing Crosby (Anything Goes), Frank Sinatra (The Joker is Wild), Gene Kelly (Les Girls), and David Niven (Happy Anniversary)

Are They Still Acting?: Gaynor still does public appearances and interviews (and did decades of television specials-the Beatles took second billing to her when they performed on The Ed Sullivan Show), but her last studio film was 1963's For Love or Money with Kirk Douglas.

Claude Jarman, Jr.

Age: 89 (September 27th, 1934 - January 12th, 2025)

Screen Debut: The Yearling (1946)

Best Known For: Jarman is best-known for his work in the 1946 Best Picture nominee The Yearling, where he plays Gregory Peck's son Jody

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: He was not nominated for an Oscar, but he is one of just a handful of living winners of the Juvenile Oscar statue, which he won for The Yearling.

Famous Costars: Gregory Peck & Jane Wyman (The Yearling), Van Johnson & June Allyson (High Barbaree), Gloria Grahame (Roughshod), Pal (aka the original "Lassie") & Jeanette MacDonald (The Sun Comes Up), John Wayne & Maureen O'Hara (Rio Grande), Arlene Dahl (The Outriders), Randolph Scott (Hangman's Knot), & Fred MacMurray (Fair Wind to Java)

Are They Still Acting?: No-he gave up acting in the mid-1950's, only returning briefly for the TV miniseries Centennial, though he helped to run the San Francisco International Film Festival for a number of years & just published his memoirs a few years back (also, every person on this list should have a memoir if they don't already, pretty please!).

Shirley Jones

Age: 89 (March 31st 1934)

Screen Debut: Oklahoma! (1955)

Best Known For: Jones is probably known to most as Shirley Partridge, the lead of The Partridge Family, which ran for four seasons on ABC and was a pop culture phenomenon.

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: Not only is Jones an Oscar nominee for Elmer Gantry, but she won for her work.  Thanks to her song "I Think I Love You," on The Partridge Family, she is one of only four performers (along with Frank Sinatra, Cher, & Barbra Streisand) to win an acting Oscar and have a #1 Billboard hit.

Famous Costars: James Cagney (Never Steal Anything Small), Burt Lancaster & Jean Simmons (Elme Gantry), Jimmy Stewart (Two Rode Together), Glenn Ford (The Courtship of Eddie's Father), Marlon Brando & David Niven (Bedtime Story), and Jimmy Stewart (again) & Henry Fonda (The Cheyenne Social Club)

Are They Still Acting?: Not super regularly, but Jones still makes the odd film or television cameo, usually playing some version of her star persona.

June Lockhart

Age: 98 (June 25th, 1925 - October 23rd, 2025)

Screen Debut: A Christmas Carol (1938)

Best Known For: Lockhart has had literally almost a 90-year career, starting in film in the 1930's, but she's more famous for her work in television, where she played Ruth Martin on Lassie and Maureen Robinson in Lost in Space.

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: She never received an Academy Award nomination, but Lockhart did win a Tony Award for the play For Love or Money and was nominated for two Emmy Awards in the 1950's.

Famous Costars: Bette Davis & Charles Boyer (All This, and Heaven Too), Ingrid Bergman (Adam Has Four Sons), Gary Cooper (Sergeant York), Judy Garland (Meet Me in St. Louis), Lana Turner (Keep Your Powder Dry), Richard Widmark (Time Limit), and Orson Welles (Butterfly)

Are They Still Acting?: No, Lockhart appears to be retired now, revising her role from Lost in Space (as an alien) for the Netflix remake for her final role.

Sophia Loren

Age: 89 (September 20th, 1934)

Screen Debut: Hearts at Sea (1950)

Best Known For: There are a lot of actors on this list that were famous in their day, and there's a lot of debate over who would actually count as the "Last Living Golden Age Star," given that many of these people were only somewhat famous in their day (this is a literal definition of the name more than a subjective one), and others, like the next actress on this list, were more stars of the New Hollywood era.  All this is to say, as long as Sophia Loren is still alive, the question objectively has an answer-Loren is synonymous with Old Hollywood through her decades of fame in the same way all of the late famous costars I've listed throughout this article are.  "I worked with Sophia Loren" carries the same weight as "I worked with Clark Gable" or "I worked with Joan Crawford."

AFI Nominee?: Not only was she nominated, but she is the only living person to have actually been selected for the list, Ranked #21 between Lauren Bacall & Jean Harlow.  Loren has also been one of our Saturdays with the Stars in our second season.

Oscar Nominations: She won for Best Actress in 1961 for Two Women, but lost for Marriage Italian Style to Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins.  She also won an Honorary Academy Award in 1991 for lifetime achievement.

Famous Costars: A lot of her best work is in Italian, but in terms of Hollywood stars we've got Alan Ladd (Boy on a Dolphin), Frank Sinatra (The Pride and the Passion), Cary Grant (The Pride and the Passion, Houseboat), John Wayne (Legend of the Lost), William Holden (The Key), Tab Hunter (That Kind of Woman), Clark Gable (It Started in Naples), Peter Sellers (The Millionairess), Charlton Heston (El Cid) & Marlon Brando (A Countess from Hong Kong)

Are They Still Acting?: Yes-as recently as 2020 she was in the running for an Oscar nomination (in my opinion, she deserved one) for The Life Ahead.

Shirley MacLaine

Age: 89 (April 24th, 1934)

Screen Debut: The Trouble with Harry (1955)-it is such a Shirley MacLaine mic drop move to have your screen debut as the lead in an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Best Known For: MacLaine, like Loren, is one of those stars you don't need a qualifier for-she's just a movie star, full-stop.  Depending on your age it could be anything from The Apartment to Terms of Endearment to Steel Magnolias to Downton Abbey, but you've heard of her if you know anything about cinema.  She's also my favorite actress of all time.

AFI Nominee?: No-her debut was too late, otherwise she would've undoubtedly been an option.  But she was also one of our Saturdays with the Stars during our third season (the third and final person on this list we've profiled to date).

Oscar Nominations: Definitely-MacLaine has been cited for six Oscars, winning for 1983's Terms of Endearment, and also was nominated for Some Came Running, The Apartment, Irma la Douce, The Turning Point, and for directing the documentary film The Other Half of the Sky

Famous Costars: Theres a LOT, but I'll give you a smattering with David Niven (Around the World in 80 Days, Ask Any Girl), Frank Sinatra & Dean Martin (many films, but probably best in Some Came Running), Anthony Quinn (Hot Spell), Jack Lemmon (The Apartment, Irma la Douce), Audrey Hepburn (The Children's Hour), Robert Mitchum (Two for the Seesaw), Ingrid Bergman & Rex Harrison (The Yellow Rolls-Royce), Gene Kelly & Paul Newman (amongst others, in What a Way to Go!), & Anne Bancroft (The Turning Point)

Are They Still Acting?: Yes, MacLaine still acts regularly, appearing in American Dreamer and Only Murders in the Building in 2022 alone.

Vera Miles

Age: 94 (August 23rd, 1929)

Screen Debut: When Millie Goes Marching Home (1950)

Best Known For: Miles is best-known for playing Lila Crane, Janet Leigh's sister in Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller Psycho.

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: No nominations, despite appearing in a number of well-known classics.

Famous Costars: Lloyd Bridges (Pride of the Blue Grass), Joel McCrea (Wichita), John Wayne (The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Green Berets, Hellfighters), Joan Crawford (Autumn Leaves), Henry Fonda (The Wrong Man), Bob Hope (Beau James), Jimmy Stewart (The FBI Story, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), & James Garner (One Little Indian)

Are They Still Acting?: No-Miles retired in 1995 after the flop psychosexual thriller Separate Lives.  The woman who worked alongside Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Robert Wise, & Walt Disney appears to have ended her career in a movie starring Jim Belushi.

Colleen Miller

Age: 90 (November 10th, 1932)

Screen Debut: The Last Vegas Story (1952)

Best Known For: Miller was one of the many contract stars of the 1950's during the end of the studio system that the studio couldn't quite make work as a leading lady during the beginning of television, despite getting to play opposite some big stars & largely getting above-the-line parts.

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: No nominations

Famous Costars: Jane Russell (The Las Vegas Story), Rory Calhoun & Walter Brennan (Four Guns to the Border), Tony Curtis (The Purple Mask, The Rawhide Years), Orson Welles (Man in the Shadow), & Audie Murphy (Gunfight at the Comanche Creek)

Are They Still Acting?: No-Miler retired entirely from acting in 1972 with a brief cameo in the 1972 comedy Stand Up and Be Counted with Jacqueline Bisset & Steve Lawrence.

Terry Moore

Age: 94 (January 7th, 1929)

Screen Debut: Maryland (1940)

Best Known For: A former child actor, Moore was most-noted for her work in the Oscar-winning 1952 stage adaptation of Come Back, Little Sheba.  She also was involved romantically with Howard Hughes, and may have actually committed bigamy by being secretly married to him while also wedding three other men (where is THAT biopic?).

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: Moore was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Come Back, Little Sheba, but lost the statue to Gloria Grahame.

Famous Costars: Cary Grant (The Howards of Virginia), Rita Hayworth (My Gal Sal), Laurel & Hardy (A-Haunting We Will Go), Claudette Colbert & Jennifer Jones (Since You Went Away), Judy Garland (The Clock), Jimmy Durante (The Great Rupert), Mickey Rooney (He's a Cockeyed Wonder), Tyrone Power (King of the Khyber Rifles), Fred Astaire (Daddy Long Legs), Lana Turner (Peyton Place), and Linda Darnell & Lon Chaney, Jr. (Black Spurs)

Are They Still Acting?: She still takes bit parts in movies and television, including a 2014 guest spot on the Emmy-winning HBO series True Detective.

Rita Moreno

Age: 92 (December 11th, 1931)

Screen Debut: So Young, So Bad (1950)

Best Known For: Moreno is an icon of the stage & screen, winner of the Kennedy Center & Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Awards.  Her best-known screen work, though, is as the original Maria in the 1961 Best Picture winner West Side Story.

AFI Nominee?: Yes, she is one of the remaining six, and by-far the most active.

Oscar Nominations: Moreno was nominated for one Oscar in her career, for West Side Story, but at least the Academy had the good sense to give her the statue for it.

Famous Costars: Gene Kelly & Debbie Reynolds (Singin' in the Rain), Gary Cooper & Susan Hayward (Garden of Evil), Tyrone Power (Untamed), Deborah Kerr & Yul Brynner (The King & I), Geraldine Page (Summer and Smoke), and Marlon Brando (The Night of the Following Day)

Are They Still Acting?: Yep!  Moreno made 80 for Brady earlier this year with Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, & Sally Field.

Don Murray

Age: 94 (July 31st, 1929 - February 2nd, 2024)

Screen Debut: Bus Stop (1956)

Best Known For: Murray is best-known today for his role in the film Bus Stop, which is generally considered to be the movie where Marilyn Monroe "proved she could act" (anyone paying attention beforehand would've already known that she could act).

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: Murray is that rare guy who got nominated on his first film, getting a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for Bus Stop but losing to Anthony Quinn.

Famous Costars: Marilyn Monroe (Bus Stop), James Cagney (Shake Hands with the Devil), Alan Ladd (One Foot in Hell), Charles Laughton & Gene Tierney (Advise & Consent), Steve McQueen & Lee Remick (Baby the Rain Must Fall), Janet Leigh & Broderick Crawford (Kid Rodelo), and Roddy McDowall & Ricardo Montalban (Conquest of the Planet of the Apes)

Are They Still Acting?: Yes, Murray still works, and had a principle role on the 2017 reboot of Twin Peaks.

Kim Novak

Age: 90 (February 13th, 1933)

Screen Debut: The French Line (1953)

Best Known For: Kim Novak started her career as a potential copycat to Marilyn Monroe, but she is best known as her antithesis, an icy blonde goddess in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, frequently name-checked as the greatest movie ever made.

AFI Nominee?: Similar to Shirley MacLaine & Leslie Caron, she definitely would have been an option here, but her film debut was too late.

Oscar Nominations: Novak received Golden Globe & BAFTA nominations in her career, but the closest she got to an Oscar nomination was as a frequent presenter.

Famous Costars: Fred MacMurray (Pushover), William Holden (Picnic), Frank Sinatra (The Man with the Golden Arm, Pal Joey), Tyrone Power (The Eddy Duchin Story), Rita Hayworth (Pal Joey), Jimmy Stewart (Bell, Book, and Candle, Vertigo), Fredric March (Middle of the Night), Kirk Douglas (Strangers When We Meet), Jack Lemmon & Fred Astaire (The Notorious Landlady), James Garner & Tony Randall (Boys' Night Out), Dean Martin (Kiss Me, Stupid), and Rock Hudson, Angela Lansbury, & Elizabeth Taylor (The Mirror Crack'd)

Are They Still Acting?: No.  Novak quit acting after the 1991 mystery-drama Liebestraum, but in recent years she has done a number of public appearances, including presenting at the Oscars & the Cannes Film Festival.

Margaret O'Brien

Age: 86 (January 15th, 1937)

Screen Debut: Babes on Broadway (1941)

Best Known For: O'Brien was a child star throughout the 1940's, but is best-known for her work in the seminal Christmas classic Meet Me in St. Louis (which given my neighbor's holiday decorations are already out, some of you have started to put up already).

AFI Nominee?: Yes, O'Brien is the youngest-living nominee on that list and our last of the AFI contenders.

Oscar Nominations: O'Brien never won a competitive Academy Award, but like Claude Jarman, she was given a Juvenile Academy Award statue for Meet Me in St. Louis.

Famous Costars: James Cagney & Ann Sothern (You, John James!), Greer Garson (Madame Curie), Orson Welles & Joan Fontaine (Jane Eyre), Charles Laughton (The Canterville Ghost), Judy Garland (Meet Me in St. Louis), June Allyson & Jimmy Durante (Music for Millions), Edward G. Robinson (Our Vines Have Tender Grapes), & Anthony Quinn (Heller in Pink Tights)

Are They Still Acting?: She is still making movies, including apparently a 2017 low-budget Saw ripoff.  Yes, Margaret O'Brien, Queen of TCM, Oscar winner, and onetime America's Sweetheart is one of the stars of a film called Halloween Pussy Trap Kill! Kill!.

Nancy Olson

Age: 95 (July 14th, 1928)

Screen Debut: Canadian Pacific (1949)

Best Known For: Olson had two big roles in Hollywood, the first being as the oblivious Betty Schaefer in Sunset Boulevard and the second as the love interest Betsy Carlisle in The Absent-Minded Professor & Son of Flubber.

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: Olson received an Academy Award nomination for Sunset Boulevard, only her second movie, but lost to Josephine Hull in Harvey.

Famous Costars: Randolph Scott (Canadian Pacific), Gloria Swanson & William Holden (Sunset Boulevard...she starred quite regularly after this with Holden), Bing Crosby (Mr. Music), John Wayne (Big Jim McLain), Jane Wyman (So Big, Pollyanna), Fred MacMurray (The Absent-Minded Professor, Son of Flubber), Glenn Ford (Smith!), and Charlton Heston & Myrna Loy (Airport 1975)

Are They Still Acting?: Olson made a rare film appearance for some reason in the 2014 sex comedy Dumbbells, her first role in 17 years after the more appropriate epitaph to her career revisiting her work in Flubber, in the remake with Robin Williams

Debra Paget

Age: 90 (August 19th, 1933)

Screen Debut: Cry of the City (1948)

Best Known For: You see her every Easter as Lilia in The Ten Commandments, her most successful film, a movie so well-known she managed to get higher-billing on Love Me Tender later that year than (checks notes) Elvis Presley.

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: No, but more glaring she also doesn't have a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which feels like a miss given some of her bigger-known roles.

Famous Costars: Loretta Young & Van Johnson (Mother is a Freshman), Edward G. Robinson & Susan Hayward (House of Strangers), Jimmy Stewart (Broken Arrow), Jeanne Crain & Myrna Loy (Belles on Their Toes), James Mason & Janet Leigh (Prince Valiant), Victor Mature, Susan Hayward, & Anne Bancroft (Demetrius and the Gladiators), Robert Taylor (The Last Hunt), Charlton Heston & Yul Brynner (The Ten Commandments), Elvis Presley (Love Me Tender), Joseph Cotten & George Sanders (From the Earth to the Moon), and Vincent Price & Lon Chaney, Jr. (The Haunted Palace)

Are They Still Acting?: Paget retired from film in the early 1960's, doing her final film (Roger Corman's The Haunted Palace) in 1963 and doing her final television appearance soon after.  Instead, she became a born-again Christian and became involved with the Trinity Broadcasting Network.

Janis Paige

Age: 101 (September 16th, 1922 - June 2nd, 2024)

Screen Debut: Bathing Beauty (1944)

Best Known For: Paige was in the original run of The Pajama Game (which also launched Shirley MacLaine's career), which made her a household name (even getting the cover of Esquire), though she lost out on the film role.  Instead, for film you recognize her from a number of different musicals, playing the similar "prominent supporting role" that actresses like Betty Garrett & Ann Miller also did during the Golden Age.

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: She definitely should've been for her scene-stealing role in Silk Stockings (rent it-she's incredible), but alas, Oscar didn't knock.

Famous Costars: Esther Williams (Bathing Beauty), Paul Henreid (Of Human Bondage), Jane Wyman (Cheyenne), Bette Davis (Winter Meeting), Fred Astaire & Cyd Charisse (Silk Stockings), Doris Day & David Niven (Please Don't Eat the Daisies), Bob Hope & Lana Turner (Bachelor in Paradise),  Joan Crawford (The Caretakers), & Henry Fonda (Welcome to Hard Times)

Are They Still Acting?: Paige's last film was the direct-to-video thrillers Natural Causes, but in 2001 her voice had been so damaged from decades of singing that she basically had to retire.

Eva Marie Saint

Age: 99 (July 4th, 1924)

Screen Debut: On the Waterfront (1954)

Best Known For: Saint is the star of two of the biggest classics of the 1950's, the Best Picture-winning On the Waterfront and Alfred Hitchcock's seminal thriller North by Northwest

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: Yes, Saint was nominated for her screen debut in On the Waterfront, and won the Best Supporting Actress statue for it.

Famous Costars: Marlon Brando (On the Waterfront), Bob Hope (That Certain Feeling, Cancel My Reservation), Montgomery Clift & Elizabeth Taylor (Raintree County), Cary Grant & James Mason (North by Northwest), Paul Newman (Exodus), James Garner (36 Hours, Grand Prix), Elizabeth Taylor (again) & Richard Burton (The Sandpiper), and Gregory Peck (The Stalking Moon)

Are They Still Acting?: No-while Saint has made some public appearances in the past few years (including presenting Best Costume Design to Phantom Thread in 2018 at the Oscars), her final film was Winter's Tale in 2014 with Colin Farrell.

Mamie van Doren

Age: 92 (February 6th, 1931)

Screen Debut: Footlight Varieties (1951)

Best Known For: Being the last surviving member of the Three M's.  During the 1950's, as a reaction to the success of Marilyn Monroe, studios hired about a dozen other buxom blonde actresses that tried to duplicate her success (the only one who got there was Kim Novak, who as we mentioned above, was the opposite of Monroe in terms of eventual star persona).  Van Doren's position (along with Jayne Mansfield) as one of the better known Monroe copycats was used as a punchline in Pulp Fiction.

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: No

Famous Costars: Liberace (Footlight Varieties), Tony Curtis (The All American), Rhonda Fleming (Yankee Pasha), Piper Laurie (Ain't Misbehavin'), Anne Bancroft (The Girl in Black Stockings), Clark Gable & Doris Day (Teacher's Pet), Mickey Rooney (The Big Operator, The Private Lives of Adam and Eve), and Jayne Mansfield (The Las Vegas Hillbillys)

Are They Still Acting?: Van Doren transitioned largely to cabaret acts & stage shows talking about her time as a headliner in Hollywood, with her last theatrically-released film being 2002's college sex comedy Slackers with Jason Schwartzman & Devon Sawa.

Robert Wagner

Age: 93 (February 10th, 1930)

Screen Debut: The Frogmen (1951)

Best Known For: Onscreen, Wagner is probably best-remembered by modern audiences as Number Two from the Austin Powers franchise, while offscreen, he is most famous for his romantic relationship with the late Natalie Wood, with many accusing him of knowing more about her drowning than he has let on.

AFI Nominee?: No-Wagner missed the ballot by one year.  Otherwise given his longtime career as a leading man, he surely would've been the last-living male actor on the list.

Oscar Nominations: Wagner was never cited for an Oscar, but he did have an Emmy nomination & six Golden Globe citations.

Famous Costars: Dana Andrews (The Frogmen), Claudette Colbert (Let's Make It Legal), Susan Hayward (With a Song in My Heart), James Cagney (What Price Glory?), Clifton Webb & Barbara Stanwyck (Titanic), James Mason & Janet Leigh (Prince Valiant), Robert Mitchum (The Hunters), Bing Crosby & Debbie Reynolds (Say One for Me), Natalie Wood (All the Fine Young Cannibals), Steve McQueen (The War Lover), Peter Sellers (The Pink Panther), and Paul Newman (Harper)

Are They Still Acting?: Wagner still acts, though not as frequently as he once did.  His most recent role was What Happened to Monday with Glenn Close & Willem Dafoe (I'd never heard of it either).

Joanne Woodward

Age: 93 (February 27th, 1930)

Screen Debut: Count Three and Pray (1955)

Best Known For: Woodward is an accomplished actress as we'll get into in a second, but in terms of the public consciousness, she is best-known as one-half of Classical Hollywood's most enduring romance (give or take Bogie & Bacall) due to her 50-year marriage to actor Paul Newman.

AFI Nominee?: No, again a surefire option if it weren't for the 1950 cutoff.

Oscar Nominations: Woodward is one of the more decorated actresses on this list when it comes to the Academy.  She won a Best Actress statue for 1957's The Three Faces of Eve (almost thirty years before her husband would win for The Color of Money), and she would be nominated for 1968's Rachel, Rachel, 1971's Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams, and 1990's Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, losing to Katharine Hepburn (The Lion in Winter) & Barbra Streisand (Funny Girl), Jane Fonda (Klute), and Kathy Bates (Misery), respectively.

Famous Costars: She costarred with Paul Newman in 16 movies, but in addition to him there are Tony Randall (No Down Payment), Orson Welles (The Long, Hot Summer), Marlon Brando & Anna Magnani (The Fugitive Kind), Sidney Poitier & Diahann Carroll (Paris Blues), Henry Fonda (A Big Hand for the Little Lady), Sean Connery (A Fine Madness), Anthony Perkins (WUSA), & Sylvia Sidney (Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams)

Are They Still Acting?: Woodward was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in 2007, and has largely retreated from public life since.

Second Editor's Note: I initially thought this was 31, but there's actually 33 (if there's more call them out in the comments).  The two actresses listed below appear to qualify (just barely though-each it looks like only has the minimum of three films), and so I've added them to the list.  I have kept the original article as is above for preservation, but wanted to add these two for posterity.

Jill St. John

Age: 85 (August 9, 1940)

Screen Debut: Thunder in the East (1951)

Best Known For: St. John is one of those celebrities that was very famous in the 1970's, but is very rarely mentioned now, partially because her film work is spotty.  Her best-known movie is Diamonds are Forever (where she played Bond Girl Tiffany Case), and she's also known for her decades-long romance with Robert Wagner which has made her a frequent mention in the tabloids.  She also was a constant figure on USO Tours during the Vietnam War (similar to Joey Heatherton, she was the "hot babe" that was there to counter Bob Hope's increasingly dated routine), and had a regular cooking segment on Good Morning America.

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: No

Famous Costars: Vincent Price (A Christmas Carol), Alan Ladd, Charles Boyer, & Deborah Kerr (Thunder in the East), Clifton Webb (The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker), Vivien Leigh (The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone), Claude Rains (The Lost World), Frank Sinatra (Come Blow Your Horn, Tony Rome), Jerry Lewis (Who's Minding the Story?), Dean Martin (Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed), Bob Hope (Eight on the Lam), & Sean Connery (Diamonds are Forever)

Are They Still Acting?: No-St. John retired from acting in 2014 after playing Mrs. Claus to Robert Wagner's Santa in a Hallmark Christmas movie, though she unsuccessfully ran for a Fire Department Board a few years ago in Aspen.

Jacqueline White

Age: 103 (November 27, 1922)

Screen Debut: Dr. Gillespie's New Assistant (1942)

Best Known For: I would guess that White, if she's known at all today, would be best known for her work in Crossfire as the "proper wife" of George Cooper's Mitch, who desperately hopes that Gloria Grahame will confess to an affair with her husband to provide him cover for a murder (Crossfire, if you haven't seen it, is really good and White is good in it).

AFI Nominee?: No

Oscar Nominations: No

Famous Costars: Joan Crawford & John Wayne (Reunion in France), Ann Sothern (Three Hearts for Julia), Spencer Tracy & Irene Dunne (A Guy Named Joe), Robert Taylor (Song of Russia...an interesting movie if you haven't heard about it as it's very important in the history of the Blacklist), Judy Garland (The Harvey Girls), Dana Andrews, Merle Oberon, & Ethel Barrymore (Night Song), & Randolph Scott (Return of the Bad Men)

Are They Still Acting?: There's two reasons I missed White when we first did this article.  First, she made very few films as a leading woman (by my count she would just barely qualify with three, all from RKO, only one of which-The Narrow Margin-being particularly well-known, and even in that she's upstaged by Marie Windsor).  And second, she retired in 1952, going out with the successful Narrow Margin (it was nominated for a writing Oscar), moving to Wyoming, though she would occasionally in the years that followed show up at film conventions.