Secret Beyond the Door (1947)

Film: Secret Beyond the Door (1947)

Stars: Joan Bennett, Michael Redgrave, Anne Revere, Barbar O'Neil, Natalie Schafer

Director: Fritz Lang

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

Joan Bennett & Fritz Lang starred together in four films that they were both credited on (Lang reportedly also helped on Bennett's 1941 war film Confirm or Deny).  Three of these films were film noir, while a fourth (Man Hunt) apparently is not technically noir but has lots of noir-like tendencies.  We have reviewed two of these films before on this blog (click The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street below), but we had not gotten to the third, so this year where we're doing some cleanup and seeing some blind spots in key filmographies it made total sense for us to move into the last movie that Bennett & Lang made together, 1947's Secret Beyond the Door.  Given that I loved both of their other movies together for this series, the expectations were high...and not really met.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Celia (Bennett), a beautiful & wealthy woman on vacation, and in need of a new husband.  Though she has more appropriate choices pursuing her, she settles for the enigmatic Mark Lamphere, and they wed after knowing each other for a short time.  The two move to his estate, and there she finds out that she's Mark's second husband...and that he comes with a creepy child from her first marriage.  She also befriends Mark's more gregarious sister Caroline (Revere) and his odd assistant Miss Robey (O'Neil).  Mark's house is unusual, as it holds six rooms, all of which depict a different famous murder scene, and it has a seventh, locked room that Celia cannot see.  Initially, she starts to believe it to be a scene from his first marriage, a sort of confession that he killed his first wife (a belief shared by his son), but when she opens it, she realizes it's a recreation of her bedroom, and the candles are uneven just like in her room...the room depicts that he wants to kill her, not his ex-wife.

We're going to take an unusual step here and stop mid-summary because I need to acknowledge-this is an AMAZING idea for a movie if they had pursued it.  The film until this point is a bit dry, and there's a lot of intrigue around that seventh room, to the point where I figured there was no way that they could live up to the hype.  In that moment, though, I was genuinely floored-it hadn't occurred to me that they were recreating a murder that hadn't happened yet, and man did I wish that they had stuck with that premise, which they actually do for a little bit afterward.  We see that Mark did want to kill her, living out a childhood trauma of him being locked in a room for hours (which he blamed on his mother, even though it had just been done as a prank by his sister), but he can't go through with it because he loves her.

The film ends with him getting better, his childhood traumas cured, and Miss Robey burning down the house ala Mrs. Danvers, obsessed with her employer that she will never possess romantically.  None of this works-it's too placid, too dull, and makes you care about a romantic relationship that doesn't work (Redgrave & Bennett do not have good chemistry).  But for a brief moment about an hour into the picture, you think that Lang has created an under-appreciated classic, either with her fleeing her own, planned murder (which she's walked right into) or Mark actually confessing to his "ultimate" crime creation...changing the ending here, this film is the rare movie I'd actively love to see remade.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Born to Kill, Brighton Rock, Brute Force, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Cry Wolf, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Stranger on the Third Floor, They Drive By Night, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Ace in the Hole, Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Breaking Point, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Elevator to the Gallows, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, Julie, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Lightning Strikes Twice, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Late Show, The Long Goodbye, Lost Highway, Night Moves, Nightcrawler, Le Samourai

OVP: Body and Soul (1947)

Film: Body and Soul (1947)

Stars: John Garfield, Lilli Palmer, Hazel Brooks, Anne Revere, William Conrad, Canada Lee

Director: Robert Rossen

Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Actor-John Garfield, Film Editing*, Original Screenplay)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

John Garfield is not an actor many people discuss today, certainly in the same confines as we do most classic film stars of his ilk.  This happens-actors go out of fashion or don't land a classic in the way that others do, and as a result they are forgotten.  But Garfield's weird in that he starred in at least one proper classic film (The Postman Always Rings Twice), but more so he's an actor that sort of serves as a template to modern film acting.  Before Brando & James Dean, John Garfield kind of invented the schtick of a sensitive, brooding, & handsome soul that completely contradicted the era's other top stars & pillars of masculinity like Clark Gable & Spencer Tracy.  Garfield's life was tragic (he'd make a brilliant Star of the Month, and we'll probably get there at some point), but it's hard to understand why he hasn't caught on more in the way other classic film stars have gotten their renaissance.  If he did, surely we'd pay attention to this, his second of two Oscar nominations, and a film that would be a big hit...despite the fact that his career would virtually be over a few years later, when he'd die at the age of only 39.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie features Garfield as Charley Davis, a young man from the hood who, despite his mother's (Revere) protestations, becomes a boxing champion.  In the process of becoming a title holder, though, he becomes involved with the seedy underworld of boxing, and starts to take bets on himself, and participating in fixed matches.  We see much of the film in flashback on a night when Charley is deciding whether or not the huge payday he'll earn is worth giving up his title in a crooked fight after the death of his coach Ben (Lee).  Thanks to the love of his on-again-off-again girlfriend Peg (Palmer), he decides to stay in the match & win, thus retaining his dignity & respect even if he doesn't make his fortune.

Body and Soul is not original, but instead based on the play Golden Boy by Clifford Odets (which had already been a movie with Barbara Stanwyck & William Holden at this point).  It's therefore a film I don't feel too bad chiding a bit for its screenplay, which is rife with cliches, and while it was formative (the film is clearly the prototype for dozens of future boxing movies in virtually every way), it was still dealing with stories & tales we'd already seen before from arguably the cinema's most-overused sport.  That isn't to say it isn't good in parts.  The Oscar-winning editing is fantastic, and would become the Gold Standard for boxing movies for decades to come (both Rocky and Raging Bull owe the movie a debt of gratitude).  It gets points for being formative, but I'm not going to ignore the cliches.

It also doesn't help that the acting choices are unusual, and really ill-advised in some cases.  Garfield's good if never expanding into the tenderer & funnier moments we get in his early scenes (Charley the Charming is a better fit for Garfield than Charley the Cad), but his costars are all a miss.  Palmer has been great in other work (she deserved an Oscar nomination for her late-career performance in The Other Side of the Wind), but she has zilch chemistry with Garfield, and doesn't really have a read on Peg.  The same can be said for "other woman" Alice as played by Hazel Brooks.  The acting & writing are both misses for Body & Soul, and as a result I left mildly disappointed even if I get where it was coming from.

That said, the movie has a great reputation today in part due to its crazy backstory.  If you look through the call list of Body & Soul you'll notice that virtually everyone involved in this movie was eventually blacklisted (Garfield, Revere, Lee, director Rossen, screenwriter Abraham Polonsky), and that's not a coincidence.  Body & Soul is about as socialist of a movie as you could get past the censors in 1947.  The film is entirely about Charley abandoning capitalism (and portraying the money-hungry boxing managers as pure greed), in favor of the dignity of a working life, even if it foregoes comfort.  The film also is not shy about showing Garfield's Jewish heritage (something that Gentleman's Agreement, which the actor also starred in 1947, also showed), and at the time anti-Semitism wasn't far off from some of the "leftist" accusations of the HUAC committee.  It's fascinating to watch the movie knowing what would happen to so many people who made the film because the picture is not subtle.  Alas, it's too predictable for me to be all that intrigued outside of curiosity.

Fallen Angel (1945)

Film: Fallen Angel (1945)
Stars: Alice Faye, Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell, Charles Bickford, Anne Revere, John Carradine, Percy Kilbride
Director: Otto Preminger
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Alice Faye-click here to learn more about Ms. Faye (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

And so we conclude our short time with Alice Faye as our Star of the Month, largely where Ms. Faye herself ended her career.  We profiled a bit in our overview of Alice Faye's career (see the link above) why Fallen Angel was such a big moment in her career, and largely ended it (long story short-Faye caught on to Darryl Zanuck trying to screw her over to give a better part to Linda Darnell, and she wasn't having it so she left show business, leaving Zanuck without one of his biggest stars).  Faye would work again decades later, most notably in 1962's State Fair (where she had to play second fiddle to Pat Boone, Bobby Darin, & Ann-Margret, a new generation of musical stars), but this was it for her time as a headliner.  Considering the director here is better than any we've profiled so far in Faye's career (real talk-Otto Preminger may be the finest director we've hit for any Saturday with the Stars articles, give or take Vincente Minnelli), I was curious if Faye had overreacted, or if she indeed gets screwed over by Zanuck.  What I found was that Faye, if she had assumed she'd get the better part, was justified in her storm off, but neither actress is saving a particularly strong picture with Fallen Angel.

(Spoilers Ahead) Fallen Angel is about a love triangle in a small town between a conman of sorts Eric Stanton (Andrews), a "loose" waitress at a local diner Stella (Darnell), and the prim organist who happens to be a wealthy heiress June Mills (Faye).  Eric is intent on marrying Stella by any means necessary, but she won't go with him unless he has some money, so he tries to steal it from June, first by tricking her into giving it to him and then by marrying her to get to hers and her sister Clara's (Revere) inheritance.  This doesn't entirely work, though, because June is genuinely in love with Eric and Stella soon finds herself dead, with us assuming Eric didn't do it, but we aren't entirely sure who did.  The movie follows with Eric confessing to being a cad and then slowly falling for June (for real this time), trying to prove his innocence.  At the end of the movie, yet another guy obsessed with Stella, the detective investigating her murder (Bickford), turns out to be the killer, with Eric & June going off into the sunset together.


The film has a lot of great makings of a movie, including reuniting Andrews & Preminger, who just a year earlier had made the cinematic masterpiece Laura, which this film was clearly trying to duplicate both creatively and financially.  While it was a modest hit, it never really approaches Laura in terms of its quality.  Everyone was right to single out Darnell's Stella, who is given less screen time than I would've assumed considering her billing and star status at the time, but she's the best part about the movie.  Her Stella is dangerous, nasty, and clearly the sort of film noir character that, nowadays, would be having sex with guys just to mess with them.  She works every guy in the film, either to get what she wants or occasionally just to screw up their lives, and she looks great doing it.  The movie's best parts are all Darnell, and it falls to pieces in the back half when she disappears, and we're left with a relatively lousy mystery.  Even with a really great supporting cast (John Carradine as a conman medium! Anne Revere as an enigmatic spinster! Percy Kilbride as a lovelorn cook!) giving solid work, its script just isn't that good, and feels hollow when you compare it to the heights that Laura achieved.

Faye, for the first time this month, feels out of her element.  I wonder what the additional scenes would have been like, if they would have added some depth to her work or if this wasn't a genre that she could pull off, but she feels too mousy to be interesting compared to the stellar work that Darnell is playing.  We're meant to root for June, but what is there to root for other than she seems like a nice girl?  Her previous iterations were so compelling because they took seemingly "gold-hearted gals" and made them interesting.  Here, though, she's left with little to do other than be upstaged, and though it's a bummer that she didn't make any major movies again, perhaps the lesson of Alice Faye is that she was never given a proper shake to begin with.  Despite clear talent, beauty, and incredible star charisma, none of her movies that we profiled this month ever felt worthy of her.  One has to wonder what, a decade later, someone like Gene Kelly or Stanley Donen could have made of such a rare talent.  At the very least, while she didn't get the decades of star legend that some of her peers would get, she did seem to have a genuinely happy life with her husband Phil Harris for the next fifty years.  Unfortunately, as you'll soon see, our May Star of the Month wasn't so lucky.

Oscar's Late-Blooming Actresses

Next week I'll be giving you an article about the overall Best Actress race and my thoughts on how crazy-awesome it looks this year (so many possibilities!), but before I get there I want to focus on one woman in particular who might be able to make a significant impression on the race: Sandra Bullock.  Bullock has a major film coming out that she's getting strong reviews for in Our Brand is Crisis, and at this point it's hard to imagine that she spent most of the Aughts wandering through the wilderness before finally making a major comeback and scoring an Oscar for The Blind Side.

Bullock was 45-years-old when she received her first nomination, which is actually pretty old for an acting nominee, particularly a female nominee.  Most women tend to be nominated in their twenties (I have read the average age for a Best Actress nominee is around 29), and especially those women who are going to be nominated multiple times will have started early.  As a result of this, I was wondering if Bullock gets her third nomination this year (she was also cited for Gravity for those keeping track at home), will she make the list of the Top 10 3+-nominees in terms of age at their first nomination?  Let's take a look at the top ten, shall we?

10. Anne Revere

Age at First Nomination (we'll be going age at the Oscar ceremony): 40
First Nominated Film: Best Supporting Actress in The Song of Bernadette (1943), followed by supporting citations in National Velvet (1945) and Gentleman's Agreement (1947)
Did She Win?: Yes, Revere pulled off the win for playing Elizabeth Taylor's mother in National Velvet, besting two women who are still alive to hold grudges, actually (Dame Angela Lansbury, the youngest person ever to be nominated for two Academy Awards and Ann Blyth, Joan Crawford's demon spawn in Mildred Pierce).
What Took So Long?: Revere was most noted for her work on the stage (she would eventually win a Tony Award for Toys in the Attic), and was more just a contract player who gained steadily in stature in the years that followed Song of Bernadette until she was forced to resign from the Screen Actors Guild because she refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Also Worth Noting: Revere played opposite Taylor six years after her Oscar win as Montgomery Clift's mother in A Place in the Sun.  Despite the film being a huge hit with Oscar and the Academy's penchant for both women, neither would be nominated for the film.

9. Agnes Moorehead

Age at First Nomination : 42
First Nominated Film: Best Supporting Actress in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), followed by Mrs. Parkington (1944), Johnny Belinda (1948), and Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte, all in supporting.
Did She Win?: No, Moorehead never made it.  Based on some readings I have done she was probably closest either for The Magnificent Ambersons (where she may have fallen prey to the Orson Welles-hate that was still reverberating from the year before) or for 1964's Hush...Hush, where she was the sentimental favorite but Oscar was very international that year, going with all non-Americans for the first time ever that year rather than the Massachusetts-born Moorehead.
What Took So Long?: Moorehead really struggled early in her career, frequently going without work and even food.  She eventually found success in radio, working with Orson Welles and his Mercury Players.  This resulted in her getting the two most iconic roles in her film career: as Charles Foster Kane's mother in Citizen Kane and her marvelous work as Fanny in The Magnificent Ambersons.
Also Worth Noting: She didn't do particularly well at the Emmys either, never winning for Bewitched, her best-known role overall to modern audiences, though she did pick up an Emmy for her role on The Wild Wild West of all things.

8. Kathy Bates

Age at First Nomination: 42
First Nominated Film: She was first noted for her iconic breakthrough as Annie Wilkes in 1990's Misery, followed by supporting citations for Primary Colors (1998) and About Schmidt (2002)
Did She Win?: She won in a bit of a surprise on her first outing for Misery, a very atypical role for a Best Actress contender, though it's hard to tell if Joanne Woodward or Julia Roberts was her bigger competition.  Eight years later she'd nearly pull off an upset over Judi Dench when she was the only American in a field of Brits (which frequently results in a win for the Yank).
What Took So Long?: Bates was initially one of those character actors who never really popped.  Though she appeared in films for prestigious directors (Milos Forman and Robert Altman), she had more success on the stage, winning a Tony nomination for 'night Mother and eventually transferring to television in a series of soap roles.
Also Worth Noting: In one of those great "what could have been" sorts of moments, Anjelica Huston was originally offered the role of Annie Wilkes, and wanted to do the movie but was committed to making the film The Grifters.  Huston would go on to lose the Oscar for her Grifters performance to Kathy Bates.

7. Fay Bainter

Age at First Nomination: 45 (for those interested, Bullock was slightly older when she landed her first nomination by a few months and so would knock out Bainter if she were nominated again)
First Nominated Film: Bainter became the first actor nominated in two different acting categories in the same year, being cited for lead actress in White Banners and supporting in Jezebel in 1938.  She would go on to get a very late-in-her-career supporting nod for The Children's Hour in 1961.
Did She Win?: She did-Bainter set a longtime pattern of actors who were nominated for two different categories in the same year winning the supporting trophy, a trend that would last for fifty years until Sigourney Weaver broke it in 1988 (to this day she's the only actor to have been nominated twice in one year to have never won an Oscar, thanks to Julianne Moore's recent victory).
What Took So Long?: Like several women on this list, Bainter got her start and much of her success on the stage, appearing in a number of major New York productions before MGM finally convinced her to give film a try, and she became wildly successful pretty quickly.
Also Worth Noting: Back in the day, supporting actors would occasionally present the category they won the previous year, rather than the alternating genders we see today.  As a result, Bainter was the first person ever to present an Oscar to an African-American when she handed the statue to Hattie McDaniel for Gone with the Wind.

6. Thelma Ritter

Age at First Nomination: 48
First Nominated Film: Like most of her costars, Ritter scored a nomination for the classic 1950 film All About Eve, and followed that up with five supporting bids for The Mating Season (1951), With a Song in My Heart (1952), Pickup on South Street (1953), Pillow Talk (1959), and Birdman of Alcatraz (1962).
Did She Win?: Ritter is the most-nominated woman without a competitive Academy Award trophy to show for it, tied with Deborah Kerr and Glenn Close (though it's worth noting Kerr eventually got an honorary Oscar).  Despite the plethora of options, it's hard to tell if Ritter was actually ever close or just the female equivalent of Arthur Kennedy.
What Took So Long?: Ritter, though she was classically-trained, never really popped, working largely in radio and stock theater until she managed to have small parts three Best Picture nominees (Miracle on 34th Street, A Letter to Three Wives, and All About Eve), which brought her to the attention of casting directors.
Also Worth Noting: She was nearly able to make a fifth nomination in a row in 1954 for the classic Rear Window, which would have tied her with Greer Garson and Bette Davis for the most consecutive nominations.  Considering that she would have almost-certainly lost to Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront, perhaps the miss was for the best for a woman who said her many losses meant she "knew what it was like to be a bridesmaid, but never a bride."

5. Helen Mirren

Age at First Nomination: 49
First Nominated Film: Mirren scored a bit of a surprise nomination for The Madness of King George in 1994, but followed that with three expected citations for Gosford Park (2001), The Queen (2006), and The Last Station (2009).
Did She Win?: Mirren stampeded to basically every award known to mankind in 2006 with The Queen, a performance so noteworthy that she ended up winning a Tony for the same role nearly a decade later.
What Took So Long?: One of the most unexpected movie stars of the past decade, Mirren worked steadily in films in the 1980's, but almost always in character roles.  She also took frequent time off to do theater, and wasn't one of the Merchant-Ivory go-to's at the time, which probably hurt as that was what British actors were being cited for during the era.
Also Worth Noting: Mirren is well-known for her work as a monarch.  In her lifetime she's played 5 Queens: Elizabeth I, Elizabeth II, Queen Charlotte of Mexklenburg-Strelitz, Queen Gertrude (in Halmet), and the Queen of Egypt in The Prince of Egypt.

4. Gladys Cooper

Age at First Nomination: 54
First Nominated Film: Cooper's first nomination came for her nightmarish work in Now, Voyager (1942), and she earned two more supporting nods for The Song of Bernadette (1943) and My Fair Lady (1964).
Did She Win?: Cooper never pulled this off.  I wonder if she was pretty close for Song of Bernadette (it's a show-y part), but the other two seem unlikely.
What Took So Long?: Cooper spent much of her earlier career as one of the biggest theatrical draws of the 1930's, frequently finding herself headlining shows in the West End and on Broadway.  It wasn't until she moved to Hollywood in 1940 that she made her mark in film, and all things considered got on with Oscar pretty damn quickly.
Also Worth Noting: Is one of the rare actresses to have been nominated for the Tonys, Emmys, and Oscars without winning any of them.  Had she been nominated for a Grammy and lost, she would have joined Lynn Redgrave as the only person to have been nominated for all four awards and never won a trophy.

3. Judi Dench

Age at First Nomination: 63
First Nominated Film: Dench, like so many British actresses of a certain age before her, got in for playing a queen, in this case Victoria in Mrs. Brown.  She followed that turn with six more nominations for Shakespeare in Love (1998), Chocolat (2000), Iris (2001), Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005), Notes on a Scandal (2006), and Philomena (2013).
Did She Win?: She did, for Shakespeare in Love, the second-shortest performance ever to win an Academy Award after Beatrice Straight in Network.
What Took So Long?: Dench didn't really do film prior to her major breakout in Mrs. Brown, focusing principally on television and theater (she's in the Royal Shakespeare Company).  However, it is worth noting that she won a BAFTA eleven years prior to her turn in Mrs. Brown for the Oscar-blessed Room with a View.  Had her costar Maggie Smith stuck to lead like she did at the BAFTA's for the Oscars, Dench may well have gotten to Oscar eleven years earlier than expected (which still would have kept her on this list, for the record).
Also Worth Noting: Dame Judi has never been able to pull off an Emmy, perhaps the only major acting trophy she hasn't bagged, despite three nominations (for The Last of the Blonde Bombshells, Cranford, and Return to Cranford).  Dench nearly got a Razzie nomination for her bizarre appearance in The Chronicles of Riddick (she was on the shortlist), but the bizarre list of Britney Spears, Condoleezza Rice, Carmen Electra, Jennifer Lopez, and Sharon Stone kept her from such a dubious distinction.

2. Ethel Barrymore

Age at First Nomination: 65
First Nominated Film: The Grand Dame of the American Stage got her first Oscar nomination in None But the Lonely Heart in 1944, followed by The Spiral Staircase (1946), The Paradine Case (1947), and Pinky (1949).
Did She Win?: Yes, Barrymore won on her first try with None But the Lonely Heart.
What Took So Long?: Barrymore made a few silent films very early in her career, but largely stuck to the stage and was actually quite snobbish about the cinema, sticking to the theater and doing the likes of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Maugham in the process.  She was bought by a major paycheck for None But the Lonely Heart, her first film in over a decade, and the acclaim that followed convinced her to stay in Hollywood.
Also Worth Noting: Barrymore turned down a marriage proposal from Winston Churchill because she thought he wasn't going anywhere.  That has nothing to do with movies or Oscars, but is a good anecdote so use it at your next dinner party.

1. Edith Evans

Age at First Nomination: 75
First Nominated Film: In the only year where three women were nominated in Supporting Actress for the same film, Evans joined her costars Diane Cilento and Joyce Redman in being nominated for Tom Jones (1963).  She followed that citation with nods for The Chalk Garden (1964) and The Whisperers (1967).
Did She Win?: No, Evans never won.  She likely came the closest in 1967 after picking up a number of precursors and getting numerous plaudits (she's superb in the largely forgotten film).  However, sentiment won the day and the inferior Guess Who's Coming to Dinner got Kate Hepburn her second trophy in the wake of Spencer Tracy's death.
What Took So Long?: Evans was one of the biggest names on the British stage, playing numerous Shakespearean roles and debuting roles in plays by the likes of Noel Coward and Bernard Shaw.  Though she dabbled in film, she didn't really take off until her small role in Tom Jones.  After that she stuck with film and gained a large amount of success during the 1960's and 1970's.
Also Worth Noting: Though she didn't win in 1963 (fellow dame Margaret Rutherford was successful), she did get to pick up Tony Richardson's Best Director award for him as he wasn't there.

It's worth noting before we go that Bullock isn't the only actress that is in contention for being included in this list (though she's the only one with a film that's an immediate threat).  Brenda Blethyn, Jacki Weaver, Catherine Keener, Viola Davis, and Melissa Leo also all are sitting at two nominations and would crack this Top 10 if they scored a third.  Do you think Bullock or any of these women will be able to go-the-distance and get a third nod?  Share your thoughts in the comments!