Gloria Grahame

Gloria Grahame electrified moviegoers with her turns as femmes fatale in such films as "Crossfire" (1947), "In a Lonely Place" (1950) and "The Bad and the Beautiful" (1952), which earned her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Her women were dangerous, without question, and potentially lethal if cornered, like her mob moll in "The Big Heat" (1953), who lurked through the film's shadowy underworld on a hell-bent mission to avenge her disfigurement by Lee Marvin. She continued to appear on TV and in features as the years went on, but her career was cut short in 1980 when she was felled by stomach cancer. But the best of her screen roles continued to burn on late-night TV and in revival houses, where her incendiary presence had lost none of its power to entrance - or to burn.