‘What’s Love Got to Do With It’ & More Great Female Performances to Stream Right Now

It’s Women’s History Month! Celebrate the occasion with these powerful performances from some of TV and film’s finest actresses.

Angela Bassett in…What’s Love Got to Do With It

To borrow lyrics from one of Tina Turner’s hits, Bassett (above left) is simply the best in this 1993 biopic about the rock ’n’ roller. Sure, she may lip-synch to Turner’s tunes instead of singing, but she still captures the icon’s grit.

Michelle Williams in…My Week With Marilyn

Williams evokes the star quality and the quiet fragility of Marilyn Monroe in this 2011 drama set in 1956, as she connects with a production assistant on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl.

(Credit: Laurence Cendrowicz/©The Weinstein Company/courtesy Everett Collection)

Katharine Hepburn in…On Golden Pond

Hepburn won her record-breaking fourth and final Best Actress Oscar for playing Ethel, the aging Thayer family matriarch, who deals with a curmudgeonly husband (Henry Fonda) and an estranged daughter (Jane Fonda) in this poignant family drama from 1981. It’s not a showy performance, but it is a moving one.

(Credit: ©Universal Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection)

Jodie Foster in…the Silence of the Lambs

Talk of this 1991 thriller inevitably turns to Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of psychiatrist (and cannibal) Hannibal Lecter, but Foster is a force of nature as an ambitious and steely FBI trainee who interviews the locked-up Lecter for insight into an at-large killer while trying to keep the doctor out of her head.

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Donna Reed in…It’s a Wonderful Life

As Mary, wife of family man George Bailey (James Stewart), Reed brings heart and a lively spirit to the 1946 holiday classic. When she offers their money to help save the town bank, George loves her more than ever, and so do we.