Great female roles are hard to come by. Just ask any Hollywood actress. It’s especially difficult for more mature actresses who see their male counterparts age gracefully and still manage to get tasty roles in quality films. But when a good part does come along, it’s important to grab the opportunity and make the most of it. Powerful female characters in Hollywood films have made for some of the most interesting characters in recent times. Top 10 Films presents the Top 10 Dominant Women in Hollywood Film – a collection of ten actresses and performances categorised by the powerful presence of a female character in the story.

Rightly or wrongly I look back at the last decade of horror films as one that gave us nothing new. We retread old ground, often with poor remakes or as they became known during the period – the re-imagining. Instead of western audiences enjoying new and interesting tales from the East – a craze that started in the late 1990s with the likes of Hideo Nakata’s 1998 chiller “Ring” or Takashi Miike’s 1999 film “Audition” – we had American producers nicking the stories and replaying them for English-speaking audiences with pretty Californian teenagers.

Steve Martin was ‘born standing up’: A Brief Introduction
Click here to jump to the Top 10
Steve Martin was born in Texas, 1945. He quickly found a kinship with showmanship and entertainment by performing magic tricks, juggling, and playing the banjo to small audiences at Disneyland. Martin was, in his own words “born standing up”.

His first big break came in 1967. Girlfriend Nina Goldblatt, a dancer on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour”, submitted some of Martin’s work to head writer Mason Williams. Williams liked what he saw to such a …