MGM · Public domain

An actress who turned a character written to seem dim — Billie Dawn, the ex-showgirl of Born Yesterday — into a performance so exact in its comic timing that it beat out Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson for the 1950 Best Actress Oscar. She won a second major award, a Tony, for the musical Bells Are Ringing a decade later. In between, called before the Senate in 1952 over communism accusations, she navigated the hearing without the career damage that ended many of her peers, and kept working until breast cancer killed her at 43.