AFI's '50 Legends'

Part of the AFI 100 Years… series, AFI’s 100 Years…100 Stars is a list of the top 50 greatest screen legends of American cinema, 25 male and 25 female. The list was unveiled by the American Film Institute on a June 15, 1999 CBS special hosted by Shirley Temple, with 50 current actors making the presentations.

The American Film Institute defined an “American screen legend” as an actor or a team of actors with a significant screen presence in American feature-length (40 min) films whose screen debut occurred in or before 1950, or whose screen debut occurred after 1950 but whose death has marked a completed body of work.

To date, of the fifty stars listed only five are still alive: two men, (Sidney Poitier and Kirk Douglas), and three women (Shirley Temple, Lauren Bacall, and Sophia Loren). At the time the list was first unveiled, two men, (Marlon Brando and Gregory Peck) and two women (Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor) were also living.

	Male		Female
1.	Humphrey Bogart	1.	Katharine Hepburn
2.	Cary Grant	2.	Bette Davis
3.	James Stewart	3.	Audrey Hepburn
4.	Marlon Brando	4.	Ingrid Bergman
5.	Fred Astaire	5.	Greta Garbo
6.	Henry Fonda	6.	Marilyn Monroe
7.	Clark Gable	7.	Elizabeth Taylor
8.	James Cagney	8.	Judy Garland
9.	Spencer Tracy	9.	Marlene Dietrich
10.	Charlie Chaplin	10.	Joan Crawford
11.	Gary Cooper	11.	Barbara Stanwyck
12.	Gregory Peck	12.	Claudette Colbert
13.	John Wayne	13.	Grace Kelly
14.	Laurence Olivier	14.	Ginger Rogers
15.	Gene Kelly	15.	Mae West
16.	Orson Welles	16.	Vivien Leigh
17.	Kirk Douglas	17.	Lillian Gish
18.	James Dean	18.	Shirley Temple
19.	Burt Lancaster	19.	Rita Hayworth
20.	The Marx Brothers	20.	Lauren Bacall
21.	Buster Keaton	21.	Sophia Loren
22.	Sidney Poitier	22.	Jean Harlow
23.	Robert Mitchum	23.	Carole Lombard
24.	Edward G. Robinson	24.	Mary Pickford
25.	William Holden	25.	Ava Gardner