Van Fleet won the Supporting Actress Oscar for her very first screen role, as James Dean's brothel-madam mother in Elia Kazan's “East of Eden” (1955).

A famous stage actress, Hull appeared in only a handful of films, but left a lasting memory in “Arsenic and Old Lace” (1944) and in “Harvey” (1950), for which she won an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress. In both films, she recreated parts she had played on Broadway.

At the center of Martin Ritt's biopic “Norma Rae” (1979), for which Sally Field received her first Best Actress Oscar, is the politicization of a Southern working-class woman in a small dormant town after meeting a Jewish labor-organizer (Ron Liebman) from New York.

Meryl Streep won the 1979 Supporting Actress Oscar as Joanna Kramer in Robert Benton's family melodrama “Kramer vs. Kramer,” playing a woman who walks out on her self-absorbed husband, leaving him the responsibility of raising their young son alone. Joanna is depicted as a confused woman, deeply dissatisfied with her mother-wife chores.