Viola Davis’s greatness has never been the kind you can mistake for luck. It’s the kind forged—scene by scene—out of craft, nerve, and a lived understanding of what it means to be underestimated and still walk into the room as if you own it. Born August 11, 1965, in St. Matthews, South Carolina, Davis spent her earliest years straddling two Americas: the rural South of her family’s roots and, soon after, the hard-edged reality of Central Falls, Rhode Island, where poverty wasn’t a talking point but a daily condition. She has spoken plainly about growing up in severe deprivation—about the indignities and dangers of it, about the way hunger and instability mark a child—and those experiences did not simply “inspire” her later work. They sharpened it. They gave her an instrument most actors spend a lifetime trying to approximate: truth that cannot be faked.

In every age, it seems, Hollywood bestows upon us an epicene erotic ideal who somehow embodies all of our girlishness and impishness and grandiose grandeur. He is a vessel of desire. He is a romanticization of youth. He is a contradiction incarnate, and he is the perfect teen idol for the decade of his ascension. In the 2020s, that man is Timothée Chalamet. Timothée Chalamet is like James Dean on LSD: unfathomably bored and beautifully androgynous and dark-eyed. He seems like both an anachronism and an inevitability, channeling an ancient sense of doomed beauty while carrying the relentless cool of the future.

At one hundred years old, Dick Van Dyke stands as one of Hollywood’s last living links to the Golden Age — a performer whose very name evokes buoyant optimism, nimble charm, and the kind of wholesome, unmanufactured warmth that once defined family entertainment. Born on December 13, 1925, in West Plains, Missouri, and raised in Danville, Illinois, Richard Wayne Van Dyke grew from a lanky Midwestern dreamer into a beloved American institution. His journey from modest radio announcer to Broadway star, from television fixture to film icon, is the story of a performer who made joy his life’s work — and who, astonishingly, is still doing it.

Few figures in motion-picture history have cast as long and luminous a shadow as Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin. His bowler hat, cane, and endearing waddle made him one of the most recognizable faces on Earth. Yet behind that comic mustache was a man whose genius, controversy, and resilience defined the art of cinema itself.