It's really no secret that the representation of women onscreen still has a long way to go. In fact, in 2020, the Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film found that the percentage of top-grossing films in the US that featured a female protagonist actually dropped to 29% from 40% the year before.
However, there are plenty of women in Hollywood who are fighting for more and better representation in movies and on TV — both on camera and behind it.
Here are 18 times famous women fought for better representation in film:
1.When Halle Berry first got the Bruised script, "it was written for a 25-year-old Irish Catholic girl," but she convinced the producers to "reimagine it for a middle-aged Black woman" and let her direct it.
2.When Meryl Streep was preparing to audition for Kramer vs. Kramer (which is based on an anti-feminist novel), she felt that the script had its lead female character, Joanna, all wrong — and if they wanted her for the role, they'd need to rewrite the part to make Joanna a more realistic and sympathetic reflection of the struggles women like her face.
3.Tessa Thompson pitched the idea of making Valkyrie openly bisexual (like she is in the comics) in Thor: Ragnarok to director Taika Waititi, and even though the scene confirming her character's sexuality was cut, Tessa confirmed it to her fans.
4.Gemma Chan, who was targeted by internet trolls when she played Bess of Hardwick in Mary Queen of Scots because she isn't white, called out the long history of actors of color only being allowed "to play their own race" and even losing out on those roles to white actors in racist makeup.
5.Despite pushback from her network, Lucille Ball fought for her real-life pregnancy to be written into her show, making I Love Lucy one of the first series to show a pregnant woman on camera.
6.Lupita Nyong'o worked with Black Panther director Ryan Coogler to ensure Nakia was "more than just the love interest" and had her own agency and space in the story apart from T'Challa.
7.A few years after Elizabeth Olsen publicly expressed her desire to change her Scarlet Witch costume from a "cleavage corset," she helped design her new suit for WandaVision and tested it to ensure she was able to move in the ways her role required.
8.After she spent a stressful year doing a lot of press and a Broadway play, Saoirse Ronan's skin broke out, but Lady Bird director Greta Gerwig suggested she keep the acne as part of her character rather than cover it up.
9.At first, Reese Witherspoon wasn't going to be in Cruel Intentions because she found Annette to be "too demure and too much of a woman influenced by a guy's manipulations," but then she spent a week rewriting Annette's dialogue with director Roger Kumble to shape her into a more well-developed character.
10.Director Patty Jenkins didn't include any "eye candy" shots of Diana in Wonder Woman, and a Tumblr post about a specific scene where Gal Gadot's thighs jiggled instead of being digitally altered went viral.
11.Mindy Kaling created Never Have I Ever and the character Devi Vishwakumar because, as she told Elle, "we are programmed to see Asian girls in a certain way on teen shows.”
12.Katharine Hepburn was one of the first women in Hollywood to wear pants, both onscreen and off.
13.While training for The Hunger Games, Jennifer Lawrence was adamantly against dieting or losing weight to portray Katniss Everdeen, instead focusing on becoming "fit and strong."
14.In 2015, Viola Davis became the first Black woman to win the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, and in her acceptance speech, she said, "The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity."
15.Anna Kendrick called out the fact that she had to wait for all of the male roles in a movie to be cast before she could "even become a part of the [casting] conversation."
16.In 1941, Bette Davis became the first woman elected president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but she quit two months later because the board wanted her to “be a figurehead only."
17.In 2018, Shonda Rhimes and her production company ShondaLand partnered with SeriesFest to create a mentorship program specifically for women directors — the first of its kind.
18.And finally, after her movie Thelma and Louise was released in 1991, Geena Davis believed the press reaction that "it was going to change everything and that there were now going to be far more female lead characters in movies," but as that promise failed to materialize, she founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2004 to investigate the portrayal of women in film.
