Women's Biographies on Film

Inspired by a post on a Turner Classic Movies Facebook fan group that noted it's Women's History Month and asked for readers to send in their favorite costumes worn by women(!), I started coming up with this list of women who have been portrayed in film instead, and it's quite an impressive one: 

Greta Garbo lead the way in Queen Christina (1933). Just the way she runs up the steps for her entrance hooked me. And Katharine Hepburn was a fine Mary of Scotland in 1936. 

Greer Garson played orphans' advocate Edna Gladney in Blossoms in the Dust (1941) and Marie Curie Madame Curie (1943), a role played by Rosamund Pike in the 2019 film Radioactive. Garson was Oscar-nominated for playing Eleanor Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello (1960); Jean Stapleton played the role in the 1982 TV movie Eleanor, First Lady of the World. 

Bette Davis portrayed Queen Elizabeth I in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). Jean Simmons played the young Queen in Young Bess (1953), as Cate Blanchett did (more realistically) in Elizabeth (1998).

Deborah Kerr starred in a fictionalized account of governess Anna Leonowens in The King and I (1956).  In 1959, The Diary of Anne Frank premiered; Shelly Winters donated the Supporting Actress Oscar she won for the film to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. Susan Hayward won an Oscar for her portrayal of Barbara Graham in I Want to Live. (Jazz, and marijuana, are blamed.) Patty Duke was named Best Supporting Actress for playing Helen Keller in A Miracle Worker (1962).

Cleopatra (1963) starred Elizabeth Taylor, the first actress to make a million dollars for a role. (The Queen of Egypt was also portrayed as smoking something in the 2005/07 HBO series Rome.) Debbie Reynolds played The Unsinkable Molly Brown in 1964; Kathy Bates played the role in Titanic (1997).  In 1965, Julie Andrews played a version of Maria von Trapp (without the yodel) in The Sound of Music.

Faye Dunaway played outlaw Bonnie Parker in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), for which Estelle Parsons won a supporting Oscar for role as Blanche Barrow. Barbra Streisand knocked 'em dead as the irrepressible Fanny Brice in Funny Girl (1968), the same year that Katharine Hepburn starred as the also-irrepressible Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter; the two tied for the Best Actress Oscar. 

Julie Harris played a milquetoast version of the powerful and misunderstood poet Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst (1976). The only thing Harris seemed to have in common with Dickinson was her red hair. Unfortunately, I must say the same about Cynthia Nixon's portrayal in A Quiet Passion (2016).  

Jane Fonda starred as Tokin' Woman Lillian Hellman in Julia (1977), a film well worth seeing. Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft co-starred in The Turning Point, based on real-life ballerinas Isabel Mirrow Brown and Nora Kaye, a movie I would see again any time if I could find it streaming. 

Sally Field won an Oscar for Norma Rae (1979), based on real-life union organizer Crystal Lee Sutton. So did Sissy Spacek, who was exceptional as Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), in which Beverly D'Angelo was perfect as Patsy Cline, as was Jessica Lange, who played Cline in Sweet Dreams (1985). Lange gave a powerful performance as Frances Farmer in Frances (1982), the year that Sissy Spacek played Joyce (Beth) Horman in Missing.

Silkwood (1983) stars Meryl Streep as activist Karen Silkwood. Streep also starred in Out of Africa (1985) as Tokin' Woman Isak Dinesen. The acclaimed actress played educator Roberta Guaspari in Music From the Heart (1999), Julia Child in Julie & Julia (2009), and Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (2011) (for which she won the Oscar). She was nominated in the supporting category for playing writer Susan Orlean in Adaptation (2002), a role in which she gets high on a plant powder. 

Isabelle Adjani co-produced the breathtaking Camille Claudel (1988), in which she starred as the sculptor and muse, the same year Sigourney Weaver unforgettably played Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist. 

Judy Davis is wonderful as George Sand in Impromptu (1991). (There's a dejeuner sur l'herbe with herb in it.) Susan Sarandon played Michaela Odone in Lorenzo's Oil (1992), and A League of Their Own is Penny Marshall's ode to the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. In What's Love Got to Do with It (1993), Angela Bassett gives a powerhouse performance as Tina Turner. 

Jennifer Lopez portrays the "Queen of Tejano Music" Selena Quintanilla-Pérez in Selena (1997). Judi Dench took home a Supporting Actress Oscar for her eight unforgettable minutes as Queen Victoria in Shakespeare in Love (1998). She also played the monarch in Mrs. Brown (1997).

In 2000, Julia Roberts won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of the title character in Erin Brockovich, and Marcia Gay Harden took the Supporting Actress award for playing Lee Krasner in Pollock. Iris (2001) starred Judi Dench and Kate Winslet as author Iris Murdoch, and Frida (2002) starred Salma Hayek as painter Frida Kahlo. 

Nicole Kidman and her prosthetic nose won an Oscar for playing Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2003). Cate Blanchett took the Supporting Actress prize for playing Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator (2004), winning over Laura Linney as Clara McMillen in Kinsey, and Sophie Okonedo as Tatiana Rusesabagina in Hotel Rwanda.

Hillary Swank was splendid as suffragette Alice Paul in Iron Jawed Angels (2004). Frances O'Connor co-starred as Lucy Burns, with Julia Ormond as Inez Milholland, and Anjelica Huston as Carrie Chapman Catt. In 2005, Charlize Theron and Frances McDormand co-starred in North Country, based on a landmark sexual harassment class action case, and Catherine Keener played Harper Lee in Capote.

Marion Cotillard was named Best Actress for her role as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose (2007). Carey Mulligan was nominated for her role in An Education (2009), based on a memoir by Lynn Barber, and  Angelina Jolie was nominated for playing Christine Collins in Changeling (2008). Jolie won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1999 for Girl, Interrupted, in which Winona Ryder played author Susanna Kaysen. While playing Maria Callas in Maria (2005), Jolie hallucinates on drugs. 

Helen Mirren won an Oscar for playing (the modern) Queen Elizabeth in The Queen (2006), and played Sonya Tolstoy in The Last Station (2009). Reese Witherspoon was Oscar-nominated for her portrayal of Cheryl Strayed in Wild (2014); she'd won for playing June Carter Cash in Walk the Line (2006). Laura Dern was nominated for her role as Barbara "Bobbi" Grey in Wild. 

Tokin' Woman Kathy Bates portrayed Alice B. Toklas's lover Gertrude Stein in Midnight in Paris (2011).  Sally Field played Mary Todd Lincoln in Lincoln (2012), and Helen Hunt played sexual surrogate Charyl Cohen-Greene in The Sessions. Keira Knightley played code-breaker Joan Clarke in The Imitation Game (2014). 

I was disappointed in the Bessie Smith biopic Bessie (2015) starring Queen Latifah, which should have been great. Queen of the Desert starring Nicole Kidman as Tokin' Woman Gertrude Bell was similarly disappointing. (Kidman did a photo spread in Vogue inspired by her role.) Thankfully, Letters from Baghdad (2016) is a terrific documentary on Bell that was executive produced by Tilda Swinton, who gives voice to Bell in the film. 

Tokin' Woman Susan Sarandon became an Oscar winner for her portrayal of death-penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean in Dead Man Walking (2016). Hidden Figures from that year tells the story of NASA mathematicians Katherine Goble Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), and Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer, who was nominated for an Oscar). 

Emma Stone portrayed Billie Jean King in Battle of the Sexes (2017), and Margot Robbie played tragic ice skater Tonya Harding in I, Tonya, for which Allison Janney took home a Supporting Actress award for playing her mother. Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise documented the life of the prominent writer, activist and Tokin' Woman. 

On the Basis of Sex (2018) dramatized Ruth Bader Ginsburg's early career; the documentary RGB explored her life and work. Keira Knightley played the French author in Colette and Amy Adams played Lynne Cheney in Vice. Saoirse Ronan starred in the title role for Mary Queen of Scots, with Margot Robbie playing her sister Queen Elizabeth I. Francis McDormand took the Oscar for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, based on events around the real-life murder of Kathy Page. 

In 2019, Kristen Stewart puffed pot in Seberg, Cynthia Erivo portrayed Harriet Tubman in Harriet, and Greta Gerwig's Little Women merges the character of Jo with author Louisa May Alcott. Renée Zellweger gave an astonishing (but sad) performance as an aging Judy Garland in Judy. 

Bombshell (2019) stars Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly, Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson, and Margot Robbie as a composite character, the women at Fox News who set out to expose CEO Roger Ailes for sexual harassment. Another Bombshell (2018) is a documentary about actress/inventor Hedy Lamarr. 

The TV series Mrs. America (2020) tells the story of conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, played by Cate Blanchett, who co-produced. Also depicted are Jill Ruckelshaus (Elizabeth Banks) and Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman), with Rose Byrne as Gloria Steinem, Uzo Aduba as Shirley Chisholm, and Margo Martindale as Bella Abzug. Sarah Paulson plays the wide-eyed innocent we see the story through who, undergoes an awakening induced by drugs (as so often happens). 

Jennifer Hudson executive produced Respect (2021), in which she starred as Aretha Franklin. Hudson also portrayed Winnie Mandela in a 2011 film of the same name. 

The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021) is a documentary depicting how the singer was targeted by the US Government for her drug use due to her politics. Diana Ross played her in Lady Sings the Blues (1972).  

"The First Lady" series (2022), interweaves the stories of Eleanor Roosevelt (Gillian Anderson), Betty Ford (Michelle Pfeiffer), and Michelle Obama (Viola Davis). Jessica Chastain transformed into Tammy Faye Baker in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and won the Oscar for it. 

And finally, Annette Benning portrays long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad's record-breaking swim from Cuba to Floria at age 64 in Nyad (2023). Both she and Jodie Foster, who played her trainer Bonnie Stoll, were Oscar-nominated for their roles.

What films have I missed? Tell me in the comments. 

Tokin' Women and Others We Lost in 2025

Along with luminaries like Jane Goodall, Diane Keaton, Robert Redford, Bill Moyers, Brian Wilson, Sly Stone, Tom Robbins and Marianne Faithfull, this year's tributes include cannabis activists Juhlzie Monteiro, Ann & Richard Lee, Pamela Javid Haymes, Louise Vincent, Wade Laughter, Amanda Feilding, David Watson and Michael Rose, and entheogenic authors Jonathan Ott and Jay Stevens. Rest in Power to them all.

 
Schlossberg at the 2023 JFK Profile in Courage Award ceremony

Tatiana Schlossberg (May 5, 1990 – December 30, 2025)

An environmental journalist and daughter of Caroline Kennedy, Schlossberg died at age 35 from a rare form of leukemia, just when we thought 2025 couldn't get any sadder. According to the Washington Post, Schlossberg published a New Yorker essay in November revealing her diagnosis in which she harshly criticized her cousin RFK Jr. for his opposition to government-funded medical research and vaccines. She also noted that the drug misoprostol, which she had received to stop a postpartum hemorrhage that nearly killed her, "at Bobby’s urging, is currently ‘under review’ by the Food and Drug Administration.”

After writing investigative pieces for several publications, in 2019 Schlossberg published the book Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have, which was honored by the Society of Environmental Journalists. “Using history, science and a personal narrative, Schlossberg provides a better understanding of both individual and systemic drivers of ecological destruction,” the judges said in awarding her the Rachel Carson book prize. “Readers will find solace, humor and a route to feeling empowered with possibilities for positive change, rather than drained by an accumulation of bad news.” Schlossberg had been planning to write a second book, on the oceans, when she was found to have cancer in May 2024, while in the hospital for the birth of her second child, a great-grandchild of JFK and Jackie Kennedy. Schlossberg's brother Jack is currently running for the Congress in New York. 

Carmen de Lavallade (March 6, 1931 – December 29, 2025)

When dancer and choreographer extraordinaire Carmen de Lavallade was celebrated at the Kennedy Center Honors (back in 2017, when they were still honorable), Stella Abrera performed "Soul Bossa Nova/Dear Quincy" in which the dancers share a pipe. See Carmen dancing it above.

Brigitte Bardot (September 28, 1934 – December 28, 2025)

Born and raised in Paris, Bardot was an aspiring ballerina during her childhood. She started her acting career in 1952 and achieved international recognition in 1957 for her role in And God Created Woman (1956), a Roger Vadim (Barbarella) film in which she played an uninhibited teenage girl who seduces older men, making her an icon of the sexual revolution of the '60s. She was the subject of Simone de Beauvoir's 1959 essay The Lolita Syndrome, which described her as a "locomotive of women's history" and declared her the most liberated woman of France. According Elle, who put her on their list of The 20 Best Legs Throughout History, Bardot "inspired thousands (millions?) of women to tease their hair or try out winged eyeliner." After several award-nominated performances, "La Bardot" retired in 1973 and became a prominent animal-rights activist, while being sued for unapologetic racist remarks made in her books, leading to the most hilariously scathing Kate McKinnon imitation ever on SNL. "La Bardot" never wanted children, but when she became pregnant abortion was illegal in France. She had a difficult relationship with her only child, a son, after whose birth she became depressed and attempted suicide. Source. 

Patricia Montanton (December 26, 1928 - December 21, 2025) 

Born in Texas in 1928, Montandon grew up in Oklahoma as one of eight children of an impoverished preacher during the Great Depression. In 1960, she moved to San Francisco with $400 to her name and got a job working at a high-end department store. She later hosted a TV show and became a newspaper columnist for the San Francisco Examiner; author Armistead Maupin caricatured her as society columnist "Prue Giroux" in his pot-friendly Tales of the City series. She was famous for hosting roundtable luncheons in San Francisco and Beverly Hills with a range of celebrities, including Andy Warhol, Danielle Steel, Joan Baez, Eldridge Cleaver, and Frank Sinatra, who she briefly dated. 

Montandon authored numerous non-fiction books, including the New York Times bestseller How to Be a Party Girl. In 1970, she founded The Name Choice Center to advocate for women's legal right to retain their surnames after marriage, and in 1982 she founded a group called Children as Teachers for Peace (later renamed Children as the Peacemakers), for which she made 37 international trips with grade-school children, meeting with 26 world leaders.

Rob and Michelle Reiner (December 14)

The amazingly accomplished actor and film director (The Princess Bride, Stand By Me, A Few Good Men, to name a few) Reiner proudly told an AP reporter that his mother Estelle, one of the founding members of the group Another Mother For Peace, helped design the famous poster “War is Unhealthy for Children and other Living Things,” and was the parent who inspired his activism.  She also uttered famous the line, "I'll have what she's having" in When Harry Met Sally, a film Reiner altered the ending to after he met his wife-to-be Michelle on the set. “Originally, Harry and Sally didn’t get together,” he told the Guardian in 2018. “But then I met Michele and I thought: ‘OK, I see how this works.’” Michelle, a photographer whose mother survived Auschwitz, was involved in Rob's movies and his political causes. As a photographer, she took the portrait of Donald Trump for the cover of “The Art of the Deal,” his 1987 book. (“She has a lot to atone for,” Mr. Reiner joked to The Guardian.) In 2024, Michelle and Rob earned an Emmy nomination as producers of the documentary “Albert Brooks: Defending My Life” and she was a producer on this year’s “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues,” their final film that revisits Rob's original one.  He was also married to Penny Marshall for 10 years, during which time she said she would roll joints for him and his friends. 

Tokin' Women and Others We Lost in 2024

Sadly, this page has been updated throughout 2024, with an emphasis on women and those connected with cannabis and its legalization, through their lives and/or work. 

Jimmy Carter (October 1, 1924 - December 29, 2024)

Carter "was way ahead of his time when he called on Congress to decriminalize marijuana in the mid-70s,” NORML founder and legal director Keith Stroup said. Read more.

Michael Brewer (April 14, 1944 - December 17, 2024)

Brewer and his partner Tom Shipley were best known for their song, "One Toke Over the Line," which they added to their set when they ran out of songs while opening for Melanie at Carnegie Hall. It was a Top 10 hit in 1971 until then-VP Spiro Agnew condemned it along with the Beatles' "With a Little Help From My Friends" and the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" as "latent drug culture propaganda," and the FCC pressured radio stations to ban it. But first, it was performed on the Lawrence Welk show, with Welk calling it "a modern spiritual." Country music's Maybelle Carter was similarly confused, wanting to sing the song she thought was a spiritual, according to her granddaughter Carlene Carter in the Ken Burns Country Music documentary series. 

Jean Jennings (February 3, 1954 – December 16, 2024)

At 14, Jennings was an exchange student in Ecuador where she learned to drive in a Toyota Land Cruiser in the Andes mountains. At eighteen, she bought a used Plymouth Satellite, painted it yellow, installed a roof light and a meter, and joined the Yellow Cab Company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she was elected president of the Yellow Cab board. After writing for Car and Driver (1980–1985), she co-founded Automobile, where she continued to write her widely known column, Vile Gossip. Jennings became an undercover spokesmodel at the 1988 North American International Auto Show, and on Good Morning America startled Diane Sawyer, live on air, after calling the new Chevrolet SSR, "bitchin," explaining that it was a hot-rodding term. She taught an Oprah Winfrey Show audience how to change a tire and jump start a car, and edited the book Road Trips, Head Trips, and Other Car-Crazed Writings. 

Anita Holmes Johnson (May 8, 1929 - December 15, 2024)

In 1951, while studying journalism at the University of Oregon, Johnson broke a national story about a cross burning on the lawn of a sorority house because a sister there was dating a black man,. After earning her degree, she got a job at the Washington Post where she was assigned to the woman's desk, ironically so, since she had eliminated the women's page at her college paper. She went on to co-found the Eugene Weekly newspaper in 1991, and remained active at the paper until her death. The EW has published the work of 150-plus journalism students from OU and Lane Community College - more than any other professional news outlet in Oregon. The paper investigated rape allegations against two Eugen police officer who later went to prison, and recently the reported on OU officials' efforts to cover up a string of fraternity party druggings. 

  

Jeanne Bamberger (February 11, 1924 – December 12, 2024)

Bamberger was a child prodigy pianist who performed with the Minneapolis Symphony before she had reached adolescence. She became a Professor of Music and Urban Education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Adjunct Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. She also taught at the University of Southern California, and the University of Chicago. In Chicago, she became interested in the education of young children, and particularly in the Montessori method. Her research interests included music cognitive development, music theory and performance, teacher development, and the design of text and software materials that fostered these areas of development. She won both a Fulbright Scholarship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, wrote several books and articles, and co-created MusicLogo, enabling students to write computer code to create tunes that could be immediately played out loud.

Mary McGee (December 12, 1936 – November 27, 2024)

The first woman to compete in motorcycle road racing and motocross events in the United States, McGee was the first person to ride the Baja 500. She competed in motorcycle road racing and motocross from 1960 to 1976, then began competition again in 2000 in vintage motocross events. Her last race was in 2012. In 2013, McGee was named an FIM Legend for her pioneering motorcycle racing career. She was inducted into the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2018. McGee died from complications of a stroke at the age of 87 just one day before the release of the documentary Motorcycle Mary, which aired on ESPN's YouTube channel.

Barbara Taylor Bradford (May 10, 1933 - November 24, 2024)

Bestselling author Bradford sold her first magazine story when she was 10 years old. She went on to become a journalist, columnist and fashion editor. She was 46 when she saw her first novel published: 1979's "A Woman of Substance," the story of Emma Harte, a poor but plucky and beautiful Yorkshire servant who founds a business empire. The book was an international smash, selling more than 30 million copies, and set the template for strong and independent Bradford heroines who would feature in 39 subsequent novels – all bestsellers, many turned into films or mini-series. In 2007, Bradford was presented with the Order of the British Empire for her contributions to English literature. Source.

Alice May Brock (February 28, 1941 - November 21, 2024)

The woman who inspired and co-wrote Arlo Guthrie's song "Alice's Restaurant," set at Thanksgiving, died a week before the holiday at the age of 83. Brock met Guthrie while she was a librarian at the Stockbridge School in Massachusetts where he was a student, and her eatery in western Massachusetts is forever immortalized in the song, which became an anti-war anthem in 1967 while US boys were still being drafted into the Vietnam war. Brock wrote several books, including “The Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook” (1969) and “My Life as a Restaurant” (1976); she appears in a cameo performance in the movie "Alice's Restaurant." A GoFundMe site to help with health and financial issues late in her life raised $170,000 in a few days. A used Hardcover copy her cookbook in "acceptable" condition is on sale at Amazon for $4,629.66. It includes advice on subjects as varied as Your Attitude, Equipment, Improvising And Making Do, and The Supply Cupboard. In 1991, Guthrie bought the re-purposed church in Great Barrington where Alice lived and hosted the Thanksgiving dinner he sang about to house his archives and a community action center. The center hosted its 19th Annual free Thanksgiving dinner this year; plans for an exhibit of Alice's artwork there began just before she died. 

Tokin' Women and Others We Lost in 2023

Sadly, this page will be updated throughout 2023.

Ana Ofelia Murguía (12/31)

Known for voicing Grandmother Coco in the 2017 Pixar/Disney film Coco, Murguía was an acclaimed Mexican actress. In 2010 she appeared in Las Buenas Hierbas (The Good Herbs), where she plays an herb dealer with Alzheimer's. 

Tommy Smothers (12/26) 

The Smothers Brothers' groundbreaking television hour ushered in the topical comedy of Laugh In and Saturday Night Live, and so much more. David Bionculli's book Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour reveals that some of the comedy on the show was fueled by weed. Tommy said in the 2002 documentary Smothered that he and headwriter/"Classical Gas" composer Mason Williams would "sometimes torch a joint" while working on scripts. Singer Jennifer Warnes recalled one road trip on which she and Tom dropped acid, and Williams remembered mistakenly eating a batch of cast member Leigh French's "specially enhanced" brownies. During the trial that resulted in a settlement for breach of contract after the show was cancelled by CBS, French's skit where she played country singer "Kentucky Rose" who said, "I used to play bluegrass, but a couple of weeks ago I started smoking it" was entered into the court record.  Tommy testified at the 1968 trial of impresario and restauranteur Frank Werber who was accused of possession and cultivation of marijuana, saying he'd known Werber for years and "before he started smoking pot, he was a real a-hole." Smothers played the second guitar on John Lennon's song "Give Peace a Chance," performed at Lennon's honeymoon/war protest and mentioning Tommy in the lyric.

Alice Parker (12/24) 

Parker was a composer, arranger, conductor and teacher who authored over 500 pieces of music (operas, cantatas, choral suites, hymns) along with a wealth of arrangements based on folk songs and hymns. Her 1984 composition "Songs for Eve" is from an Archibald MacLeish poem; her "Echoes from the Hills" and "Heavenly Hurt," among others, are inspired by Emily Dickinson. In the 2020 documentary Alice: At Home With Alice Parker she tells how, when she was born in 1925 she was held up to the window for the neighbors to see on Christmas Eve. She died on that day at the age of 98. 

Ruth Seymour (12/22)

A broadcasting executive known for her innovative work in public radio, Seymour's first venture into radio came at KPFK in Los Angeles from 1961 to 1964. From 1971 to 1976, she worked as program director there. She was fired in 1976, after the FBI raided the station in search of a tape KPFK had aired from Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, which the station manager refused to turn over. Seymour broadcast the raid live, as it occurred. She joined the staff of KCRW at Santa Monica College in 1977 as a consultant and was named manager a few months later, in 1978. She retired from there in February 2010 after having helped the station "transcend its basement location to shape the culture in Los Angeles," bringing programs to the station such as "Le Show" (hosted by Harry Shearer); "Left, Right & Center"; "Morning Becomes Eclectic"; and "Which Way L.A.?" In 1996, KCRW became the first station other than Chicago's WBEZ to air "This American Life." She also supported programs that brought literature to the radio, including airing radio dramas adaptations of Babbitt and Ulysses. Known in Washington, D.C. as a fierce defender of public broadcasting funding and issues such as licensing and royalties for streaming, in 1997 she received Amnesty International's Media Spotlight Award.  

Rose Ann Fuhrman (December 2023)

When few were covering the topic, Sonoma CA-based author Fuhrman wrote lively and accurate articles like “Cliffhanger in California” about Prop. 215, the 1996 initiative that made California the first state to legalize medical marijuana. When Prop. 215's spear-Head Dennis Peron died in 2018, she wrote on her Facebook page: "The passing of Dennis Peron feels like the closing of one chapter as another one struggles to write itself....A little less than 30 years ago I learned that marijuana prohibition was based on racist and other lies and had nothing to do with public safety. I hadn't given it much thought prior to that and had never tried it, automatically defaulting to the common view. Being a passionate advocate for justice, my new knowledge made activism for decriminalization or legalization inevitable.... I don't remember what led to my writing for Cannabis Canada (now Cannabis Culture) but a friend and neighbor took me to the original Cannabis Buyers' Club in San Francisco for a meeting, which was my access point. Intelligent, peaceful people who did (and many still do) great work."

Cari Beauchamp (12/14)

I had just written to Beauchamp after re-reading the Vanity Fair article she co-wrote with Judy Balaban about Hollywood's experimentation with LSD. I also picked up her book, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Power of Women in Hollywood and found a couple of marijuana references there. Beauchamp was an award-winning author and historian who was a resident scholar at the Mary Pickford Foundation. She also wrote books about screenwriter Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) and Joseph P. Kennedy's influence on Hollywood, as well as editing and annotating Hollywood Secretary: Her Private Letters from Inside the Studios of the 1920s by Valeria Belletti. She wrote and co-produced a documentary film in 2000 based on Without Lying Down, also wrote the documentary film The Day My God Died about young girls of Nepal sold into sexual slavery, which played on PBS and was nominated for an Emmy in 2003. Before becoming a full-time writer in 1990, she worked as a private investigator and a campaign manager, and served as Press Secretary to California Governor Jerry Brown. 

Ryan O'Neal (12/8)

The cocaine/meth/alcohol monster got him, leading to accusations of abuse from his kids and spouses, but in the end his daughter Tatum, who remains the youngest actor to win an Oscar for "Paper Moon" in which she starred with her Dad, had nice things to say about him, as did co-stars Ali McGraw, Barbra Streisand and others. Born on 4/20/1941, O'Neal was married to Leigh Taylor-Young, who baked pot brownies in "I Love You Alice B. Toklas," and was with Farrah Fawcett when she died of cancer, an even sadder Love Story. 

Norman Lear (12/5)

Prolific screenwriter and producer Lear was most known for the breakthrough sitcom All In the Family. Its spinoff, Maude, was about a liberated woman (Bea Arthur) who, in one episode, protested a young man's marijuana arrest by scheming to get herself arrested too. Lear also produced One Day at a Time about a divorced woman living on her own with her two daughters, and its recent reboot with a Latina cast starring Rita Moreno (shown), which aired a thoughtful episode about cannabis. Lear filed a First Amendment lawsuit against TV's "family hour" censorship, and founded People for the American Way (PFAW), a progressive advocacy organization formed in reaction to the politics of the Christian right.

Sandra Day O’Connor (12/1)

The first woman to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court justice, O'Connor was born Sandra Day in El Paso, Texas, the daughter of a cattle rancher. In her youth, she participated in cattle roundups as the group's only female rider, latter calling it, "my first initiation into joining an all-men's club, something I did more than once in my life." Day enrolled at Stanford University  at the age of 16 and graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in economics in 1950. At Stanford Law School she served on the Stanford Law Review with future Supreme Court chief justice William Rehnquist, who proposed marriage to her (she declined). After graduating from law school, because of her gender, she could only find employment as a deputy county attorney in San Mateo, California after she offered to work for no salary and without an office. She eventually became a judge and an elected official in Arizona, serving as the first female majority leader of a state senate as the Republican leader in the Arizona Senate. While serving on the Supreme Court from 1981-2006, she was one of three co-authors of the lead opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the Court upheld the right to have an abortion as established in Roe v. Wade, and argued in favor of President Obama naming a replacement for conservative justice Antonin Scalia (before the Senate scandalously held up Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland, until Trump could be elected and name Neil Gorsuch, assuring the Court's conservative majority).  She also joined the dissenting opinion in Gonzalez v Raich, in defense of state marijuana laws. After retiring, O'Connor succeeded Henry Kissinger (who died two days before her) as the Chancellor of the College of William & Mary. In 2003, she wrote a book titled The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice and in 2005,  a children's book, Chico: A True Story from the Childhood of the First Woman Supreme Court Justice, was named for her favorite horse. In 2009, Justice O'Connor was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.       

Shane MacGowan (12/30)

Born on Christmas Day in 1957, the "peerless and fearless" MacGowan was the co-founder, frontman and chief songwriter of the Pogues, which brilliantly and energetically combined punk rock with traditional Irish music and politics. In 1972, MacGowan was expelled from the school he was attending on a literary scholarship after being caught smoking pot in public, and at age 17, he spent six months in a psychiatric hospital due to drug addiction, where he was also diagnosed with acute situational anxiety. He struggled with drugs and alcohol throughout his life, and was dismissed from the Pogues for unprofessional behavior after missing concert dates, including opening for Bob Dylan. "Fairytale of New York," which MacGowan co-wrote and performed with Kirsty MacColl, remains a perennial Christmas favorite. Sadly, he died of complications from pneumonia at age 65 just as the Christmas season started this year. At the end of his life, “We used to go to Shane’s house and roll joints for him. We would watch Netflix with him,” said Andrew Hendy of Dundalk balladeers. "Shane will be remembered as one of music’s greatest lyricists. So many of his songs would be perfectly crafted poems, if that would not have deprived us of the opportunity to hear him sing them," said Ireland's President Michael Higgins in a statement. 

Clay Jones  claytoonz.com

Henry Kissinger (11/29)

Paul Sorvino brilliantly plays Kissinger in the Oliver Stone movie "Nixon," nailing indelibly the scene in which he prays on his knees with Nixon on the eve of impeachment. In the opera "Nixon In China" Kissinger is shown whipping Chinese workers into submission to the semiconductor. “People are a little shocked when he appears as the sadistic overlord,” director Peter Sellars told the New York Times. “But obviously he’s the man who’s responsible for Chile and for the secret bombing of Cambodia — the list of atrocities and acts of unspeakable violence is long. And that lurid stuff is behind the jolly and well-spoken diplomat. The surprise is, as always, no one is just one thing. That is one reason you make operatic characters.” My first political act, at the age of 14, was to campaign for George McGovern against Richard Nixon in 1971. After Tricky Dicky with Kissinger at his side won by a landslide, and bombed Cambodia by Christmas, I was disillusioned for decades. That Kissinger lived to be 100 while chewing on the cud of human misery just adds to the sickeningness of it all. 

Dale Spender (11/21)

Australian feminist scholar Spender was co-founder of Pandora Press, the first of the feminist imprints devoted solely to non-fiction, committed, according to the New York Times, to showing that "women were the mothers of the novel and that any other version of its origin is but a myth of male creation." Her book Man Made Language (1980), based on her PhD research, argues that in patriarchal societies men control language and it works in their favor, drawing parallels with how derogatory terms are used to maintain racism. She was a co-originator of the database WIKED (Women's International Knowledge Encyclopedia and Data) and associate editor of the Great Women Series (United Kingdom). Particularly concerned with intellectual property and the effects of new technologies, for nine years she was a director of Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) in Australia and for two years (2002–2004) she was the chair. Spender consistently dressed in purple clothes, a choice she initially made for its symbolic reference to the suffragettes.

Rosalynn Carter (11/19)

Asked by Katie Couric what was the most exciting moment in his life, winning the Nobel Peace Prize or being elected President, Jimmy Carter replied that it was when Rosalynn said she would marry him. The couple were married for 77 years, and the former president called her “my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished.” The eldest of four children born to a bus driver/farmer father and teacher/dressmaker mother, Rosalynn helped raise her younger brothers after her father died when she was 13. After helping Jimmy win the governorship of Georgia in 1970, she was appointed to the Governor's Commission to Improve Services for the Mentally and Emotionally Handicapped, and mental health became a lifelong cause. As the first of all First Ladies to have her own office in the White House, she attended Cabinet meetings and major briefings, served as the President’s personal emissary to Latin American countries, and led a delegation to Thailand in 1979 to address the problems of Cambodian and Laotian refugees. She was honored by the National Organization for Women with an Award of Merit for her vigorous support for the Equal Rights Amendment, and joined other First Ladies at the Houston conference celebrating the International Women's Year in 1977. In 1982, she co-founded The Carter Center in Atlanta to promote peace and human rights worldwide. Her autobiography, First Lady From Plains, was published in 1984. She and her husband contributed to the expansion of the nonprofit housing organization Habitat for Humanity, and they received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1999. 

Tokin' Women and Others We Lost in January 2023

Lisa Loring (1/28)

At the age of 6, Loring originated the role of Wednesday Addams on TV's The Addams Family (1964–1966). Afterwards, she joined the cast of the ABC sitcom The Pruitts of Southampton with Phyllis Diller. In the 1980s she played the character Cricket Montgomery on the soap opera As the World Turns and appeared in a few B slasher movies. In 1987, she married an adult film actor after meeting him on the set of the 1987 film Traci's Big Trick, on which she was a make-up artist and uncredited writer. Christina Ricci played the role of Wednesday in two movies in the '90s, and Jenna Ortega said she paid homage to Loring's groovy dance moves (above) while playing the role on the new smash Netflix series "Wednesday."

Cindy Williams (1/25)

Williams appeared as an American girl who turns on a staid British bank manager to pot in Travels With My Aunt, just before she played the quintessential American girl in American Graffiti. She went on to be paired with Penny Marshall as a writing partner, leading to a guest shot on "Happy Days" and their spin-off "Laverne and Shirley" (1976-1983). The show has a 1981 "lost episode" titled "I Do, I Do" in which the girls get stoned on pot brownies. David Lander, who played Squiggy on the show, was an MS sufferer and advocate for medical marijuana who told producer Garry Marshall that instead of patrolling the halls during the show he ought to put marijuana in the budget.

David Crosby (1/19)

“I know this is good. It’s from Crosby.” - Rock roadie passing a joint in Almost Famous. Story. 

NORML Advisory Board member, activist and musician Crosby stayed full of life and passionate about reform until the end, weeks before his 82nd birthday. "He was always, I repeat, always present for me, to defend my character and politics. He was funny, clever, and refreshing to be around," said Joan Baez, whose portrait of Crosby is on his last album cover.  He's higher than Eight Miles High now. 

 

 

Renée Geyer (1/17) 

Bonnie Raitt called the Australian Geyer, "One of the greatest singers I’ve ever known....Her husky, powerful and deeply soulful voice and phrasing has blown me away since I first heard her." Geyer had hits with her cover of James Brown's "It's a Man's Man's World," and "Difficult Woman," a song written for her, and sang back up for Sting, Chaka Khan, Toni Childs, Neil Diamond, and Joe Cocker, among many others. Her Ready to Deal (1975) was the first album co-written and co-produced by a woman in Australia. Asked once if she thought she would emulate the international success of fellow Aussies Helen Reddy and Olivia Newton-John, Geyer replied: no, because “I’m not a very well-behaved person.” Her memoir titled Confessions of a Difficult Woman is open about her alcohol and drug use.

Lupe Serrano (1/16)

Trained in Chile and Mexico City, Serrano joined the American Ballet Theatre in 1953 when "American audiences had rarely seen a female dancer achieve the soaring jumps, fleet footwork and swift turns that Ms. Serrano executed with aplomb." On a 1960 stop in St. Petersburg (then known as Leningrad), the audience was reported to have been so enthralled by her performance that they insisted she repeat her solo turn rather than simply take a bow. One who noticed was Rudolf Nureyev, who invited Serrano to dance with him after his defection in 1961. The two perform here the pas de deux from Le Corsaire, based on a poem by Very Important Pothead Lord Byron. Source. 

 

 

Gina Lollobrigida (1/16)

"She makes Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple," said her co-star Humphrey Bogart. Italian actress Lollobrigida overcame Howard Hughes's interference in her film career and won the Henrietta Award (World Film Favorite) at the 1961 Golden Globe Awards. She had a second career as a photojournalist in the 1970s, photographing, among others, Paul Newman, David Cassidy, Ella Fitzgerald, and Fidel Castro, publishing several books of her photography. Lollobrigida was an active supporter of Italian and Italian-American causes, particularly the National Italian American Foundation (NIAF). In 2013 she sold her jewelry collection and donated nearly $5 million from the sale to benefit stem-cell therapy research.

 

Lisa Marie Presley (1/12) 

Lisa Marie's parents Priscilla and Elvis Presley divorced when she was four, and her father died when she was seven. Starting in her teens, she was reportedly sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend and experimented with alcohol and drugs. She credited Scientology for ending her addictions, and along with fellow Memphian Isaac Hayes, founded their Literacy, Education and Ability Program before renouncing the cult in 2014.  In 2002, she testified before Congress against children being forced to take a "cocaine-like stimulant" (probably, Ritalin) for ADHD rather than a drug-free approach. Presley was a recording artist, and on the 30th anniversary of Elvis's death in 2007 she released a "duet" with her dad of "In the Ghetto" (shown), with proceeds benefiting the Presley Place Transitional Housing Campus in New Orleans, a project of The Elvis Presley Charitable Foundation that Lisa Marie chaired. Her death of a heart attack at the age of 54 was determined to be a result of complications from gastric bypass surgery she'd had years before. She died two days after Austin Butler lovingly thanked her in his Golden Globe acceptance speech for his portrayal of her father in Elvis. 

 

 

Carole Cook (1/11)

An accomplished stage actress, Cook was a protégé of Lucille Ball, who applauded her "healthy disrespect for all things in general." Cook appeared on many TV shows and played the wife of Don Knotts in "The Incredible Mr. Limpett" and Grandma Helen in "16 Candles." In 2018, she became the subject of controversy when she said of then-President Donald Trump, "Where's John Wilkes Booth when you need him?" Paid a visit by the Secret Service, she quipped, "I said, 'I can't go to prison, the stripes are horizontal, they don't look good on me.'" She died three days shy of her 99th birthday.

Jeff Beck (1/10)

Among his many accomplishments, guitarist extraordinaire Jeff Beck really knew how to back up a woman, shown here with Imelda May. A member of the influential Yardbirds, Beck pioneered the use of the "talkbox" (here on the Beatles' "She's a Woman") and toured this year with Johnny Depp. "I loved him since I was 14," wrote Tokin' Woman Chrissie Hynde. "Sadly, he couldn’t influence my primitive skills on guitar - but my hair style was all his." Beck backed up Hynde on her 1999 pot anthem "Legalise Me." 

Melinda Dillon (1/9)

“Melinda Dillon was such a great actress, with a wonderful delicacy about her. She was a delight to direct in Prince of Tides," Barbra Streisand wrote. Known and loved as Ralphie's calm and loving mother in A Christmas Story (1983), Dillon got her start when, as Second City's first coat-check girl, she leapt to the stage as a last-minute understudy. She was nominated for a 1963 Tony Award for her Broadway debut in the original production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Absence of Malice (1981), in which she played a Catholic woman tormented by a reporter's coverage of her abortion. Nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for her performance in Magnolia (1999), she also played Woody Guthrie's wife and singing partner in Bound for Glory (1976, directed by Hal Ashby), and Paul Newman's lover who also slept with women in Slapshot (1977).

Fay Weldon (1/4) 

 Over the course of her 55-year writing career, she published 31 novels, including Wicked Women (1995) and Mantrapped (2004), but was most well-known as the writer of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil which was the basis for the 1987 movie "She Devil" starring Tokin' Women Meryl Streep and Roseanne Barr. A self-declared feminist, Weldon's work features what she described as "overweight, plain women" and spoke out against the "appalling" lack of equal opportunities for women, and the myth that they were supported by male relatives. Later she took flack for telling BBC in 1998 that rape wasn't the worst thing that could happen to a woman, and championing faked female organisms in her 2006 book What Makes Women Happy.

 

Marilyn Stafford (1/2) 

In 1948, Stafford went with friends interviewing Albert Einstein for a documentary film, getting her first lesson in using a 35 mm camera in the car on the way and making Einstein her first portrait. She worked as an assistant to the fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo and in 1958, while six months pregnant, traveled to Tunisia to document the plight of Algerian refugees. When her photo of an Algerian refugee nursing her child (shown) appeared in The Observer, Stafford became one of few women photographers working for national newspapers. Throughout her career she photographed war victims, fashion photos and street scenes (often combined), and portraits of Indira Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Edith Piaf, Sharon Tate, Donovan, Joanna Lumley, and Twiggy among many others. 

 

Edith Lank (1/1) 

Author, advice columnist, and blogger Lank wrote or co-wrote ten books on real estate and one on Jane Austen. Her books include the Home Buyers Kit and Home Sellers Kit, and her syndicated weekly real estate column "Housecalls" appeared in more than 100 newspapers and web sites, leading USA Today to dub her the Dear Abby of real estate. In 1984 Lank won the Matrix women in communication award. She filed her last column in 2019 while writing "86 and Holding," a blog about adventures in aging. She died at age 96. 

Lise Nørgaard  (1/1)

Journalist and writer Nørgaard was known for her precise and often humorous portrayals of Danish cultural life. She wrote numerous novels, compilations of essays and short stories, and from 1978 to 1982, she co-wrote the television series Matador. The memoir of her childhood, Kun en pige (Just a girl), became a bestseller in 1992 and is considered her masterpiece. The work was adapted into a feature film in 1995. Nørgaard died in her sleep at the age of 105.

Fred White (1/1)

White began playing the drums in high school and toured with Donny Hathaway, recording Donny Hathaway Live, which Rolling Stone named one of the top 50 live albums. In 1974, he joined his brothers Maurice and Verdine White in the funk band without equal, Earth, Wind & Fire. White also played with The T-Box Band and Little Feat, and worked for Motown Records. EW&F guitarist Sheldon Reynolds died on 5/23/23. 

2022 Tokey Awards

TOKIN' WOMAN OF THE YEAR -

BRITTNEY GRINER

It's a bittersweet year when our top Tokin' Woman was sentenced to serve nine years in a Russian penal colony, despite international outcry about her arrest for the petty crime of having a couple of vape pens in her luggage at a Moscow airport.

Brittney Griner, 32, a seven-time WNBA All-Star center for the Phoenix Mercury, won Olympic gold medals with the U.S. women’s national basketball team in 2016 and 2021. She played for the Russian team UMMC Ekaterinburg for several years, as do many WNBA stars who are not paid anything like their male counterparts in the US. 

 

President Biden announced on December 8 that Griner has been freed. She was exchanged for Viktor Bout, an arms dealer accused of supplying Al Qaeda, the Taliban and rebels in Rwanda. (Apparently, on the world stage, carrying a couple of vape pens is equated with arms dealing. But then, of course, the US is arguably the largest arms dealer in the world. Convicted arms smuggler Oliver North never did jail time and is a longtime Faux News host and commentator; he was briefly head of the NRA until he ousted for extortion in 2019.)

 

Many think Griner was taken as a political prisoner, just days before Russia invaded Ukraine in March. The announcement of her arrest came on the heels of a ruling whereby an Israeli court froze the Russian government ownership of a Jerusalem church, reportedly part of a deal struck in 2020 for the release of American-born Israeli citizen Naama Issachar, who was convicted for smuggling 10 grams of hashish through the Moscow airport. She had been sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison. 

 

Griner, who said she noticed an inordinate amount of customs agents at the airport the day she was arrested, never denied carrying the vape pens, only saying it was an oversight that she packed them. On the witness stand, she said that she used cannabis to deal with the pain from injuries she's suffered during her career. "The benefits from medical cannabis definitely outweigh the painkillers that they prescribe," she said. "The painkillers have really bad side effects. Medical cannabis, there are honestly no side effects that harm you." 

 

Very Important Pothead and top all-time NBA scorer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote in support of Griner (the day after we Tweeted him, asking him to). NBA champ Steph Curry gave a shout-out to Griner on her birthday at the Warriors Ring Ceremony in October.  He and Megan Rapinoe—the soccer star with a Portland-based CBD company—spoke of Griner's plight at the ESPY Awards in July, the same month that Rapinoe was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom wearing a blazer with the initials ‘BG’ and a flower embroidered onto the lapel in tribute to Griner. 

Biden called Griner "an incomparable athlete" who "endured mistreatment and a show trial in Russia with characteristic grit and incredible dignity" at the press conference. He mentioned US Marine Trevor Reed, who was brought home from Russia in April in exchange for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot convicted in the US in a cocaine trafficking conspiracy. Not mentioned was Marc Fogel, a Pittsburgh native who was sentenced to 14 years after airport workers found half an ounce of marijuana in his luggage when he went to Russia to teach in June. Free Marc Fogel. 

Last year's Tokin' Woman of the Year was Sha'Carri Richardson, another black woman screwed by our international drug laws. Other Top Tokin' Women are Kamala Harris (2020), Jane Fonda (2019), Michelle Obama (2018), Kathy Bates (2017), Whoopi Goldberg (2016) and Melissa Etheridge (2015).