page_title: Angie Dickinson
section_title: Leading lady
hierarchical_section_title: Angie Dickinson / Career / Leading lady
caption_attribution_description: Cropped screenshot of John Wayne and Angie Dickinson from the trailer for the film Rio Bravo
context_page_description: Angeline Dickinson is an American actress. She began her career on television, appearing in many anthology series during the 1950s, before landing her breakthrough role in Gun the Man Down with James Arness and the Western film Rio Bravo, for which she received the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year.
  In her six decade career, Dickinson has appeared in more than 50 films, including China Gate, Ocean's 11, The Sins of Rachel Cade, Jessica, Captain Newman, M.D., The Killers, The Art of Love, The Chase, Point Blank, Pretty Maids All in a Row, The Outside Man and Big Bad Mama.
  From 1974 to 1978, Dickinson starred as Sergeant Leann "Pepper" Anderson in the NBC crime series Police Woman, for which she received the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Television Series Drama and three Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series nominations. As lead actress, she starred in Brian De Palma's erotic crime thriller Dressed to Kill, for which she received a Saturn Award for Best Actress.
context_section_description: In 1959, Dickinson's big-screen breakthrough role came in Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo, in which she played a flirtatious gambler called "Feathers" who becomes attracted to the town sheriff played by Dickinson's childhood idol John Wayne. The film co-starred Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson and Walter Brennan. When Hawks sold his personal contract with her to a major studio without her knowledge, she was unhappy. Dickinson nonetheless became one of the more prominent leading ladies of the next decade, beginning with The Bramble Bush with Richard Burton. She also took a supporting role in Ocean's 11 (1960) with friends Sinatra and Martin.
  These were followed by a political potboiler, A Fever in the Blood (1961); a Belgian Congo-based melodrama, The Sins of Rachel Cade (1961), in which she played a missionary nurse tempted by lust; a scheming woman in Rome Adventure (1962), filmed in Italy, and the title role in Jean Negulesco's Jessica (1962) with Maurice Chevalier, in which she played a young midwife resented by the married women of the town, set in Sicily. Angie also shared the screen with friend Gregory Peck as a military nurse in the dark comedy Captain Newman, M.D. (1963).
  For The Killers (1964), originally intended to be the first made-for-television movie, but released to theatres due to its violent content, Dickinson played a femme fatale opposite future U.S. President Ronald Reagan in his last movie role. Directed by Don Siegel, it was a remake of the 1946 version based on a story by Ernest Hemingway and the only film Reagan made in which he was cast as a villain. He viciously slaps Dickinson in one of the film's scenes.
  Dickinson co-starred in the comedy The Art of Love (1965), playing the love interest of both James Garner and Dick Van Dyke. She joined a star-studded Arthur Penn/Sam Spiegel production, The Chase (1966), along with Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford and Robert Duvall. That same year, she was featured in Cast a Giant Shadow, a war story with Kirk Douglas.
  Dickinson's best movie of this era is reputed to be John Boorman's cult classic Point Blank (1967), a crime drama with Lee Marvin as a criminal betrayed by his wife and best friend and out for revenge. The film epitomized the stark urban mood of the period, and its reputation has grown through the years.
  Westerns would continue to be a part of her work in the late 1960s, when she starred in The Last Challenge opposite Glenn Ford, in Young Billy Young with Robert Mitchum, and in Sam Whiskey, where she gave rising star Burt Reynolds his first on-screen kiss.
  In 1971, she played a lascivious substitute high school teacher in the dark comedy Pretty Maids All in a Row, which also starred Rock Hudson and Telly Savalas, for director Roger Vadim and writer-producer Gene Roddenberry. In the film, her character seduces a sexually inexperienced student, portrayed by John David Carson, against the backdrop of a series of murders of female students at the same high school. Pretty Maids All In A Row drew hostile critical reviews, and was a box-office failure.
  Also in 1971, she portrayed the ambitious wife of Robert Culp in the television movie "See the Man Run". In The Outside Man (1972), a French movie shot in Los Angeles, with Jean-Louis Trintignant, directed by Jacques Deray, she plays the wife of a mobster. In 1973, she co-starred with Roy Thinnes in the supernatural thriller The Norliss Tapes, a television movie produced and directed by Dan Curtis that in later years attained a modest cult following.
  One of Dickinson's best known and most sexually provocative movie roles followed, that of the tawdry widow Wilma McClatchie from the Great Depression romp Big Bad Mama (1974) with William Shatner and Tom Skerritt. In her forties at the time, she appeared nude in several scenes, which created interest in the movie and a new generation of male fans for Dickinson.
  A 1966 Esquire cover gained Dickinson additional fame and notoriety, her having posed in nothing but a sweater and a pair of panty hose. The photo became so iconic, that while celebrating the magazine's 70
caption: Dickinson with John Wayne in Rio Bravo
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