With a Charlie’s Angels reboot hitting theaters, you’re bound to read a lot of headlines about how women are now believable action heroes in a post-Wonder Woman world. But you know better: ladies have been kicking ass on the silver screen for over a century, and while the Angels are certainly entertaining they’re just the latest link in a very long chain. If you want to really pay tribute to the leading lights of action cinema, here are our eleven picks for the most influential female action heroes of all time.
Helen Holmes
If we’re going to do this, let’s start at the very beginning. Helen Holmes was in many ways the first female action hero, starring in early serials like The Hazards Of Helen where she would perform daredevil deeds in front of a whirring silent camera. Holmes was born in Illinois but moved to California with her family as a young woman and quickly started picking up parts in films. Helen (the fictional one) was a telegraph operator who found herself in all kinds of trouble, and Holmes’s stunts were top of the line – while her male co-stars employed doubles, she did nearly everything herself, from jumping off moving trains to wild stunt driving.
Cynthia Rothrock
Taking up martial arts in her teens, Cynthia Rothrock became a multiple-time world champion in the 1980s across a variety of disciplines. Her film career began in 1985 working for Hong Kong production company Golden Harvest in films like Millionaires Express and No Retreat, No Surrender 2. Her imposing physicality made her stand out from other female HK stars, but she could hang with the best of them, often going toe-to-toe with male villains, and she soon made the jump to American B-grade action flicks. To see her at her best, check out 1986’s Righting Wrongs, which pairs her with Yuen Bao and gives her a trio of extremely kick-ass fights.
Yukari Oshima
Even if she only starred in The Story Of Ricky Yukari Oshima would deserve a spot on this list, but the Japanese actress racked up a career full of incredible action movies. She began studying karate in high school and started working on tokusatsu shows in her early 20s. Shortly afterwards, she relocated to Hong Kong and began acting in flicks like the dope A Book Of Heroes, Angel and Never Say Regret. Oshima was famous in the industry for her incredible endurance and terrifyingly hard strikes. After leaving Hong Kong, she went on to make movies in the Philippines using the extremely dope alias “Cynthia Luster.”
Michelle Rodriguez
Audiences first really noticed Michelle Rodriguez in 2000 indie Girlfight, where she played a hot-tempered Brooklyn girl who turns to boxing as a way to work out her frustrations and discovers she has a gift for the sweet science. But the next year would bring her into her most famous role, as Letty Ortiz in the first Fast and the Furious movie. The extremely male-dominated world of street car racing (and international crime or whatever it is they get up to in the sequels) is no match for Letty, and she’s a lot to handle. Rodriguez has also appeared in movies like Machete and Resident Evil, so her pedigree is extensive.
Sigourney Weaver
Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Alien cast Ellen Ripley as a horror heroine more than an action one, the lone survivor of a very hungry stowaway aboard the Nostromo. It took James Cameron to finish her transformation with 1986’s Aliens. Ripley really laid the groundwork for how directors would approach the female action hero concept, never stepping back from her female qualities but instead communicating how those qualities made her stronger. Her showdown in that film against the Alien Queen – two bad bitches going at it to the end – is one of the best, nastiest fights on this list.
Tura Satana
The muse of boob-obsessed shlock director Russ Meyer, Tura Satana only appeared in a handful of films but her legend is massive. After being attacked by a group of men as a young girl, she learned martial arts and tracked each of them down years later to extract revenge. That’s not a movie – that was her real life. On screen, she played violent biker chick Varla in Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, one of the most iconic parts of all time. Sadly, Satana’s acting career was cut short when she was shot by a former lover in 1973, but her star burned very fast and very bright.
Meiko Kaji
Japanese actress Meiko Kaji started work for the Nikkatsu studio in the 1960s, but when that company shifted over to soft porn she knew her skills were best used elsewhere. In 1972 she started work for Toei, starring in the classic Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion as the lead character, a young woman betrayed by her cop boyfriend and forced to serve hard time. The next year would see her also take the starring role in Lady Snowblood, and playing those two characters would keep Kaji busy throughout the decade as both films spawned multiple sequels. Kaji brought an icy distance to her roles, delivering piercing glares that let you know she was absolutely serious about cold-blooded murder at all times.
Pam Grier
The 1970s were a prime decade for stereotypes to get busted, and Pam Grier was on the forefront showing that Black women were capable of kicking just as much tail as their male counterparts. After moving to Los Angeles, Grier was discovered working the switchboard at American International Pictures by director Jack Hill, who cast her in his women’s prison epic The Big Doll House. Her breakthrough lead role came in 1973’s Coffy, where she played a nurse who seeks revenge against pushers after her little sister gets addicted to heroin. Grier’s incredible physicality and attitude gave her a career that stretched decades, with the lead in Tarantino’s 1997 Jackie Brown a high point.
Charlize Theron
If you just saw Charlize Theron walking down the street you probably wouldn’t peg her as a woman who can get rough when the need presents itself, but her filmography can go toe-to-toe with the other greats on this list. Whether it’s as the one-armed Imperator Furiosa in the brilliant Mad Max: Fury Road, the title character in underrated Æon Flux, a spy hunting double agents as the Berlin Wall falls in Atomic Blonde, or the big bad in The Fate of the Furious, Charlize has shown she can hang with just about anybody in the world. With an Atomic Blonde sequel allegedly on the way and the buzzed-about The Old Guard coming as well, she’s just getting started at 44.
Michelle Yeoh
Born in Malaysia, Michelle Yeoh caught the eye of Hong Kong producers after winning a number of beauty contests and appearing in a commercial with Jackie Chan. During the 1990s she was one of the HK industry’s most reliable and bankable female stars, combining a natural knack for martial arts choreography with significant dramatic range. Check her out in 1993’s Tai Chi Master. Yeoh had her first exposure to Western audiences with 1997 Bond outing Tomorrow Never Dies, but her big international break came as Yu Shu Lien in boundary-breaking wuxia hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. You can see her now on the surprisingly dope Star Trek: Discovery.
Linda Hamilton
How good did it feel to see Linda Hamilton back as Sarah Connor in Terminator: Dark Fate? And not as a CGI de-aged flashback or something but as a crusty, pissed-off older woman who has been dealing with future robots for way too long. Hamilton’s physical transformation for Terminator 2: Judgment Day was one of the most striking things about that movie, as she chiseled her muscles to inhabit a character who has been fighting for her life for years. She even hired an Israeli military commando to teach her how to load clips and tactically examine a situation. A key part of action hero status is believability, and she has it in spades.
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