Top 100 women / Emma Thompson

Emma Thompson

Top 100 women: art, film, music and fashion

Emma Thompson

Oscar-winning actor and human rights campaigner, recently working to raise awareness of sex trafficking


Emine Saner
Tuesday 8 March 2011 00.05 GMT

A

n activist since the beginning of her career, Emma Thompson, 51, is a longstanding supporter of the anti-poverty agency Action Aid, chair of the human rights organisation The Helen Bamber Foundation, and has been raising awareness of sex trafficking.

Refusing to be grand, she has rejected cosmetic surgery and talked about her IVF and post-natal depression – and is the first person to win an Oscar for both acting and screenwriting.

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Top 100 women / Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović

Top 100 women: art, film, music and fashion

Marina Abramović 

Yugoslavian performance artist famed for her gruelling, intimate works that are legendary feats of endurance, self-exposure and risk


T

he daughter of high-ranking officers in Tito's Yugoslavia, Marina Abramovic makes gruelling, intimate performances that are legendary feats of endurance, self-exposure and risk. She has invited audiences to manipulate her body, providing whips, knives and a gun loaded with a single bullet. She has sat among rotting cow's bones, scrubbing them clean while singing a tragic lament, a performance that reflected on the civil wars in the Balkans, and won her a Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Biennale. Her alarming art is leavened by great humour and tenderness. Abramovic is inspirational in setting the bar almost impossibly high for performance art.

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Top 100 women / Stella McCartney

Stella McCartney

Top 100 women: art, film, music and fashion

Stella McCartney

The designer who has carved out her own successful career on her own merit, not just her connections

Stella McCartney's graduation fashion show might be remembered more for roping in famous friends Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell to model, but since then she has carved out a successful career on her merit, not just her connections.

Admired for staying true to her principles – it would have been far more commercially savvy to use fur and leather in her collections, but McCartney, 39, a lifelong vegetarian, has always refused – her clear vision for clothes that suit women of all shapes and sizes has won her loyal customers.

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Top 100 women / Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman

Top 100 women: art, film, music and fashion

Cindy Sherman

American artist and photographer, famed for her self-portraits in disguise, subverting notions of identity and gender

Emine Saner
Tuesday 8 March 2011 00.05 GMT

"T

he work is what it is and hopefully it's seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work," says Cindy Sherman about her art, "but I'm not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff." But feminists were eager to claim her, inspired by her photographs that were not self-portraits but spoke of gender, identity and power.

In her early Untitled Film Stills, Sherman, always her own favourite muse, appears as B-movie cliches – as sex object or domestic drudge. In her Centerfolds series, she appears as a seductress and in another as terrified and vulnerable. Sherman, 57, has become everything from career woman to clown, beauty to hag, doll to dead, playing with disguise and stereotypes.

Her work, spanning more than 30 years, has made her one of the most important, and collected, female artists in the world. Last year, a 6ft photograph of Sherman as a muddied corpse sold for a record $2.7m (£1.7m).

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Top 100 women / Paula Rego

Paula Rego

Top 100 women: art, film, music and fashion

Paula Rego

Portuguese painter who broke boundaries at the Slade School of Art and was nominated for the Turner prize in her 50s

T

o look over Paula Rego's body of work is to look over the landscape of women's experience: desire, abortion, rape, female circumcision, childbirth, family relationships, dominating and being dominated by men; her masculine female figures are sometimes lonely, but usually fierce and often bent on revenge. Success came relatively late in life – a graduate of the Slade School of Art at a time when female artists were taught how to support and inspire their "superior" male artist partners ("women were good either for going to bed with or making good wives – particularly if they came with their own money and could support the men".)

Rego, now 75, was in her 40s before her first big solo exhibition, and in her 50s when she was nominated for the Turner prize. Although she was made a dame last year, Rego was born in Portugal and in 2009, Paula Rego – House of Stories, a gallery dedicated to housing her work, opened in Portugal. Germaine Greer, whose portrait by Rego hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, says, "No other artist has ever come close to capturing Rego's sense of the phantasmagoria that is female reality."

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Top 100 women / Patti Smith

Patti Smith

Top 100 women: art, film, music and fashion

Patti Smith

The pioneering punk musician, poet and political activist broke through the male punk movement without chasing fame or money

"I

t was the most electrifying image I'd ever seen of a woman of my generation," Camille Paglia said of the cover of Patti Smith's debut album Horses, which was released in 1975. That photograph, taken by Smith's friend and sometime lover Robert Mapplethorpe, revealed her as defiant and without pretension, with an unkempt masculine beauty – and she has remained that way ever since

She is inspirational, not only because she broke through the heady male punk movement, but because she has integrity and loyalty to her art, resolutely never interested in chasing fame or money. Smith, 64, is a poet, photographer, artist, mother, political activist and a voracious reader and writer. "All I've ever wanted, since I was a child," she says, "was to do something wonderful."

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