Hollywood Leading lady
Dickinson's big-screen breakthrough role came in Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo (1959), 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 her personal contract with him 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 film 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 theaters due to its violent content and entertainment value, 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 considered to be John Boorman's cult classic Point Blank (1967), a crime drama with Lee Marvin, a criminal who is out for revenge after being betrayed by his wife and his best friend. The film has been described as epitomizing the stark urban mood of the period, while its reputation has grown through the years.
Westerns continued 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 Sam Whiskey with Burt Reynolds.
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, and starred alongside Leslie Nielsen in The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler. In The Outside Man (1972), a French movie shot in Los Angeles, with Jean-Louis Trintignant, directed by Jacques Deray, she plays the beautiful but corrupt 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 40s 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 70th anniversary in 2003, the Dickinson pose was recreated for the cover by Britney Spears.
