l - at girls with guns

Female Action Movie Stars RELOAD - SUBSCRIBE TO EMAIL NEWS ABOUT THIS SITE

Cheryl Ladd
She was born Cheryl Jean Stoppelmoor in South Dakota, 1951, and married to David Ladd (1974-80). Won fame on TV as Kris Monroe in Charlie's Angels (1977-81), where she played Farah Fawcett's replacement in the famous trio of private detectives. Ladd portrayed Grace Kelly in a 1983 biopic, and mysterious time-traveller Louise Baltimore in offbeat sci-fi adventure Millennium (1989).

Donald Morefield

Laurene Landon
Canadian actress Laurene Landon displayed memorable athleticism as wrestler Molly in Robert Aldrich's road movie, The California Dolls (aka: All The Marbles, 1981). She then played Mike Hammer's secretary Velda in a remake of I, The Jury (1982), written by Larry Cohen from Mickey Spillane's novel, before starring in the rarely seen sword 'n' sorcery adventure Hundra (1983), where she excelled in fight scenes as the vengeful warrior-woman of the title.
However, Landon's key action girl role was as the undercover vice squad officer, Theresa Mallory, in William Lustig's cult thrillers Maniac Cop (1988) - produced from another Cohen script, and its sequel, Maniac Cop 2 (1990), in which she helps the nominal hero (Bruce Campbell) tackle a homicidal zombie that wears a badge...

Diane Lane
A former child actor, Diane Lane has progressed from playing beautiful kidnap victim Ellen Aim in Walter Hill's Streets Of Fire (1984), to the role of pistol-packin' housewife Debbie in black comedy My New Gun (1992), to being cast as lethal peacekeeper Hershey in the Stallone actioner, Judge Dredd (1995).
Lane has also played security agent Nina Chance, an Olympic sharpshooter recruited by the US Secret Service, in the White House conspiracy thriller Murder At 1600 (1997).

Shannon Lee
As Bruce Lee's daughter, she's very good at the old martial arts in Cory Yuen's heist thriller And Now You're Dead (aka: Enter The Eagles, 1998), which has several running gunbattles in addition to kung fu fighting.

Jennifer Jason Leigh
She says:
"I could never play the ingénue, the girl next door or the
very successful young doctor. That would be a bore." The daughter of Vic Morrow, this chameleonic actress is renowned for gamely tackling roles in lurid material. See her as Agnes in Paul Verhoeven's Flesh + Blood (1985), as Teensy in The Men's Club (1986), as Carol Rivers in Heart Of Midnight (1988), and as Tralala in Last Exit To Brooklyn (1989). She delivered quirky and vivid performances as Nash, the kidnapped truck-stop waitress in The Hitcher (1986), as performance artist, Lydia Johnson, in Christopher Guest's The Big Picture (1989), as feisty reporter Amy Archer in the Coen brothers' comedy satire The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), as Kristen, the undercover narcotics cop who becomes an addict, in Rush (1991), and as psychopathic flatmate Heddie Carlson (taking over co-star Bridget Fonda's lifestyle and identity) in Barbet Schroeder's Single White Female (1992).
Just when mainstream audiences and conservative critics were ready to dismiss the talented but eccentric Leigh as only interested in perverse ('sluts and nuts') characters, she played Selena St George, a career woman going home in Taylor Hackford's perfect adaptation of Stephen King's Delores Claiborne (1995), and more recently she wrote, produced and directed The Anniversary Party (2001).
However, Leigh's top action role is as alluring 'game-pod goddess' Allegra Geller, in David Cronenberg's superb eXistenZ (1999), where she fires a machine gun and happily slays rivals and competitors in the film's dazzling virtual reality scenario.

Peter Schilling

Jade Leung
Jade Leung played vicious street punk, Erica, who becomes Catherine, a secret agent with a microchip implanted in her head, in Stephen Shin's electrifying Black Cat (1991), Hong Kong's shameless yet noteworthy answer to Luc Besson's excellent Nikita (1990). She reprised her role as expert killer Cat in uninspired sequel, Black Cat 2: The Assassination Of President Yeltsin (1992).
Leung's animal ferocity was also seen to good effect when she played a crazy police officer in crime thriller, Satin Steel (1994), and she turned in two further remarkable performances as a dispirited rookie cop in tragic drama, Enemy Shadow, and as an undercover cop taking revenge upon the killers of her partner in Fox Hunter (both 1995).

Steven Hampton

Charlotte Lewis
At age of 11, London-born Charlotte Lewis played Samantha in TV school drama, Grange Hill (1978), before her first young adult roles as Delores in Roman Polanski's high seas adventure, Pirates (1986), mysterious martial artist Kee Nang in offbeat fantasy The Golden Child (1986), and Jenny Cooper in slasher movie Dial Help (1988), where she's menaced by a stalker. Other roles include Trudy in Tripwire (1990), Anita Gilmour in Excessive Force (1992), Roberta Daley in Lipstick Camera (1994), Loki in Men Of War (1994), and lone assassin Katya in Decoy (1995) - which is probably her best girl-with-gun role to date. Lately, she's played exotic dancer Jacqueline in The Glass Cage (1996).

Ian Shutter

Carolyn Liu
A former Penthouse model cast among supporting players as action girl Silk, in Malibu Bay films Do Or Die (1991), Hard Hunted (1992), Return To Savage Beach (1998).
In director Andy Sidaris' Day Of The Warrior (1996), she played character of Alice.

Sondra Locke
In addition to having been Clint Eastwood's squeeze from 1977 to 1988, Sondra Locke also held her own in the gun department, both supporting the cops, as Gus Mally in The Gauntlet (1977) and breaking the law, as Jennifer Spencer in Sudden Impact (1983) with the help of a revolver. Born in Shelbyville, Tennessee on May 28, 1927, the hot blonde struck critical acclaim and an Oscar nomination for playing Mick in The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter (1968), her film debut. She struck up a relationship with Eastwood, joining him on westerns - as Laura Lee in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), his Dirty Harry movies, and comedies such as Every Which Way But Loose (1978), in which she played Lynn Halsey-Taylor.
   In The Gauntlet, Locke used a revolver to unload a busload of passengers. In Sudden Impact, the revolver was used for a more painful purpose, namely blowing the bollocks off the men who gang-raped her and her sister. In Sudden Impact, Locke managed to actually exemplify Dirty Harry's philosophy with the following exchange:
   Woman: "Well, it must give you a great feeling of satisfaction to make old ugly things right again."
   Jennifer (Locke): "Yes. Sometimes it does."
   Anyway, watching Locke brandishing a revolver while dressed in a midriff-tied top and skin-tight denim pants gets my attention every time. Since her well-publicised break-up with Eastwood, Locke has gone on to write a book and direct several films, such as Impulse (1990), Death In Small Doses (1995), and Trading Favors (aka: Do Me A Favor, 1997).

Octavio Ramos, Jr

Louise Lombard
British TV actress who appeared in the likes of Chancer (1990), and won attention for her role as Evangeline in period drama The House Of Eliott (1991), before being cast as the female lead, Liz Shaw, in action series Bodyguards (1996), about a government sanctioned "close protection group" acting as minders for VIPs, foreign diplomats and threatened witnesses. When killers attack a safe-house, heroine Liz gets into a running gun-battle with ruthless bad-guys.
Lombard has also appeared, as Samantha Turkel, in Russell Mulcahy's dud genre movie Tale Of The Mummy (1998).

Donald Morefield

Jennifer Lopez
She says:
"I was always a singer and a dancer, and I always wanted to be an actress. For me, it's all just one thing." Born 24 July 1970 to Puerto Rican parents in the Bronx, singer and actress Lopez initially studied dance in New York and appeared in Janet Jackson videos, before her own music career took off as J Lo.
After TV on shows like South Central (1994), she won role of New York subway transit cop Grace Santiago in Money Train (1995), where she gets into punch-up with co-star Wesley Snipes, and played Terri Flores in jungle monster movie Anaconda (1997). In Oliver Stone's U-Turn (1997), Lopez sizzles as femme fatale Grace McKenna, but it was her role as FBI agent Karen Sisco in Out Of Sight (1998) that firmly established her action girl credentials.
Since then, she's played psychic scientist Catherine Deane in Tarsem Singh's visually impressive cyber-thriller The Cell (2000), and Lopez was paid $9 million to play Chicago street cop Sharon Pogue, tackling hoodlums, in mystery romance Angel Eyes (2001).

Traci Lords
With a beautifully sculpted face and athletic body, Traci Lords continues to carve quite a niche for herself as a film and TV actress. Born Norma Kuzma in 1968 in Ohio, Lords dominated adult films during the 1980s, but she was not even 18 years old. Consequently, many of these films were banned.
But Lords is not just an adult-film actress, as she has so adeptly demonstrated by reinventing herself. Her most recent films include City Of Masks (directed by Hong Kong master Tsui Hark) and Chump Change (for which she won the Best Actress award at the U.S. Comedy Festival in Aspen), but she has also appeared in movies such as Blade, Virtuosity, Ice, Serial Mom, Crybaby (directed by John Waters), and Not Of This Earth (directed by Jim Wynorski), all of which demonstrate her dynamic range and willingness to take risks. Her television work includes playing Jordan Radcliffe on the Sci-Fi Channel series First Wave and making guest appearances in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, The Profiler, and countless others.
Lords has released an autobiography titled Traci Lords: Underneath It All and is presently working on her follow-up CD release to her 1995 effort 1,000 Fires, a techno-driven album that benefited from the writing/production of Babble (Thompson Twins), Ben Watkins, and Mike Edwards (Jesus Jones).

Octavio Ramos Jr

Carey Lowell
One of the independent and cynical Bond girls, Carey Lowell plays freelance pilot and sometime CIA agent Pam Bouvier with a mix of grace and toughness. In John Glen's Licence To Kill (1989), she helps Timothy Dalton's 007 escape from a bar fight, and thankfully doesn't ever need rescuing. In the film's climactic battle scenes, Lowell's heroine tricks her way into the bad-guys' secret base and pulls a gun on the sleazy villain (Wayne Newton). Watch out for her thigh holster! More fiesty Lowell gunplay: one, two

Elaine Lui
Athletic beauty Elaine Lui was, reportedly, a volleyball official in Hong Kong, before taking up acting in a variety of action and fantasy movies. She played character 'Elaine' in Angels (aka: Iron Angels, 1987) and its sequel Angels 2 (1989), both films inspired by American TV series Charlie's Angels.
Lui played Ji Wushuang in fantasy The Bride With White Hair (1993), and was great as bad girl terrorist, Elaine, in Red Wolf (1995). Since then, she has guest starred as Lai Pai Chin in kung fu TV series Martial Law (1998).

Rob Marshall

Joanna Lumley
Born in India, former model Joanna Lumley remains one of the golden girls of British TV, even though she's well into her fifties, now...
She was among 007's bevy of beauties in underrated Bond movie, On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), and had roles in horror chillers such as Hammer's The Satanic Rites Of Dracula (aka: Count Dracula And His Vampire Bride, aka: The Rites Of Dracula, 1973), before she hit the big time with the heavily publicised female lead of Purdey (named after a brand of shotgun!), in The New Avengers (1976-77) co-starring with Patrick Macnee and Gareth Hunt. Her most notable use of firearms in this superspy action series was episode six, Target!, during which she achieves a 99 percent score on a hi-tech shooting range used for training agents in mock combat.
Lumley went on to further cult success as the mysterious psychic investigator in telefantasy classic Sapphire And Steel (1979-80), and her BAFTA award-winning role as Patsy Stone, the champagne-swilling bitch of popular BBC comedy show Absolutely Fabulous (1992-94).

Donald Morefield

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