Top Actresses of the 1960s

When you're hot, you're hot and in the 1960s there was no-one more sizzling than these female movie stars...

The social revolution of the 1960s and its accompanying shifts in perspective brought about new standards of beauty in the film industry. The pointy-chested, pancaked-faced, voluptuous babes of the 1950s didn't gel with the emergent youth culture who were looking for something a little more edgy to identify with. Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe were on the way out and Brigitte Bardot and Jane Fonda were on the way in.

It was the era of subversive fashions, revolutionary music, political protest and greater sexual freedom and the new generation had a taste for women who were assertive, freedom-loving, slender, sexy and trendily chic. The actresses featured below represented a new ideal of the individualistic, modern women and they radiated the vibe and energy of the pulsating '60s on screen.

The Dead End Kids

Such naughtiness. Some of The Dead End Kids

In depression-era America, the Dead End Kids were a popular cinema attraction, reflecting as they did, the chutzpah and wisecracking humour-in the-face-of-adversity of New York kids who were doing it tough in the slum tenements of the 1930s.

So who were they? Essentially they were a group of actors who played a gang of wayward boys -  wisearse street kids, who oozed a kind of reprobate charm and personality.

The kids began on Broadway in 1935, in a successful play called Dead End and a couple of years later were brought to Hollywood by legendary producer Samuel Goldwyn, who saw the potential appeal of the show for a wider audience.

Real Life Brats
Goldwyn turned the play into a film, hiring an extra eight youths, in addition to the original cast,  to play an array of roles. Legend  has it they were a nightmare on the set - running amok, destroying valuable studio property and generally misbehaving. So much so, that Goldwyn, eager to offload them, sold their contract to Warner Bros. after the film's completion.

They went on to make six films under the name Dead End Kids with Warner, often working with big name stars like Bogart, Cagney, Ronal Regan and Pat O'Brien. In subsequent films, the boys were rechristened the Eastside Kids and in the 1940s, Monogram Films  made another series of films using some original cast members under the name The Bowery Boys.

All in all, the various groups of boys that began with the original concept of the Dead End Kids, made total of 89 films during a period that spanned a long, by Hollywood terms,  21 years. In the 1960s and 70s,  the Eastside Kids and the Bowery Boys films were screened on syndicated television , leading to a new legion of fans.


The Original Dead End Kids
Billy Halop
Bobby Jordan,
Huntz Hall,
Bernard Punsly
Gabriel Dell
Leo and David Gorcey