Barbara Stanwyck in a scene from Sorry, Wrong Number (1948).

The Academy celebrates the legendary actress Barbara Stanwyck during the year of her centennial with an evening of film clips and onstage conversation with Stanwyck’s friends and colleagues. This tribute will be followed by a retrospective screening series at the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s new Billy Wilder Theater – a fitting venue, as the great director was one of Stanwyck’s favorites.

Though Barbara Stanwyck became well known to younger generations through her starring roles on several long-running television shows, especially “The Big Valley,” she was a major film actress from the early 1930s into the 1960s, starring in over 80 movies. Born Ruby Stevens on July 16, 1907, in Brooklyn, New York, Stanwyck’s first job was wrapping packages at a local department store. Her youthful dreams of a career in show business were realized in 1922, when she was hired as a chorus girl for $35 a week. In 1944 her earnings of $400,000 made her the highest-paid woman in the U.S.

Stanwyck could literally do it all. She starred in everything from romantic comedies to serious dramas, hard-boiled noir films to Westerns – in the latter, she even performed many of her own stunts. Her early work encompassed a wide range of roles, including the easy women of Mexicali Rose (1929), Ladies of Leisure (1930), and the scandalous and heavily censored Baby Face (1933); the compassionate student nurse she played in Night Nurse (1931), opposite a devious Clark Gable; and the tawdry but self-sacrificing mother in Stella Dallas (1937), a role that earned Stanwyck her first Best Actress Oscar® nomination.

Three more nominations followed, for performances that underscore her remarkable versatility. She combined a wicked sense of humor and glamorous sex appeal in Ball of Fire (1941), embodied the nefarious desires of a discontented wife in Double Indemnity (1944), and captured the acute terror of an endangered invalid in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948). Stanwyck held her own opposite the great leading men of her day in Golden Boy (1939), with William Holden; The Lady Eve (1941), with Henry Fonda; Meet John Doe (1941), with Gary Cooper; The Furies (1950), with Walter Huston; and Clash by Night (1952), with Robert Ryan.

The Academy presented Stanwyck with an Honorary Award in 1981 for her “superlative creativity and unique contribution to the art of screen acting.” This “Centennial Tribute to Barbara Stanwyck” renews that well-deserved praise.