AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars

The American Film Institute's AFI 100 Years... series includes AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars ranking their selections for the top 25 male and 25 female greatest screen legends of American film history. On June 15, 1999, a CBS special hosted by Shirley Temple unveiled the list with fifty current actors making the presentations.

AFI defined an "American screen legend" as an actor or a team of actors during the Classical Hollywood cinema era with a significant screen presence in American feature-length (40 min or more) films whose screen debut occurred in or before 1950, or whose screen debut occurred after 1950 but whose death has marked a completed body of work, i.e., actors recognized for their contributions to classical Hollywood American cinema.

The top stars of their respective gender are Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. They starred together in the classic adventure 1951 film The African Queen, for which Bogart won his only Academy Award. Sidney Poitier and Sophia Loren are the list's only living honorees.[1] Of the Males Humphrey Bogart, Fred Astaire, James Cagney, Charlie Chaplin, all four Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton and Edward G. Robinson were born in the 19th Century, and the females Mae West, Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford. All the rest were born in the 20th century; among them, Gish was the last survivor. The earliest female death was Jean Harlow in 1938, and earliest male death was James Dean in 1955. The most recent was Kirk Douglas in 2020 and as of 2021 is the longest living legend. (Poitier would have to live until at least 2030 and Loren 2037 to surpass Douglas).