Hollywood is full of amazing women. As well as winning an Oscar for her performance in Silver Linings Playbook, current queen of popular opinion, Jennifer Lawrence, says brilliant things like ‘I ate French Fries and laid in bed until three’. And speaking of the quotable, there’s no end to the gold that reels off Gwyneth Paltrow’s tongue. That in addition to the fact that the Iron Man 3 actress has managed to capitalise on how amazing it is to be Gwyneth with her life-porn website Goop and  dream-diet book, It’s All Good.

And what of Angelina Jolie, she too a possessor of a little gold man for her role in Girl, Interrupted, who not only underwent a gruelling double-mastectomy to give her children a better chance of not losing her to breast cancer, but then took to the New York Times to speak of her experience hoping to help other women have the confidence to do as she’s done. That’s pretty fierce. 

Why then, as a study reveals today, is female representation in the film industry at a new low, with only 28.4 percent of speaking roles in the top 100 highest-grossing movies of 2012 occupied by women? And as if that wasn’t bad enough, Lucy Liu comments in the latest issue of Net-a-Porter magazine, ‘I can't say that there is no racism – there's definitely something there that's not easy, which makes [an acting career] much more difficult’. So if you’re Halle Berry or Octavia Spencer, also Oscar winners for Monster’s Ball and The Help respectively,  or indeed Liu herself, who resents being type-cast as ‘the Asian girl with no emotion’, that’s even fewer roles for you. 

It’s about time Hollywood started representing the best actresses, as well as actors, around. In the meantime, let’s celebrate the roles our silver screen sisters have nailed with this gallery of amazing women in film.