45. Reese Witherspoon as Tracy 
      Flick Election (1999)

“I went to a high school for three days, where I pretended to be a student,” recalls Witherspoon, who was 23 years old when she wowed the critics with her unflinching performance as Tracy Flick, an anal-retentive go-getter who will stop at nothing to win her student council election. She generates an onslaught of posters, buttons, and customized cupcakes all bearing her special slogan: Pick Flick. But the tightly wound physicality that Witherspoon brought to the character—the typewriter speech, ramrod-straight posture, and desperately sunny disposition—veils more nuanced undercurrents of pain. Witherspoon creates a character who is at once a riotous embodiment of a type—the geeky brownnose we all knew in high school—and a living, breathing individual, reeling with quirks, loneliness, and anger. “She clenched her teeth and jutted her jaw forward, particularly when she was angry, which was ninety-five percent of the film,” Witherspoon says. “I just remember after the movie was done, my jaw hurt so bad. I had TMJ from holding my jaw so tight!”

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