Some of the movie roles for women in the 1990s were more complex and grittier than those of earlier decades. In The Grifters (1990) Annette Bening and Anjelica Huston played tough con artists at odds with one another. Jodie Foster had a major hit with The Silence of the Lambs (1991), in which she played an FBI trainee who convinces a savage mass murderer (played by Anthony Hopkins) to help her solve a grisly crime, proving her toughness in a traditionally masculine job.

Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis starred as the female equivalents of Butch Cassidy and Sundance in Thelma & Louise (1991), a dark comedy about two women on the run from meaningless relationships .who end up as murderers on the run from the las Pop-music star Madonna played another sort of tougff woman in Evita (1996), director Alan Parker's screen version of Andrew Lloyd...