Who were the most underrated actors/actresses ever?

Stage and screen actors who were good, but got stuck in lightweight roles, or character actors caught in the Hollywood typecast, or good actors, for one reason or another, who got murdered by the press, or those destroyed in the 1950’s communist witch hunts, or even those who died too young before they met true potential.

Such as the much maligned Diana Dors, whose star glimmered ever fleetinigly for only short moments starting at seventeen with Oliver Twist (1948), or the noir film Tread Softly Stranger (1958), and as a death row inmate sentenced to hang in the controversial Yield to the Night (1956) for which she was nominated for the Palm d’Or. But because of her looks, it was decided she would be marketed as “Britain’s Blonde Bombshell” by her agent/husband who managed to go through all her money after eleven years of work and left her destitute and heavily indebted to the taxman when he died of syphilis in 1958.

Even some of her best roles, like the Hitchcock-style The Last Page (1952) was sabotaged when it was marketed in the US as Man Bait, and the same with her best dramatic performance, Yield to the Night, which was marketed in the sexually repressed US public as The Blonde Sinner.

By the 1970s she was reduced to doing cabaret work as an aging torch singer and comedienne in burlesque to pay the bills and was dismissed by the general public as a failed Marilyn Monroe wannabe. She was very good and had great potential, but she couldn’t catch a break from the press, or her managers who saw that they could make fast money selling her as just another dumb blonde in films that were nothing more than soft porn of the times.