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Turner Classics focuses lens on leading ladies in Oscar salute

Any serious movie lover has already seen the films featuring this year’s nominees for the Best Actress Oscar. (Hint for those betting in office pools: Cate Blanchett is the favorite).

But more-devoted cinephiles will relish the opportunity provided by Turner Classic Movies’ popular annual series “31 Days of Oscar,” running right up until the big day.

Scores of Oscar-winning and -nominated performances by lead actresses throughout the years are being spotlighted. Here’s a sampling of some of the highlights.

Bette Davis

Bette Davis and Leslie Howard in “Of Human Bondage.”

“Of Human Bondage,” (1934)

Feb. 20, 8 p.m.

Bette Davis wasn’t nominated for her brilliant performance as Mildred, a slutty waitress. But Academy members were so upset by the snub that they voted for her anyway. She came in third, behind Claudette Colbert for “It Happened One Night” and Norma Shearer for “The Barretts of Wimpole Street.” Davis won the following year for “Dangerous” and in 1938 for “Jezebel.”

Best line: Davis to Leslie Howard: “It used to make me sick to have to kiss you. Why, I would wipe my mouth. Wipe my mouth!”

Claudette Colbert

Claudette Colbert with Clark Gable in “It Happened One Night.”

“It Happened One Night” (1934)

Feb. 20, 9:30 p.m.

Colbert was so unhappy with the finished picture and convinced that she wouldn’t win Best Actress that she had to be literally dragged off a departing train to attend the ceremony. This Frank Capra picture, the first film to win Academy Awards in all the leading categories of Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director and Screenplay, has no shortage of great scenes, such as when co-star Clark Gable erects “The Walls of Jericho,” actually a blanket, to chastely separate his and Colbert’s adjoining beds, or takes off his shirt to reveal that he is not wearing an undershirt, which, much to clothing manufacturers’ dismay, sparked a nationwide trend.

Best scene: After the hitchhiking Gable and Colbert fail to get picked up, the long-limbed actress flashes her gams and immediately causes the next passing car to screech to a halt.

Cicely Tyson

Cicely Tyson with Yvonne Jarrell in “Sounder.”FOX

“Sounder” (1972)

Feb. 22, 3:45 p.m.

Tyson’s competition for the award that year included Diana Ross for “Lady Sings the Blues,” marking the first time since Dorothy Dandridge in 1954’s “Carmen Jones” that a black actress was nominated for a leading role. Unbelievably, Tyson lost to Liza Minnelli for “Cabaret,” but nonetheless gives a heartbreaking performance in this 1930s-set drama as a woman desperately trying to keep her family together after her sharecropper husband (Paul Winfield, also nominated) is imprisoned for stealing food.

Best scene: When Tyson joyfully races across a field to greet Winfield upon his return from prison, it’s simply devastating.

Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor in “Butterfield 8.”

“Butterfield 8” (1960)

Feb. 27, 2 p.m.

The glamorous star had been nominated for a Best Actress Oscar four years in a row before finally winning for this bowdlerized adaptation of John O’Hara’s novel about a prostitute who falls in love with a married man. Taylor herself hated the movie, but despite stiff competition that included Shirley MacLaine for “The Apartment” she took home the Oscar. It was largely considered a sympathy vote due to her having nearly died from a bout with pneumonia for which she received an emergency tracheotomy.

Best line: Taylor’s scandalous affair with Eddie Fisher while he was married to Debbie Reynolds undoubtedly adds resonance to such lines as “Mama, let’s face it, I was the slut of all time.”

Sophia Loren

Sophia Loren in “Two Women.”

“Two Women” (1961)

Feb. 27, 4 p.m.

Becoming the first non-American actress to win the award for a foreign-language film, Loren suppressed her innate glamour for this World War II drama directed by Vittorio De Sica. She plays a young widow who, along with her teenage daughter, is brutally raped by Moroccan soldiers.

Best line: Loren’s maternal anguish is powerfully expressed in the scene in which she cries, “You ruined my beautiful daughter forever! Now she’s worse than dead!”

Maggie Smith

Maggie Smith in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.”

“The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969)

Feb. 27, 6 p.m.

Long before a new generation of fans were tartly amused by her performance as the Dowager Countess on “Downton Abbey,” Smith won the Oscar — her first — for her scintillating role as the provocative schoolteacher at an upscale girls school who’s conducting a scandalous affair with a married colleague (played by her real-life husband Robert Stephens) and preaching Mussolini’s virtues to her young students.

Best line: Miss Brodie tells her protegée, the devious Sandy (Pamela Franklin): “Please try to do as I say and not as I do. Remember, you are a child, Sandy, and far from your prime.”