Movie Sex Symbols Who Are Always Out-sexed By Others

I was watching a film with Claudia Cardinale, and I was reminded that she has always struck me as the epitome of a sex symbol (or someone who was sold as a sex symbol) who is usually outclassed in sex appeal by someone else in the movie. I've said before that in The Pink Panther, Fran Jeffries in her one big (and irrelevant) scene manages to be sexier than either of the two leading ladies, Cardinale and Capucine. But Cardinale is also outshone by Anouk Aimée in 8&1/2 even though Cardinale is supposed to be the sex symbol and Aimée has that bespectacled Big Sleep bookstore clerk look going on.

In Alexander Mackendrick's weird, bitter, depressing Tony Curtis comedy Don't Make Waves, Cardinale is so completely outclassed by Sharon Tate that Andrew Sarris remarked that it was "the biggest Hollywood cheesecake robbery since Betty Grable displaced Alice Faye in Tin Pan Alley."



If she's the only woman in the movie, as she is in Westerns like Once Upon a Time In the West and The Professionals (Update: I forgot that there is another woman in The Professionals; see comments), she doesn't have the problem of being outdone by another woman, but she still never comes off as a highlight of the movie, at least for me.

It's not that she isn't attractive, just that I don't find she lives up to the sex-symbol buildup she gets in most of her movies. I have my issues with Marilyn Monroe, but it's impossible for anyone to steal a scene or a movie from her. Ditto Sophia Loren, Bardot, and to some extent even Lollobrigida (who made mostly mediocre movies, but managed to dominate them). But some attractive actresses, no matter how aggressively they were sold as sex symbols, come off as no more intriguing than other pretty women in the same film, and sometimes less.

Sometimes I think Anita Ekberg is in a similar category for me -- though that's much more controversial, because unlike Cardinale, she did achieve legitimate sex-symbol status for a while. But again, I find that unlike a Monroe or a Loren, it's very easy for her to be outshone in the movie by the woman who is not supposed to be the sexpot, whether it's Aimée again in La Dolce Vita, or Pat Crowley in Hollywood Or Bust (who somehow manages to be sexier than Ekberg even though most of the film and promotion was about how sexy Anita Ekberg is), or Edie Adams in Call Me Bwana.

I don't know if anyone else has their own examples of an actor who got the sex-symbol buildup but is rarely the sexiest person in the movie. And obviously, this applies to male actors just as much as female.