In partnership with The Film Foundation, Turner Classic Movies is proud to bring you this exclusive monthly column by iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese.

SUMMER UNDER THE STARS--Every August, TCM pays tribute to actors - for the most part, actors from the Hollywood studio era. I'm always struck by the range of choices in the programming. It's interesting to look at the filmography of any given actor and to realize that most of them are remembered for only a handful of the pictures they made. Henry Fonda, who is being celebrated on August 1, made almost 90 movies. In general, as he's remembered in popular culture and in clip reels, it boils down to about 5 or 6 movies. For people who love cinema, maybe it's about 20 movies. For fans that are devoted to him as a star, an icon, you could say that it's the whole career. But are even the most devoted Henry Fonda fans going back often to watch That Certain Woman or The Long Night or Yours, Mine and Ours? I think it's a good idea to include these titles in the tribute alongside Fonda's work for John Ford and Preston Sturges and Alfred Hitchcock, because they give a sense of the array of possibilities available to actors at different moments in their careers. In the case of Ava Gardner (August 8), you have someone who began a bit later and who had a very brief period of stardom that more or less began in the late '40s and ended in the mid-'60s--sadly, stardom still ends early for many women actors. Like many other actresses of her era, Gardner's carefully cultivated image locked her into a certain kind of character and a certain kind of movie. And that image is also tied to a very particular moment in moviemaking (from noir represented by The Killers, through the Technicolor pictures of the '50s like Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, The Barefoot Contessa and Bhowani Junction) and an even more particular sense of her beauty and her presence: she always seemed to be shadowed by tragedy. Liv Ullmann (August 14), who started in the late '50s in Europe, had something that simply wasn't available to Hollywood actors like Gardner: an intimate working relationship with a great filmmaker, a real creative partnership that created its own unique aura (and that was quite different from, say, the multi-picture collaboration between James Stewart, honored on August 7, and Anthony Mann). From Persona in 1966 to Autumn Sonata in 1978 (both of which are being shown), Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman made nine astonishing films together (25 years later they made one more great film, Saraband, which is not part of this program), and Ullmann also found something very special with Jan Troell on The Emigrants and The New Land. And then there's Humphrey Bogart (August 11), whose very presence was so distinctive that it brought almost every movie he ever made--great, good, mediocre or bad--to some kind of life (all of the films in this tribute are good, by the way). The relationship between an actor, their era, the artists they work with and the state of cinema--it's always changing, and it's rich for exploration.

by Martin Scorsese