IMDb used to use a name-based system for referring to actors, but they’d long planned to switch to a numeric system like that used to refer to movies. They recently made the switch, and now there are seven-digit numbers to refer to every actor (meaning they can have up to 9,999,999 actors in the current system). I caught most of Yankee Doodle Dandy on TV tonight, and that prompted me to look up the details in IMDb. I realized that James Cagney was #0000010 and they must have actually ranked cinema personalities. This seems to me a curious way to do it, but anyway here’s what they’ve come up with:

1. Fred Astaire
2. Lauren Bacall
3. Brigitte Bardot
4. John Belushi
5. Ingmar Bergman
6. Ingrid Bergman
7. Humphrey Bogart
8. Marlon Brando
9. Richard Burton
10. James Cagney

It just strikes me as peculiar that a database that has always seemed factual and objective would go to a subjective sorting like this. I wonder if it’s based on votes somehow?