"For women in Hollywood, the system was created to isolate them from each other and to pit them against one another," says Silverstein. "Women are taking back the power by sharing the information in a way that has never been done before."

Hollywood’s feminists have previously been accused of representing an elitist group, who are far removed from the struggles of ordinary, less glamorous women. The Time’s Up movement is a serious attempt to counter these accusations through showing solidarity with working women of all backgrounds and ethnicities.

Called Time’s Up, the movement was announced on Monday with an impassioned pledge of support to working-class women in an open letter signed by hundreds of women in show business, many of them A-listers. The letter also ran as a full-page ad in The New York Times, and in La Opinion, a Spanish-language newspaper. “The struggle for women to break in, to rise up the ranks and to simply be heard and acknowledged in male-dominated workplaces must end; time’s up on this impenetrable monopoly,” the letter says.

The actress posted an impassioned speech on Instagram after seeing an article in the Daily Mail that said she was 11 years older than her actual age of 44. “While, yes, it can be funny to read untrue things about yourself, I’ve been aware for years (with this newspaper but by no means confined to it) of how the glee in shaming women, often with lies like this, is so much darker and further reaching than enjoying a little schadenfreude,” Beckinsale writes.

The death threats — against one of India's most popular actresses and a prominent filmmaker — brought quick backlash. They were sharply denounced by leaders of Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, and the home minister in the southern Karnataka state, Ramalinga Reddy, ordered protection for Padukone and her family. Also at stake are the boundaries for the world's most prolific film industry, in which some directors have increasingly tried to push back against decades of film censorship for political reasons.

“I started saying to my agents, ‘Don’t send me scripts where the first adjective in the female description is ‘beautiful.’ And if the second is ‘enigmatic,’ throw it in the trash.’ The word ‘enigmatic’ means ‘Her backstory doesn’t matter.’

In the real world, women with disabilities are often seen as wheelchair first and woman second. Movies cannot fix that, of course, but at least they could provide some sort of visibility for an underrepresented segment of society. Do I want the same tired disability porn for women that men get? No. When it comes to men with disabilities, Hollywood has to do better. When it comes to women, it has to at least do something.

In 1913, 26% of the cast in 53 films was female and of the 74 films made so far in 2017, the percentage is 28%.