Every year we lose a number of irreplaceable artists. 2009 was no exception. In celebration of the lives of those we bid adieu to in the year just ended, here are recommendations for films representing some of the best work of just ten of them.

Bea Arthur was best known for her TV work in the landmark series, Maude and The Golden Girls, but the veteran stage actress left us with two great silver screen performances as well.

As wonderful as she was in 1974’s Mame, the film itself is a mess so I don’t recommend you torture yourself by sitting through it, but I do recommend her earlier, even more wonderful performance in 1970’s Lovers and Other Strangers in which she and Oscar nominated Richard Castellano are the Italian-American parents typical of middle class parents in the fast changing world of the times. Bonnie Bedelia, Michael Brandon, Gig Young, Cloris Leachman, Diane Keaton, Anne Meara and others turn in classic performances as well, but the film belongs to Ms. Arthur and Mr. Castellano.

Lovers and Other Strangers is available on standard DVD only.

You’ve probably seen Betsy Blair numerous times in her Oscar nominated performance in 1955’s Marty, but she was equally memorable in a smaller role four years earlier in the gothic thriller, Kind Lady, in which she is the only sympathetic member of a mob out to rob and ill elderly Ethel Barrymore. Maurice Evans, Angela Lansbury and Keenan Wynn have a field day being as nasty as they can be but it’s Blair you remember most next to Barrymore.

Kind Lady has shamefully never been released on commercial home video in any format.

Jack Cardiff’s painterly eye made him one of the screen’s great cinematographers. Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, The African Queen and Fanny are but a few of the great films he lensed, but he was also a renown director.

Trevor Howard and Wendy Hiller complained that they had to direct themselves in 1960’s Sons and Lovers because Cardiff was too busy lining up the best shots. A bit of exaggeration perhaps, but perhaps not. Howard, Hiller, Dean Stockwell, Mary Ure, Heather Sear and the rest of the cast were either beyond the need for direction or Cardiff in his sly way controlled their performances whether they knew it or not.

It remains an outrage that Sons and Lovers has still not been released on DVD in the U.S. and Canada.

You probably know Dominick Dunne as the father of murdered Poltergeist actress Dominque Dunne and her brother, actor Griffin Dunne as well as for his many appearances discussing notorious criminal cases on Larry King Live.

The author of numerous novels and non-fiction works, his best novel to be turned into a TV mini-series was 1987’s The Two Mrs. Grenvilles which provided Ann-Margret and Claudette Colbert with two of their best performances. Colbert, in her last screen role, is mesmerizing as the controlling, socialite mother who helps slatternly daughter-in-law Annie cover up the murder of her son for propriety’s sake.

The Two Mrs. Grenvilles is available on DVD from the Warner Bros. Archives.

Susanna Foster did not have a large career. The girl with the pitch perfect lyric soprano was hired by MGM to be their answer to Deanna Durbin in the late 1930s. Unfortunately they never quite knew how to use her. Her one great role was ironically on loan out to Durbin’s studio, Universal. She blossoms in one of the iconic screen roles of all time as Christine to Claude Rains’ phantom in the 1943 version of Phantom of the Opera.

Phantom of the Opera is available on standard DVD only.

Everyone is familiar with Maurice Jarre’s scores for Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Witness and Dead Poets Society, but my favorite is his less sung but equally memorable score for 1970’s Ryan’s Daughter. David Lean’s story of the Irish schoolteacher’s wife whose affair with an English soldier was considered overproduced and overly long but I’ve never understood how anyone could complain when Freddie Young’s Oscar winning cinematography continuously fills the eye and Jarre’s lilting score continuously enraptures the ear. Robert Mitchum, Sarah Miles, Trevor Howard and John Mills are among the players whose performances are enhanced by his underscoring in David Lean’s film.

Ryan’s Daughter is available on standard DVD only.

An incandescent star with five Oscar nominations and one win to her credit, Jennifer Jones was an actress who could play a wide range of characters from innocent and saintly (The Song of Bernadette) to ephemeral and dreamy (Portrait of Jennie) to worldly wise and poignant (Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing). One of her least acclaimed performances, but I think one of her best, was her last screen appearance in the 1974 disaster epic, The Towering Inferno. Amidst the spectacle and carnage, an all-star cast of Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Richard Chamberlain and others weaves in and out of the film’s narrative but the two characters we care most about are Jones’ self-sacrificing teacher of the deaf and Fred Astaire’s aging con man who genuinely falls for her. Astaire won a much deserved late career Oscar nomination, but Jones should have gotten one, too.

The Towering Inferno is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Karl Malden had been on screen for sixty years beginning with 1940’s They Knew What They Wanted and ending with an appearance in TV’s The West Wing in 2000. He reached his peak with his Oscar winning performance in A Streetcar Named Desire and his Oscar nominated role in 1954’s On the Waterfront, but my strongest early impression of him was in another 1950s film, Robert Mulligan’s Fear Strikes Out.

Playing the cold, demanding father of baseball player Jimmy Piersall, Malden has never been better than in the scene where he drives his son, played by Anthony Perkins, to a nervous breakdown.

Fear Strikes Out is available on standard DVD only.

By all accountsNatasha Richardson was a real life Auntie Mame, beloved by all who knew her. Her self-deprecating humor was in evidence even after the ski slope accident that took her life a few hours later. Shrugging off help, she made fun of her own clumsiness in trying to learn to ski at 45.

Acclaimed for her performance in the 1998 Broadway revival of Cabaret, she was at her incandescent best on screen in 1994’s Widows’ Peak, a comedy/mystery gem in which she more than holds her own with veteran players Joan Plowright and Mia Farrow at their best.

Widows’ Peak is available on standard DVD only.

Patrick Swayze is best remembered for Dirty Dancing and Ghost, films that people have seen so many times they can quote almost his entire dialogue, but there is another film in which he is also at his iconic best.

In 1991’s Point Break, he plays a rough and tumble surfer dude who is also the leader of a gang of bank robbers whose modus operandi is to disguise themselves as former presidents. Keanu Reeves is the FBI agent who infiltrates the gang. Both actors give the film a high adrenaline rush under the direction of Kathryn Bigelow, whose The Hurt Locker was one of 2009’s best films.

Point Break is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.