Miriam, Moses’ sister, is an intriguing character in the biblical Exodus story, and one there is much speculation about.
The modern takeaway from the biblical stories about Miriam is that she was assertive even as a child, making sure that Moses was taken into Pharaoh’s household.
She led the Israelite women in singing and playing music to celebrate the parting of the Red Sea, and later, with Aaron, she confronted Moses about his leadership choices.
Miriam has never been front and center in a major movie, but she has played a part in several biblical epics, such as the feature-length animated musical The Prince of Egypt, a high-quality film from 1998 with an all-star cast that includes Val Kilmer voiced as Moses, Michelle Pfeiffer as Tzipporah, Ralph Fiennes as Ramses, Helen Mirren as the Queen, Jeff Goldblum as Aaron, and Sandra Bullock as Miriam.
Miriam has several key moments in the movie and sings in two numbers on the soundtrack. Her songs are sung by Sally Dworsky in the scenes where Miriam is grown, and by Eden Riegel when she is young.
Riegel sings part of the song “Deliver Us” with Ofra Haza, who played Yocheved, Moses’ mother. The song tells of her heartbreaking decision to save her son’s life by putting him in a basket in the Nile when the Egyptians were killing all male Jewish children. Miriam is shown following Moses and watching as he is taken from the water by Bithia, Pharaoh’s daughter.
The most famous song from the film is a version of “When You Believe” by Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston, who have small parts in the movie. But another version of it is sung in the film by Michelle Pfeiffer as Tzipporah and Sally Dworsky as the older Miriam as the Israelites leave Egypt following the 10 plagues.
More recently, in the 2014 feature film Exodus: Gods and Kings, directed by Ridley Scott, another retelling of the Exodus story, Miriam (Tara Fitzgerald) faces torture at the hands of Ramses (Joel Edgerton) for refusing to admit that Moses (Christian Bale) is her brother.
It’s a scary scene, and Miriam shows great courage. The movie features elaborate special effects and a cast with some top actors, such as Ben Kingsley, John Turturro, Aaron Paul, and Sigourney Weaver.
But the tasteful Exodus: Gods and Kings lacks some of the over-the-top fun of earlier Hollywood biblical epics.
For sheer spectacle and drama, nothing can beat The Ten Commandments, the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza, starring Charlton Heston as the most heroic movie Moses, glowing with a great tan and righteousness, and Yul Brynner as the domineering and tormented Pharaoh. The adult Miriam, played by Olive Deering, and the young Miriam (Babette Bain) are depicted in the film, but this character appears in very few of the film’s 220 minutes.
While the scene where the Red Sea parts was truly cutting-edge for its time, it looks rather clunky today; but there are many lively moments in the film, particularly the Golden Calf scene.
The supporting cast includes John Derek as Joshua, Anne Baxter as Nefretiri, Yvonne De Carlo as Tzipporah, and Edward G. Robinson as a lecherous slave overseer. Bithiah (Nina Foch) finds baby Moses in his basket and says, “Because I drew you from the water, you shall be called Moses,” as if that line makes sense to an English-speaking audience. [The Hebrew word moshe means “drawn out” (from the water).]
For anyone familiar with the biblical story, much of the film will be unintentionally funny, but that doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy it.
Movies about brave and artistic women who question authority
IF YOU’RE interested in movie portrayals of brave and artistic women who question authority, there are many such heroines.
Not Without My Daughter is a movie that is particularly relevant, now that Israel is again at war with Iran and its proxies. The movie stars Sally Field as an American woman married to an Iranian (Albert Molina) who goes on vacation with him to Tehran in 1984.
There, she discovers to her horror that he wants them to stay there forever, and that she has no legal right there to decide anything about her daughter’s future. While it isn’t a masterpiece, it’s a tense thriller, with Field appealing as a mother who risks her life to protect her child.
A different kind of assertiveness is on display in On the Basis of Sex (2018), a drama about the early life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the trailblazing female US Supreme Court justice who became an unlikely celebrity. It celebrates her uncompromising career devoted to furthering women’s rights and her outspoken style, which inspired many.
Directed by Mimi Leder, it stars Felicity Jones as Ginsburg in her law school days, when she struggled to balance her roles as a wife, mother, and student, and the years after she graduated and could not find work.
Eventually, she got a job teaching and had an epiphany that the best way to end discrimination against women was to find the few laws that discriminated against men, and she argued successfully that there should be no inequality “on the basis of sex” in the eyes of the law.
Hidden Figures (2016) is a fact-based drama about three female African-American mathematicians who were pioneers in breaking the color and gender barriers in the US space program in the 1960s.
Anchored by three wonderful leading performances, it follows Katherine Goble Johnson (Taraji P. Henson, who played Cookie on the TV series Empire); Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer, who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Help); and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae, a musician known for her roles in Moonlight and Glass Onion) as they fight to be taken seriously by those leading the space program.
In a famous scene, Johnson’s boss (Kevin Costner) chides her for taking too long on her bathroom breaks, and she bravely tells him that because the bathrooms are segregated, she has to walk half a mile to use the restroom. This shocks him and spurs him to desegregate the work environment.
That scene encapsulates the theme of the movie, which is that simply doing brilliant work was not enough; these women faced obstacles that even their co-workers were unaware of.
Several movies about women in the arts celebrate the spirit of those who followed in Miriam’s footsteps. The biopics What’s Love Got to Do With It? and Coal Miner’s Daughter look at the lives of musical giants Tina Turner (Angela Bassett) and Loretta Lynn (Sissy Spacek), respectively.
Frida, a 2002 biopic of iconoclastic artist Frida Kahlo, showcases the Mexican artist whose evocative work was inspired by magic realism and folk art and became wildly popular decades after her death in 1954.
In 2025, her painting The Dream (The Bed) was sold at auction for $54.7 million, which was the highest price ever paid for a work by a female artist.
Frida was made by Julie Taymor, a director known for the innovative stage production of The Lion King. It stars Salma Hayek in the title role, for which she received an Oscar nomination. The movie focuses on her relationship with her husband, muralist Diego Rivera (Albert Molina), and her struggles with her health issues.