Ah, China O’Brien… I knew there was a film of hers I recognized. There were a few of those, weren’t there?
Good choice for a tough female - she’s blonde, right? 
I’ll also throw in a premptive vote for Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft. Mmmm…
Anne Parillaud in the original (French) version of La Femme Nikita.
Anita Mui, who kicks as much ass as Michelle Yeoh does, but has better comic timing. No disrespect meant to Ms. Yeoh, though…she RULES as well. Mui & Yeoh are two of the big reasons that I got into Hong Kong action movies. In American action movies, the women are mostly insipid wifey & mother keep-the-home-fires-burning types. Bo-ring!! If a woman DOES get to run around & have adventures, it’s like a RULE that she has to be evil. The message is clear: good girls stay at home, only evil girls get to do anything interesting.
BTW, the actress in The Perils of Pauline was named Pearl White.
The OP is also an interest of mine: strong women portrayed in popular culture. It seems to me that the greats have been mentioned, particularly my personal favorite, in the OP: Ellen Ripley from Aliens.
In addition, I second Trinity from The Matrix, (I don’t care if she was playing second fiddle, she broke that fiddle over the bad guy’s heads and saved the hero’s ass numerous times), Sarah Connor from T2, Meg Coburn from The Replacement Killers (a favorite of mine), Anne Parillaud’s Nikita, Jordan O’Neil from GI Jane, anyone played by Michelle Yeoh, Tank Girl and Charly Baltimore from The Long Kiss Goodnight.
I would like to nominate Ashley Judd’s character Libby Parsons from Double Jeopardy. She was a force to be reckoned with, even if she didn’t have to kick ass too often, she was prepared to and more than capable of it. She wasn’t exactly a wimp in Kiss the Girls, either. And how about the trio from Charlie’s Angels? . . . Sure, they lack the fearsome demeanor of the previous nominees, but that part at the end when Drew tells those guys how she’s going to wipe the walls with them, then proceeds to do it . . . that was pretty fun to watch.
I probably would have enjoyed Point of No Return more if I had not seen La Femme Nikita first. And wasn’t it nice to see that tough as nails little girl from The Professional grow up to become Luke Skywalker’s mom?
The Fifth Element! How could I have forgotten it. I still walk around calling my MetroCard a multipass. Mul-ti Pass
Slightly hijacking my own thread.
The french actor who was in The Professional and La Femme Nikita. Something Russo, I believe. Does he not play emotionless killers with really deep emotions very well?
It’s also ripped off, beat for beat, from True Lies.
Jean Reno. That guy lives at the pinnacle of coolness. He was the only good thing in Godzilla, for example. He’s gonna be in the Rollerball remake, too.
Hey, back to the OP: What about Mystique in X-Men? A mutant non-human villain, so I’m not sure if it counts, and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos ain’t much of an actor, but… the role was pretty cool.
Notes to self:
Rent The Replacement Killers.
Jean Reno, remember the name.
A few people have mentioned that they found** Le Femme Nikita** to be superior to The Point of No Return. So do I. Just as I think Gena Rowland’s Gloria is superior to Sharon Stone’s. My husband says I only like those better because I saw them first. Especially in the case of Point of No Return since, in his opinion, it was a cut and paste job from french to english.
Is there a concrete reason to like one heroine over the other besides the fact that they were the first ones I saw? Did anyone have the opposite experience?
Biggirl: My take on the Nikita vs. No Return dichotomy is that the preference comes down to subtleties of tone. The French original, being French, didn’t feel the need to make the heroine particularly likeable, or simplistically “good.” (Note that the TV series version of Nikita is “wrongly convicted” of killing the cop. More sanitization.) IMHO, the French version is cooler because she isn’t so, I don’t know, namby-pamby; she kicks ass over the American version because you don’t get the feeling she’s trying so hard to make the audience like her. Also note, in the American version, the “cleaner” who shows up (played by Harvey Keitel) is far freakier and nastier, which is a further attempt to force the audience to have sympathy for her.
Of course, the American studio did this for a reason, figuring (probably correctly) that mainstream American viewers, i.e. Joe and Jane Sixpack who choose movies by the art on the video box, would be more amenable to that sort of American-style no-ambiguity heroine, as opposed to a filthy-mouthed harpy. (Not my opinion. Just a bit of projection.)
Make sense?