Part 4: From Page to Screen

This grouping of performers comes from plays, adaptations of novels, or even screenplays created by some of the greatest authors or playwrights of their times. They are intrinsically tied to the page in a special way, whether because they are anti-heroines from enduring works of classic literature or they are simply as well-written as a novelistic character sprung to life thanks to a striking, contemporary author.

Carroll Baker

Baby Doll

(Elia Kazan, 1956)

Playing a child-like, hyper-sexual nymphet in a Tennessee Williams adaptation might not have been a sure-fire way to launch a respectable career in the 1950s. But for Actor’s Studio alum Baker (who was Williams’ second choice behind Marilyn Monroe), it did just that -– she became a genuine cultural phenomenon. She would go on to enjoy virtually overnight success in the late 50s that would translate into steady work onstage and in film through the 1970s (including a leading lady turn in Andy Warhol’s Bad. The combination of sex-bomb and brainy actress was never an easy fit, and she would not play a substantial part like Baby Doll again in her acting career, but the image of her as a dim-witted, man-trap ingénue, draped over the railings of a child’s crib, sucking her thumb, in a lacy negligee, would become her signature. The film was so controversial, in fact, that the Catholic Legion of Decency organized a boycott of the racy melodrama that helped cancel showings in 77% of theaters. Baker’s sly, sumptuous performance must have been doing something right to provoke a national outcry that saw Time magazine deem the film “the dirtiest American-made motion picture that had ever been legally exhibited.” MM

Kathy Bates

Dolores Claiborne

(Taylor Hackford, 1995)

Bates plays two women in Dolores Claiborne: the middle-aged haus Frau Dolores and the weathered old woman she becomes after her husband dies under mysterious circumstances. Told in a style that resembles mirrored glass shattering and reflecting old, bad memories, Bates is not only able to virtually glow when playing her character as a naïve, younger abused housewife, but she is also somehow able to pull off a startling transformation into the bitter crone that was born as the result of unspeakable family tragedy –- it is not often performers have the dexterity to span the ages like Bates does as Dolores. It’s hard to play aging onscreen, but the transitions are seamless, thanks to Bates. Opposite a nervy Jennifer Jason Leigh as her troubled daughter, the actresses’ salt-of-the-earth charisma has never been more seductive and she has not given a stronger performance in a career of strong performances; not even for her other Stephen King leading lady turn in Misery, which won her an Oscar. It’s a damn shame that she is lately relegated to the purgatory of sassy supporting ladies when she is so strong in her infrequent leading roles. MM

Anita Bjork

Miss Julie

(Alf Sjoberg, 1951)

Bjork has a face that can one second can rendered into a mask that makes Miss Julie out to be as timid as a mouse, while the next second, the same face is perfectly capable of painting the actress to be the most cross dominatrix her foot man has ever encountered (literally – the scene where she “trains” her fiancée after brutally whipping her dog is akin to literary-pedigreed sadomasochistic soft core porn). It is this delicate duality embedded into her features that marks the performance of Bjork as being thoroughly ahead of it’s time, much like the subversive words of August Strindberg as he dissects class and gender long before they were studied terms. Unafraid of exploring sensuality in the wake of bacchanalian lust, and the inevitable fallout that comes from following the choices made by the titular character, Bjork hovers like a ghostly presence over the entire film. Miss Julie is a character who is so unnerved by her upbringing that she feels the need to act out sexually, a concept that she cannot grasp, and one that repulses her and will be a major factor in her undoing. Watching Bjork, a titan of Swedish acting, going on a journey of sexual self-discovery while immersed in Miss Julie’s tortured, bruised psyche is harrowing, especially as she so expertly hits every ugly note of her downward spiral in the wake of a drunken one night stand with a servant. MM

Joan Crawford

Humoresque

(Jean Negulesco, 1946)

Clifford Odets’ forays into Hollywood screenwriting afforded him the chance to fund his far more subversive theater work, but also gave him the chance to work closely with a much bigger, interesting pool of talent. In many ways, these scripts enabled him to be able to bite the hand that fed him by writing scathing entertainment industry-set morality plays. He was one of the first writers who really got the concept of deconstructing the concept of a star — whether the actual actor or the character. Most times, both. Sometimes they didn’t really work (Grace Kelly’s performance in The Country Girl is much-scrutinized today), others, like Crawford’s reflective best, managed to change perceptions of the performer and properly showcase their range in new ways. While still ensconced in her trademark melodrama, Odets writes a literate, cultured lady for Crawford to play the year after winning her Oscar for her working class mother in Mildred Pierce. Helen Wright is a powerful grand society dame, but the interesting thing that Crawford does is play her insularly, coolly and fiercely intelligently. Her reactions are key in this film, her aloofness and detachment hinting at a deeply depressed woman. With all of the legend and mystique surrounding Crawford’s real life, it could be best surmised that this was a dark period in her life that she was able to achingly convey into this characterization. Crawford “the actress”, in general, is often overshadowed by Crawford’s legend. MM

Dorothy Dandridge

Carmen Jones

(Otto Preminger, 1954)

In a just world Dandridge would have been the first African American woman to take home the Oscar gold for her portrayal of the title character in director Preminger’s film of Oscar Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones -– an all-black cast adaptation of George Bizet’s opera, itself an adaptation of an 1846 novella by Prosper Merimee. But it was 1954, and she was up against Hollywood royalty (winner Grace Kelly and Judy Garland), so Dandridge’s clever, ahead-of-it’s time take on the archetypal Femme Fatale was likely left in the dust in favor of these (white) institutions. Looking back, Dandridge’s stylish Carmen was probably much too sexually dangerous for voters of the time to even consider — she is an opportunist, a survivor, a seductress. Not exactly a nice girl. But that was the beauty of her as a character -– and it was the chance for an actress of color, for perhaps the first real time in the history of Hollywood, to play such a dramatically significant role in an important film. She has rough edges, red lips, and a reckless physicality and abandon rarely seen in female performances of that time, let alone in the performances of women of color. Dandridge plays this classic heroine as a working, class thrill-seeking romantic and the resulting powerful performance that is (yes!) operatic in its delivery. Carmen Jones retains a sharp, real edge and a shocking, electric undercurrent that remains just as memorable, fresh and shocking as it must have been when it debuted. It borders on criminal that the Academy waited until 2003 to finally give its top female acting honor to an African American woman, and when Halle Berry took the stage to accept her award for Monster’s Ball, she thanked Dandridge for her true pioneering achievements that made it possible, some 50 years later, for a woman of color to finally get the prize. MM

Bette Davis and more

Danielle Darrieux

The Earrings of Madame de…

(Max Ophuls, 1953)

Sprung from the pages of Louise De Vilmorin’s novella, and much like the narrative that she’s enacting, Darrieux’s enchanting work as Madame de…’s eponymous heroine is full of contradictions. She’s precise yet natural; restrained yet impulsive; lugubrious yet frivolous. The Frenchwoman celebrates these inconsistencies whilst reconciling them beneath her sophisti-coquette’s dynamic façade. What subsequently emerges is one of the most intelligent characterizations in screen history: a multifaceted portrait of fractured desire, effortlessly born from an incandescent heart. The actress responds to director Max Ophuls’s elaborate artifice with a minimalist intuitiveness that articulates her tragic Comtesse’s fateful transition from carefree belle to world-weary femme. It is this delicately nuanced approach that breathes life into the archetype of the socially-incarcerated trophy wife, imbuing it with compassion and depth that eventually proves devastating. To watch Madame de… is to experience cinema’s most brilliant love story — and its romanticism lives and dies with this most immortal of performances. SB

Bette Davis

The Little Foxes

(William Wyler, 1941)

The indomitable Davis might well have been the finest actress in the world during the late 1930s and early 1940s — and Lillian Hellman’s discreetly tyrannical über-bitch from The Little Foxes would afford her the best opportunity to flaunt those credentials. Regina Giddens represents the pinnacle of Davis’s prowess as a physical and intellectual screen force. Her intrinsic volatility has never been more formidable, a result of both the composed restraint that barely conceals its existence and the casual precision with which she verbally executes her victims. Davis reportedly battled with director Wyler over the characterization (she strived for ice queen from Hell, he wanted more warmth). She won out, and her victory is our gain. The Little Foxes is more notable for its deep-focus photography than the close-ups associated with traditional star vehicles — and there’s a reason for that: it’s to prevent the merciless venom in Davis’s eyes from searing right through the screen. SB

Whoopi Goldberg

The Color Purple

(Steven Speilberg, 1985)

Perhaps the most talented, underappreciated actresses of her generation, and maybe also one of the most hard-to-cast, Goldberg’s film debut (!) for Steven Speilberg remains her superlative dramatic achievement in a career full of comedy. What casting agents just don’t seem to get about Goldberg is her commanding knowledge of cinema history and pop culture, and her ability to relate it to whatever role she happens to be tackling — her abilities as an intuitive, instinctive actor are unique and sorely missed. Celie, as written by Alice Walker, is not an easy part to play and one that requires the actor playing her to age more than 50 years, and become several different women in that time span, going from beaten-down to radiant. Goldberg is able to conquer all of the challenges the role demands of her in a naturalistic, empathic way and Celie becomes as much Goldberg’s creation as Walker’s or Speilberg’s. If you aren’t bawling during the last ten minutes of this, you must have a heart of stone. This should have been the first Oscar for Whoopi, rather than the one she received a few years later in 1991 for her ace comedic role in Ghost, in the supporting category. It is her depth and her gravitas in Purple that will ensure her place in film history, though. Unless, of course, some brilliant scribe out there provides her with a properly-written new dramatic part. One can dream… MM

Katharine Hepburn

Long Day’s Journey into Night

(Sidney Lumet, 1962)

How did a rebelliously eccentric tomboy with an insufferable voice become enshrined as Hollywood’s greatest actress? Hepburn’s career trajectory deserves an essay in its own right, but if ever one sought justification for her gargantuan stature then look no further than Lumet’s adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s classic American tragedy Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Hepburn pours heart and soul into the morphine-addicted matriarch of the troubled Tyrone clan, reveling in her mercurial exploration of the character’s pathetically frayed edges. But she doesn’t simply stop there: the film is as much about her presence as her performance. Thus, Mary Tyrone becomes a riveting synthesis of the actress’s distinguished past, with the hallmarks of her youth (independence, authority, intelligence) often coruscating across her still-radiant but now weather-beaten face. Hepburn courageously throws her own legend into her work, and in doing so amplifies the tragedy of her familial abnegation to cataclysmic proportions. Many of her contemporaries faded with the onset of age, but Hepburn? She delivered her magnum opus. SB

Wendy Hiller

Pygmalion

(Anthony Asquith, 1938)

In a story that has been made and remade ad nauseum, Hiller stakes such supreme claim to the iconic character of Eliza Doolittle that film critic Frank S. Nugent, in a New York Times review said “Miss Hiller is a Discovery. (She deserves the capital.)”. Rooted in Greek mythology, the story of Pygmalion is the ultimate female rags to riches story, about a wealthy, cultured genteel-man who makes a bet that he can turn a guttersnipe flower monger from her vulgar origins and turn her into a passable society lady. She complies and then falls for him. Misogyny aside, Hiller’s performance is robust and daffy as the slang-slinging street waif of Henry Higgins’ dreams (Hiller earned the distinction of being the first woman to say “bloody” in a feature!). Personally cast by Socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw in the stage shows of Pygmalion, Major Barbara and Saint Joan, it was only through the great author’s insistence that she was able to act in the film version. Shaw, who is the only person other than Al Gore to have won both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar, saw in Hiller a versatility and ability, that, despite its significance, was largely under-utilized in film. Hiller, who was vocal about her lack of concern with celebrity, preferred to remain primarily on the stage during her 60-plus-year career, which would include an eventual Oscar win for Separate Tables in 1958. MM

Glenda Jackson and more

Glenda Jackson

Elizabeth R

(Roderick Graham, 1971)

After viewing her Emmy-winning stint as England’s most famous monarch, it’s difficult not to be blown away by Jackson’s ability to command such a hefty production with such expert precision this early in her career. Elizabeth R covers just about the entire span of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign in six episodes. For any actress, this is a huge order because it requires the character to age and grow through several condensed decades. When you’re playing one of history’s most famous figures there’s the additional requirement of filling such an endeavor with legitimacy and believability. Jackson never gets bogged down by the girlish naiveté of the earlier sequences of Cate Blanchett in Shekar Kapur’s Elizabeth, nor is she especially prone to the maddening hysterics of Helen Mirren’s severely fractured monarch. She certainly doesn’t come off as comically bored as Dame Judi Dench’s Shakespeare in Love scene-stealer. She broaches some of the more vulnerable terrain, but never leaves her eye off her stature. She knows her abilities and position from the very beginning, even being so bold as to demand that the Tower guards be given leave due to the weather when she’s first imprisoned. This assertiveness and self-recognition is carried throughout the production through her near-death experience with small pox, to her bloody feud with Mary Queen of Scots, to her war with Spain, and to her final moments of what seems to be deep introspection. PY

Jennifer Jones

Duel in the Sun

(King Vidor, 1946)

Jones began her career with an Oscar win (for playing a saint The Song of Bernadette), and in subsequent roles spread her creative wings in directions that indicated she was one of Hollywood’s first real chameleonic actresses — from playing an Asian doctor in Love is a Many-Splendorded Thing to tackling Gustav Flaubert’s seminal Madame Bovary. But no role ever quite captured her audacious side quite as nicely as the wild “half-breed” Pearl Chavez in Vidor’s surreal Western epic, based on Niven Busch’s lurid melodramatic novel. Leading with a robust, dangerous physicality that was all but missing from films of the time, Jones fully separated her generous off-screen persona from the tawdry character, and never once shied away from the sex or the violence that informed Pearl, which stops her from descending into parody despite a loopy accent and brown-face make-up job. When the dust settles after the final gun shots, or when you expect rotten sentimentality, her Pearl goes crassly in the opposite direction of where one might expect. Jones’ instinctive, intuitive take on the brazen, almost feral hussy is ahead of it’s time, and not, as Pearl says in the film, “trash, trash, trash, trash, trash…” MM

Vivien Leigh

Gone with the Wind

(Victor Fleming, 1939)

There are so many legendary components to this film, this book, and definitely this performance that it would be impossible to list them all. The search for the perfect female actor to play Scarlett O’Hara, Margaret Mitchell’s epic Southern Belle turned up the very British Leigh, who in turn, truly set the standard for playing strong-willed, spoiled, beautiful pistols from the South. It is a dynamic scope that Leigh must play, and she must essentially carry the entire film on her shoulders with her performance. Known for playing Shakespeare’s greatest women (Cleopatra, Lady MacBeth, and Juliet were amongst her roles), Leigh’s turn as Scarlett would not only become her signature, but arguably the most well-known female character in film history, winning her the Best Actress Oscar. Off-screen, Leigh battled chronic tuberculosis and bipolar disorder, which led to a reputation of being difficult to work with, though her co-star, Olivia DeHavilland, has recently written that she was the picture of professionalism throughout the shoot. She clashed, reputedly, with director Fleming on a daily basis over how to play the character. It is also rumored that playing the highly strung Scarlett stressed her out so much that she smoked four packs of cigarettes a day during the entirety of filming. That is over 10,000 cigarettes over 125 days. Who knows how many thousands more she smoked during the press tour, or when she went on to play another similarly iconic lady from the South: Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. The real-life neurotic never showed through once in her immersion into this fallen Georgian pseudo-aristocrat who has everything taken away from her, has her entire world turned upside down, and yet still manages to find the inner strength to make it through a Civil War intact. In fact, she makes it through the war with a steely, romantic optimism despite the horrors she has seen. It is an archetypal performance that every ingénue with a twang has since emulated. Knowingly or not. Scarlett is so engrained into film history that she remains an influence on women to this day, and that is largely because of Leigh’s skill in playing her. MM

Kristin Scott Thomas

I’ve Loved You So Long

(Philippe Claudel, 2008)

I have never done such a complete 180 on a performer in my life, until I saw this film. Afterwards, I went back and re-watched every single Scott Thomas performance of note to see what was wrong with me. Shame on me, but thanks to a single performance, I have re-discovered an immensely engaging talent. In this most striking, original and intelligent movie about women to come along in some time, director-novelist Claudel was able to conceive of one of the most powerful female film characters put to film in recent memory. In concert with Claudel, star Scott Thomas channeled a level of emotional intimacy and sheer mysteriousness that hasn’t been seen since the women of Ingmar Bergman’s troupe (Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Thulin, Harriet Andersson, etc.) were in their minimalist prime. This is a superb instance of the character, as written, being able to survive the transition from the page to its filmic form perfectly, without losing any of the intensity, only to be even more greatly enhanced by the person giving the character physical life. It is a perfect marriage of character and performer, or as Claudel put it: “strange alchemy”. MM

Maggie Smith

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

(Ronald Neame, 1969)

Rarely does Oscar get it right with regards to actresses, but Maggie Smith’s powerhouse performance as Jean Brodie marks one of those exceptions. The British Dame has never looked more ravishing nor been more charismatic than as the fascist-sympathizing schoolteacher of Muriel Spark’s novella. And yet the character is effectively a monster – as much a cause of destruction as she is a recipient of adulation. Smith’s perceptive work digs deeper however, and softens her fervent ardor to the point where she successfully humanizes the beast. Brodie may be a modern-day Boudica, but Smith (a brilliant comic actress) plays up her eccentricities and underscores the performance with a sensitivity that demands our compassion. Because of her, Miss Jean Brodie maintains a domineering and discriminatory personality, but never is she repugnant so much as she is endlessly fascinating. SB

Sissy Spacek and more

Sissy Spacek

Crimes of the Heart

(Bruce Beresford, 1986)

Spacek’s character Babe, in this film, is an even more peculiar ornament on an already out-of-control tree of strangeness. It’s one of her most unique performances as an actress — channeling an aloofness that she hadn’t really brought to a character before. Watch as she casually reminisces with her sisters, explaining her mental whereabouts on a day that tragedy struck… blowing a bubble the size of her face and fiddling with her lace gloves. In the next breath she talks about shooting her husband because she didn’t like his looks. Something’s just not right about this woman and we can’t stop watching because of Spacek’s devotion to playing it so calmly deliberate in its unpredictability. There’s also a great sadness to it that she allows us to become aware of (but not wholly) little by little, frame after frame, yet she never lets the comedy of the situation out of our sight, even as she repeatedly attempts suicide. This makes us more comfortable watching and it’s a seduction between performer and page that only the greats can accomplish. And there’s enough mystery she brings to her to make it last long after it’s over. The goal of this character is to stick out amidst the eccentric backdrop as the most (!) eccentric and Spacek succeeds in spades by making this all seem totally natural. The more real she is — the crazier she seems. These are all signs of a virtuosic artist, and one would expect no less from Spacek at this point, but she elevated a rather conventional character from Beth Henley’s play into a daffy Southern Gothic goddess. TD

Emma Thompson

Wit

(Mike Nichols, 2002)

I believe there is a terrible misconception about television film performances. In this decade, HBO, in particular, has been home to some of the most exciting performances of the world’s finest actresses over 40, with their beautifully-realized theatrical adaptations like Nichols’ Wit. Thompson is Professor Vivian Bering, a woman who has forsaken a family and life for a career in academia, specifically metaphysical poetry. Fulfilled by her choice up until the moment she (and the audience) find out she has cancer, the film cautiously, fearlessly explores the experience of a woman’s worst medical nightmare (stage VI ovarian cancer, followed by an onslaught of intense chemotherapy), nuance by painstaking nuance. Essentially a one-woman show (written originally by Margaret Edson), Wit is heavy on the close-ups and monologues, and the entire play hinges on the casting of Dr. Bering. Thompson enjoys one of her most adventurous acting offerings to date. She has to play the acerbic, Ivy League lady who retains her composure through the loneliness and impersonality of a cold medical care system that is more interested in exploring her body after she dies. Dr. Bering must come to terms with her regrets and her past, and face the inevitable death from cancer, despite making a couple of friends along the way, completely alone. Thompson in Wit is a study in strength and the resilience of women in critical circumstances — she is heartbreaking one minute, the next waxing poetic, seeing ghosts or cracking wise. There is a wildness and unpredictability to Thompson’s work in Edson’s play, which she adapted alongside Nichols. It is superior to most film performances that actually make it into the theater. MM

Cicely Tyson

Sounder

(Martin Ritt, 1972)

Rarely are our great African American actresses given roles like Rebecca in this Disney film. Even rarer still are they actually rewarded with Oscar nominations. Tyson’s take on a stoic (though never sappy) 1930s sharecropping matriarch, who desperately tries to encourage her children to succeed in a climate short on hope, brought her into serious contention for the award in the only year where two African American women were nominated for the big award (Tyson was nominated alongside Diana Ross for Lady Sings the Blues, and the Oscar would eventually go to Liza Minnelli for Cabaret). Instilling a sense of pride and decency into her children in a situation verging on absolute poverty is hard enough for Rebecca, but when her husband is carted off to jail for stealing food, she must do it all on her own. She tends to the fields, plays mother and father to the kids, and even finds time to challenge the racially-biased by-laws of her county which dictate that she, as a black woman, is not allowed to see or talk with her incarcerated husband. A woman of considerable talents, Tyson used the part of Rebecca to land other iconic African American female leading lady roles such as Harriet Tubman (in A Woman Named Moses), and the title character in the landmark television film The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Today Tyson is still appearing in film, at age 75, working with such successful, contemporary collaborators as Tyler Perry (on two films), and OutKast (on Idlewild), but it is her unforgettably good-natured, elegant turn in Sounder that is her most inspired work. MM

Debra Winger

Terms of Endearment

(James L. Brooks, 1983)

Co-star Shirley MacLaine might have been the one to take home the Best Actress Oscar for her work in Larry McMurtry’s serio-comic novel about the lives of a Texas mother-daughter that Brooks reinterpreted as a mini-epic, but it was the preternaturally talented Winger who benefited most by playing the part of Aurora Greenway’s only child Emma Horton. Emma, as written, offers the performer a steady challenge as she is not as detailed or rigidly-constructed as Aurora, who is full of quirks and ticks. Emma is a natural, nurturing presence in the film who must alternately be sympathetic, acidly funny, and heartbreaking. Winger, on a very hot streak in the 1980s, defined a new type of motherhood: unsentimental, at-the-end-of-one’s-rope, and independent. Saddled with a philandering husband, a needy mother, and three kids, Emma’s biggest challenge comes in the final act of Terms, where she also has to fight cancer. Combining melodrama with a modern sensibility, Winger’s deathbed goodbyes to her children ensure that her scrappy performance will be the thing viewers remember most about the sometimes maudlin film, even more so than MacLaine’s histrionic hysterics. Winger’s coolness and bravery in the face of death, combined with her character’s search for an identity apart from her mother and family, make Emma one of the most intriguing female characters of the decade. MM

Teresa Wright

Shadow of a Doubt

(Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)

Thornton Wilder, author of the austere, homespun staple Our Town, was a playwright who dared to look deep in the crevasses of the most ordinary places. He thought evil was lurking in suburbia, in the towns we live in, even, as in Wright’s character Charlie’s case, in her own family. Named after her dangerous, charming uncle, Charlie shares a somewhat incestuous bond with this man who she really knows nothing about. She sees the good side of him but never any more. He might be family, but he is hiding a gruesome secret that his niece is about to be accidentally exposed to. As she finds more and more out about her uncle, the young woman’s life is put at risk and Thornton’s script cranks out the suspense. It seems Uncle Charlie can’t have a clever little niece running around talking about his crimes for fear of being put away forever and he is willing to go so far as to rub her out. The interesting thing about Wright’s performance is her anachronistic strength — her character is scrappy, bright and inquisitive without being obnoxious. More than a match for a petty murderer, a quick-witted young woman with a sense of decency, honor and justice like Charlie was Uncle Charlie’s worst nightmare. Thornton crafted a twisty, ambiguous morality play where a curious, smart young lady could literally fight the monster. A fresh conceit in 43. MM