• David O. Russell’s “The Fighter” unspooled at the AFI Fest. Kris was impressed and later reported from a Q&A with the film’s stars.
• This week’s Off the Carpet column pondered the presence of money-spinners in this year’s Best Picture race.
• The Long Shot, meanwhile, wondered if that very race is currently looking a little flimsy.
• News of Hugh Jackman turning down the gig prompted the annual speculation over who should host the Oscar ceremony.
It’s odd to think that younger readers may principally recognize Jill Clayburgh, the New York City-born actress who passed away yesterday after a long battle with leukemia, from her Emmy-nominated role in TV’s “Nip/Tuck” — where she played Bobbi Broderick, a vengeful victim of unsuccessful liposuction, done in the hope of securing a job ahead of younger, thinner rivals.
It was a sharp, upsetting performance, all the more haunting because it was easy to imagine Bobbi as the soured middle-aged self of Erica Benton, the unaffected, sexually liberated divorcée she played, to career-making effect, in Paul Mazursky’s 1978 romantic dramedy “An Unmarried Woman.”
The film is rarely spoken of today, but Clayburgh’s immense performance, balancing sweetly goofy comedy with stabs of untempered pain and anger, was something of a feminist touchstone for the depiction of “real” women in American cinema — she won Best Actress at Cannes for her efforts, and was nominated for an Oscar that unwisely went to Jane Fonda instead.
This is the first of a two-part study of legendary screen actresses through the years. Stay tuned tomorrow for part two.
We often hear about the great actors in movie history: Brando, Nicholson, Duvall, Hoffman, Hackman, Washington, Freeman and DeNiro, men who advanced the craft into an art of the highest order.
But what of the women? They have never really been taken seriously in Hollywood as trend-setters. Historians have even documented the genuine shock by studio heads when they realized that a woman, Vivien Leigh, had carried “Gone with the Wind” for its more than three-hour running time.
Leigh, Bette Davis and Katherine Hepburn were the greatest of classic Hollywood, and certainly Elizabeth Taylor’s astonishing performance as Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” broke ground for women in terms of what they could portray on screen and get away with. A genuine movie star, Taylor gained a great deal of weight for the film and was willing to play down her stunning good looks in the name of her art.
Brash and loud, vulgar and sexual, Martha was the greatest challenge of Taylor’s career, to which she responded with one of the cinema’s great performances. This was years before Robert De Niro in “Raging Bull,” which received substantially more attention. But all of the aforementioned actresses in one way or another broke ground for the fairer sex.