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.
Jeff Wells, high on Anne Hathaway’s work in
I still remember when I was 12 and getting into the Oscars for the first time. My Dad said, “How can you tell if the film has good editing?” To a very large extent, I had to concede his point, as the best editing is often that which we don’t explicitly notice. Rather, it simply “becomes” the film as we become immersed in what is on the screen, not remembering that everything was staged from different angles on different days.