From Page to Screen

Glenda Jackson

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

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

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 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

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