#character actress
The great Judy Davis in her first Oscar-nominated performance as E.M. Forster’s troubled heroine Adela Quested, a repressed English tourist on a transformative journey, in the lush screen adaptation A Passage to India (1984, David Lean)
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In small-town Ontario during World War II, naive teenager Jeannie Dougall (Carol Kane) gets pregnant by rape and beleaguered by her family in the harrowing sociological drama Wedding in White (1972, William Fruet).
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One of our finest actresses, Miranda Richardson, in a dazzling triple role in the disquieting psychological character study Spider (2002, David Cronenberg; pictured with Gabriel Byrne and Bradley Hall). Some critical context:
“A triumph of both quality and quantity, Richardson gives a nightmarish triptych of performances as, alternately, the mother of Ralph Fiennes’s mentally hollowed protagonist, his father’s mistress and his present-day landlady, vividly embodying an entire, terrorising wall of femininity in his psyche. Favored for the Best Actress award at Cannes, she emerged from the festival with no prize, but a cloud of Oscar buzz that vanished into thin air. A shame; it’s her best screen work.” — Guy Lodge, Hitfix(August 2012)
“This slow but brilliantly sustained journey into madness is fronted by a remarkable performance from Ralph Fiennes and superb backup from Miranda Richardson in a triple role… Richardson shows her range, depicting Mrs. Cleg as a woman sadly hanging onto hope, still trying to pretend she has some kind of satisfying family life despite her errant husband’s surliness; her Yvonne is trashy, vulgar, graceless and totally without morals, in the latter scenes injecting that same brassy sexuality into Mrs. Wilkinson’s cold authoritarian manner.” — David Rooney, Variety (May 2002)
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Toni Collette relives the scariest, most intense moments from Hereditary (Vulture, June 2018); photos by Amanda Demme
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Check out this great essay on Debbi Morgan’s career-best portrayal of frequently widowed 1960s Louisiana psychic Mozelle Batiste Delacroix in the richly evocative Southern Gothic melodrama Eve’s Bayou (1997, Kasi Lemmons; with co-stars Jurnee Smollett, Diahann Carroll and Samuel L. Jackson):
““We’re two of a kind, my brother and I,” Mozelle intones repeatedly, and it takes a formidable talent to play the sister of Samuel L. Jackson (at his most magnetic here, with no 12-letter words in sight). But Morgan actually upstages him. She has a way of gliding into a room as though on a dolly, and her reaction shots are so acute that the film uses them as punctuation. Her unsettlingly wide eyes flicker between emotions outsize and minute, and her sultry, worldly-wise voice sounds just as one imagines Ava Gardner’s did before the studio sanded down the Southern edges. She feels born of the bayous, as endemic to the region as Spanish moss… It’s worth considering Morgan’s turn not only as a great performance but as the kind of supporting work that’s hardly ever recognized—neither ingénue nor overdue, and not, like this year’s front-runners, a masquerading lead. It fuels the eternal hope that admirers of great performances, like Louis in Mozelle’s prophecy, “open their eyes and see that what they’ve been looking for is standing right in front of them.”” — Steven Mears, “On Debbi Morgan in Eve’s Bayou”,Film Comment (February 2016)
And see my previous post on this undervalued classic of black cinema here!
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One of Hollywood’s finest character actresses, Melissa Leo, shot by Gary Friedman for Los Angeles Times (September 2008)
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Holly Hunter at her most eccentric, as androgynous Swiss spiritual guru GJ in the first season of the New Zealand-set murder mystery series Top of the Lake (2013, Jane Campion & Garth Davis)
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Toni Collette in a BAFTA-nominated supporting turn as depressed hippie single mother Fiona Brewer in the British coming-of-age dramedy About a Boy (2002, Chris & Paul Weitz)
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Died on this day 48 years ago: consummate character actress (and scene stealer par excellence) - Agnes Moorehead (6 December 1900 – 30 April 1974)! Moorehead significantly improves every film she appears in simply by virtue of her presence. Off the top of my head, some of my favourite Moorehead performances would include: the 1947 film noir Dark Passage – ostensibly a vehicle for Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, but it’s Moorehead in a secondary role (a vision in leopard print!) who makes the indelible impression; as the compassionate superintendent of a women’s prison in Caged (1950); as Jane Wyman’s bitchy socialite friend and neighbour in Douglas Sirk’s masterpiece All That Heaven Allows (1955); and as the tough-as-nails bleached blonde brothel madam (and Jane Russell’s employer) in The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956). But even in her ignominious final feature film – the low-budget hagsploitation horror flick Dear Dead Delilah (1971) – Moorehead is majestic. And her status as a beloved camp icon is forever assured from her stint as the drag queen-like Endora in the TV series Bewitched!
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