Category: Best Actress

1941 – Olivia deHavilland

Hold Back the Dawn

Maybe I’m looking at this movie, this character, and by extension, this actress with too cynical a modern eye.  Did deHavilland play the part as it was written?  Yes, she did.  Was is a pretty dumb premise?  Yes, it was.  Did I enjoy watching the movie?  Only a little.  If an acting nomination needs to be a combination of script and actor, then here, the script let the actor down, but only by modern standards.  I’m sure it was seen quite differently in 1941.

Olivia played the role of Emmy Brown, a sheltered, lonely school teacher who meets the film’s con-man protagonist, played by Charles Boyer.  After being wooed by him for a few hours, she marries him and falls hopelessly in love.  And if you can get past that bit of idiocy, then you can enjoy the romance of the film.  The character of Emmy required a ridiculously gullible nature, a willful blindness to good sense, and a delusional desire for an idealized marriage.  That is… until the end of the film where the con-man’s dishonesty is revealed.

Finally, deHavilland got to use a bit of her acting chops and allow her to give Emmy some realism and dimension.  When Boyer’s true intentions are revealed, she has enough true love in her heart for him that she lies to a government official in order to save her lying husband from prosecution.  Unfortunately, as she is driving back home in tears, she is foiled by an open car window and an attacking shawl.  Once the garment is blown over her head, she runs her car off the road and nearly dies. 

After that, we only see her two more times.  Once as she is unconscious and near death in a hospital bed, and again as she returns to Mexico to fetch her husband, who, she discovers, really does love her because he’d come to her bedside in the hospital.  She meets him at the US border and they kiss.  The end.

I don’t know.  I found her character to be a little one-dimensional.  She was a little too sweet for reality, but I don’t think it was entirely her fault.  It was just the way the character was written, and she did just fine with what she was given.  But I don’t know if it was worth a Best Actress nomination.

1941 – Greer Garson

Blossoms in the Dust

I liked Greer Garson in this movie, but I didn’t love her.  She was good but not great.  Yes, some of it had to do with the way the character of Edna Kahly Gladney was written, but at the same time, some of it was the way Garson played her.  She was very unrealistic.  She was so saintly and good that she almost felt fake.  Nobody is that sweet, loving, and unfalteringly perfect.  Throughout the film, she displayed near-god-like powers of wholesomeness and sweetness.  But darn it if she wasn’t a pleasure to watch. 

The character of Edna was based on a real woman who not only cared for orphaned infants and children, but she fought to have the stigma of their illegitimacies be removed from their birth records so they could live their lives without the shadow of shame turning them into social pariahs.  Yes, the woman did wonderful things, but even real saints were human and had flaws.  But not Garson.  She was sheer perfection, and she looked gorgeous doing it.

Garson had an aristocratic air about her.  She had poise, and grace, and beauty.  She had style and personality.  She looked flawless whether she was in love, or had just given birth, whether she was pleading a passionate case in court, or was weeping over her dying husband.  But I think her performance, though good and sweet, could have been taken to another level if she had shown us a deeper, care-worn countenance, a sense of exhaustion or worry, or maybe even eyes that were haunted by the death of her only son.

But I don’t want it to sound like I didn’t enjoy watching Garson.  I did.  But could you imagine how much more impactful Edna’s story could have been if she’d ever shown a moment of deep weakness, or maybe even a short temper.  True, there was that one scene when her husband brings home an orphan to replace her son.  She shows a little bit of anger and grief, which is undercut in the very next scene, when she accepts the child into her heart.  I guess my real problem with her performance was that she played a caricature, not a character.  She was an idealized saint, not a real woman.  But I enjoyed watching her anyway.

1941 – Bette Davis

The Little Foxes

Bette Davis, number six.  This was her sixth nomination for Best Actress.  She was clearly good at doing the deep drama, and she seemed to have a natural knack for playing a viperous villainess.  In The Little Foxes, she is a greedy and mean woman, willing to screw over her own family in order to become filthy rich, and she does it all without committing any actual crimes, other than blackmail.  She accomplishes her avaricious goals through manipulation and a generally sour disposition.  And while she did not actively murder her husband, she calculatingly watched him die without lifting a finger to save him.  Is that murder?  Maybe it is.

Bette Davis had been around the block a few times by 1941, but she was clearly still the hot ticket.  She was the queen of the silver screen bitches.  Well, maybe that isn’t entirely true.  After all, she played a virtuous and innocent victim in at least two other Oscar nominated films: Dark Victory and All This and Heaven Too, though she wasn’t nominate for her performance in that second one.  But if you look at all her other Best Actress nominations, she played a mean and spiteful woman.  Look at her films like Dangerous, Jezebel, or The Letter.  She seemed to be perfect for those kinds of parts, and both audiences and critics loved her for it.

Here she played Regina Giddons, one of three siblings who are willing to scheme, manipulate, steal, and in her case, even murder, kind-of, to become super wealthy.  She sacrifices the life of her unloved husband and her relationship with her beloved daughter to get what she wants.  In other words, she played a horrible woman.  The scene where she watcher her husband have his heart-attack was particularly good.  The look of calculated inactivity on her face, the frozen, manic anticipation in her eyes was perfectly done.

I might sound critical of her performance, but I actually really liked Davis in this movie.  She seemed to be perfectly cast, and I bet it was a difficult decision to award the Oscar to Joan Fontaine in Suspicion.  I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if she had won.  Sure, she was being typecast in the bad-girl roles, but darn if she wasn’t so good at it.

1941 – Barbara Stanwyck

Ball of Fire

Ok, I’m going to say it.  This little more than a mildly amusing movie.  The plot was silly and frivolous.  They had a few big names like Gary Cooper, who played himself… again, and Barbara Stanwyck, who was, granted, probably the most interesting character in the film, though the roll itself was not terribly dynamic or dramatic.  Now, I understand that the movie wasn’t trying to be a heavy drama or a deep romance.  It was a light romantic comedy.  But did that make Stanwyck’s performance worthy of an Oscar consideration?  I’m not convinced.

She played Katherine “Sugarpuss” O’Shea, a nightclub dancer and singer who is mixed up with a mob boss.  When the police come looking for her to interrogate her about her boyfriend, she hides out in the house of eight professors who are working on writing an encyclopedia.  Her fast-talking charm and sexy legs bring light and passion into their dreary den of scholarly endeavors.  This is what Stanwyck had to bring to the table.  Well, there is no doubt, she had the legs!

But the interest in her character, and the way she played it, was in her duplicity.  In order to convince the professors to let her stay, she had to make them all fall in love with her, especially Gary Cooper.  But she was lying to them all, and planned to leave him flat when he got her safely to her mob boss boyfriend, played by Dana Andrews.  The internal conflict the actress had to portray was certainly there most of the time, and the slow transfer of her affections from the mobster to the scholar was gradual enough to be believable. 

So I supposed I have to check myself.  Sure, the role itself lacked intensity, but that doesn’t make it a bad performance.  The plot point of the professor needing to research modern slang, and her proficient and easy use of it, gave her some dialogue that sounded tricky, at least to my modern ears, though there were a few times it sounded a little forced.  Stanwyck was good, and she performed the role as it was written, exactly as it was intended.  But did it challenge the actress?  Did it challenge the audience?  Did it stand out as an outstanding performance?  Maybe.  Why not?  So I guess I don’t mind the nomination.  But I am glad she didn’t win.

1941 – Joan Fontaine

Suspicion

Clearly, Alfred Hitchcock had his favorites, and when it came to Joan Fontaine, the reason why was obvious.  Not only was she absolutely gorgeous, but she knew how to act, as well.  She was first nominated for an Academy Award in 1940 for Rebecca.  I liked her performance there, but I liked her even more here.  The character she played seemed to be more realistic, more relatable.  In Rebecca, the second Mrs. DeWinter was a little one-note in her terminal shyness.

In Suspicion, she played Lina McLaidlaw, a sheltered young woman who was on course to be a spinster, when she meets and falls madly in love with Johnnie Aysgarth.  Very soon after they meet, they are married, and when they arrive home from their honeymoon, she learns that her new husband is a penniless playboy who has never worked a day in his life.  After learning she has been lied to, and that her man has already put them into financial distress, she would naturally begin to doubt all his motives and intentions.  He continues to lie to her as the marriage progresses, mostly about money and gambling. 

This is where Fontaine shined.  Her consistent disappointments, and the ever-present lack of communication that was a staple of 1940s movie romances, all combined to make her doubt his every word.  Fontaine really understood her character, never allowing herself to go over the top with her reactions.  Her facial expressions and her body language was all perfectly timed.  In other words, she sold the character, lending complete credence to the film’s title, even to the point of suspecting Johnnie of murdering his best friend for his money.

Fontaine was wonderful as she drew her audience into her character’s suspicions, making us doubt her husband as much as she did.  That is the mark of both a great script and a great actress.  I mean, Cary Grant played Cary Grant (again), but Fontaine played a nuanced character with a wide range of emotions.  I really loved how she played every moment when she learned of Johnnie’s shortcomings.  She had worry, disappointment, fear, and everything in between, but she clearly never lost her love for her man.  After all, it was still 1941.

1940 – Martha Scott

Our Town

This was a good movie, and Martha Scott’s performance was good.  I don’t know if I’d call it an award-worthy performance, but I think she did the roll justice.  She played the part of Emily Webb, an ordinary girl in an ordinary town, in an ordinary life.  And that was really the point of the entire film, which brought the Pulitzer Prize-winning stage play of the same name to the big screen.  The actress had to play the character at various ages, ranging from childhood to adulthood, and finally to death at a still young age.

But that ordinary quality was really the point of the whole film, and the actors had the task of being as ordinary as possible.  The characters could be anybody and everybody.  The script, penned by Thornton Wilder, had done such an impressive job of capturing that every-man and woman in each character.  The entire cast did a fine job of portraying that, but that’s just the problem.  I’m not seeing how Scott did any better than any of the other big names in the roll call.  Other well-established actors like Thomas Mitchell, Fay Bainter, Guy Kibbee, Beulah Bondi, and William Holden seemed to have just as much screen time, and they all played their parts just as well, the only difference being that Emily was the focus of act two.

Now, I’ll admit, that isn’t the actress’s fault.  But as I often say, an Academy nomination should be a combination of a good script and a good actor.  This script just didn’t seem to lend itself to that kind of recognition.  On rare occasion, an actor can transcend that blanket statement, elevating a mediocre character to a great one with an outstanding performance, but I don’t believe this is represented here.

Did Martha Scott do a bad job?  No, absolutely not.  She did a fine job.  But was her performance better than other women in 1940?  Was she better than her cast-mates?  Did she deserve an Academy Award nomination?  I don’t really think so, since I’m not sure I’d even call her character a lead in this ensemble piece.  Her lead status was barely more than a simple plot device in the third act.  Not only that, but the movie undercut the impact of her character, making the entire death sequence out to be only a dream, not her actual death.  Bad choice, if you ask me.

1940 – Bette Davis

The Letter

Here we are again with Miss Davis.  This is Best Actress Nomination number five, proving that she was still Hollywood’s golden girl.  The audiences and the critics loved her and it was easy to see why.  She looked good, and she could act.  The only problem is that, while she did a good job, I don’t see how her performance here was better than any of her past performances.  In fact, she has a type that she typically plays, and she does it well, but this roll didn’t require to stretch herself as an actor.  And the thing is, I have seen other films in which she has starred where she has shown us she is capable of better.

So as I am thinking through this, my disappointment isn’t that Davis did a poor job, but the role itself just didn’t seem to merit the attention.  She played a woman who murders a man, shooting him to death, and then lying about her motives, making it seem like self-defense.  But as it turns out, it was certainly nothing of the sort.  It was a crime of passion.  She was having an affair with him, and murdered him in a jealous rage.  The plot is about how her story crumbles with the appearance of a letter that disproves all her lies.

For the most part, Davis played the character of Leslie Crosbie as a cold blooded woman, as comfortable with lies as she is with the truth.  It is only when her lies are revealed that she loses her composure and spills her guts.  But her defense lawyer, after learning the truth, buries the evidence and sways the jury to pronounce her innocent.  The only real emotional breakdown she has is when her husband offers to forgive her so they can put her affair behind them and move on with their marriage.  But she can’t do it.  She is still in love with the man she killed.

Her guilt is enough to make her resolutely go to her murdered lover’s widow and allow herself to be stabbed to death in atonement for her crime.  At least that satisfied the Hayes code that required all sinful character in every film to receive proper punishment before the end credits.  But aside from that one breakdown scene, her acting just seemed a little like… business as usual.  I didn’t feel like the role required that much of her.  Let’s just say I’m glad she didn’t win this Oscar.

1940 – Ginger Rogers

Kitty Foyle

So, Ginger Rogers took home the Oscar for Best Actress.  Did she do a good job?  Yes, she really did.  But I have to wonder if the Oscar was awarded to the movie and the role, and the actress was just along for the ride – a little.  In this case, the character may have outshined the actress.  Don’t miss-understand.  I’m not saying the award wasn’t deserved.  I think she did just as well as the other actresses in the category, but Kitty Foyle was a movie and a character that had a great deal of social significance in 1940, and that might have had more to do with her win than her accomplished performance.

It was a daring role.  A strong, independent woman who gets pregnant out of wedlock, and decides to keep the baby and raise it herself, as a single mother.  A real woman in such a situation was considered shameful at best, lacking in morals at worst.  There was a negative stigma attached to un-wed mothers that was often not deserved.  But Rogers played Kitty Foyle as a heroine, a champion of-sorts, for all single mothers.  Never-mind that the baby died during the birth.  The point is, that had the child lived, she was determined to raise it without the help, financial or otherwise, of any man. 

But when I separate the actress from the character, I somehow feel a bit ambiguous.  She did a good enough job, and I don’t begrudge her the Oscar she earned.  But there were a few scenes in which her acting felt a little forced, like she was trying to portray a character that wasn’t completely natural to her.  It was like a girl from New Jersey trying to make people believe she is from New Hampshire.  Most of the time she’s fine, but once in a while, her façade slips a tiny bit, because she seems to be trying too hard to be convincing.

Still, Rogers did a fine job of portraying the wide range of emotions necessary for the part.  She could be love-struck, jaded, aroused, bitter, excited, cautious, or resigned.  Whatever a scene required.  She even had to play a teenager for one scene, and was believable enough.  And she was particularly good in the scene where she learns that her baby has died.  So, sure, give her the Oscar.  Why not?

1940 – Katharine Hepburn

The Philadelphia Story

For me, this is classic Hepburn.  In fact, if I really think about it, I believe this is the first Hepburn film I ever watched, way back when I was a child.  It is a rom-com, and for the most part it has a light-hearted, silly story, but there is a bit of light drama thrown into the mix.  And Hepburn is really the one who shoulders the few serious moments this movie has.  True, the drama never got too intense, but I think she handled it well.

She plays the part of Tracy Lord, a girl from a wealthy family who is spoken of by those around her as a goddess, a queen, and therein lies that bit of drama I mentioned.  She has such a high and haughty nature, that she holds everyone around her, friends, enemies, and her family to a standard of personality so lofty that nobody can live up to her expectations.  And she even holds herself to that standard even more strictly than she does others.  She is supposed to be like a statue: beautiful and perfect, but without emotions like compassion, empathy, or to a certain extent, love.  And eventually those she cares for begin to call her out for her haughty superior attitude.  But not to worry.  It never gets too deep.  Just a few tears that threaten to fall, but never really do.

Hepburn was perfectly cast.  She had that face, that posture, that demeanor that, on the surface, seemed to embody those qualities.  And it makes the inevitable moment when her walls crumble and she comes down from her tower, beautiful.  Her emotions blossom and she gives into love.  One minute she could be cold and aloof, then smiling and warm, and finally, angry and acerbic a moment later.  She was wonderful, bringing out whatever was needed from one minute to the next.  And not only that, she was gorgeous and effusively charming.  She was exactly what was required.  And she had the ability to keep up with the quick and wit and dialogue of the intelligent script.  The wordy banter and fast comebacks rolled off her tongue just as easily as it did for her co-stars, and that’s saying something, as she shared the screen with other powerhouses like James Stewart and Cary Grant.  I can absolutely see why she was nominated for Best Actress for the performance.

1940 – Joan Fontaine

Rebecca

The first time I saw this movie, I didn’t think Joan Fontaine did a very good job.  I thought the aggressively shy personality was too heavy-handed.  But the more times I see the film, the more I realize the exact opposite.  The real clue is in the name of her character, or rather the lack of a name.  She is never actually given one.  She is nobody but the woman who lives in the shadow of the infamous Rebecca.  Even in the credits, she is only referred to as the Second Mrs. de Winter.

She is supposed to be a terminally shy woman who allows herself to be manipulated by nearly every other character in the story.  She has almost no personality of her own, outside of her social ineptness and timidity.  How does someone portray that effectively?  Fontaine had to find that fine line between a woman with severe social anxiety and one with enough confidence to fall in love with and marry the wealthy Maxim, and take on the role of the Lady of Mandalay. 

And the more I think about it, the more I see how incredible a performance Fontaine turned in.  Just look at the difference between the character at the beginning of the movie and the woman she becomes at the end.  The difference is both pronounced and yet subtle at the same time.  It is really remarkable.  The former was perpetually nervous and the latter had a newly budding confidence.  A lesser actress might not have been able to pull that off effectively, but Fontaine did the part justice, and I think her nomination was very much deserved.

Not only that, but this was essentially a psychological thriller.  Her interactions with Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers was a big part of that.  There was one powerful scene that sticks in my memory.  In it, Mrs. Danvers tries to get her to commit suicide by throwing herself from a window.  It is easy to focus on Anderson’s performance in that scene, but Fontaine was really incredible, too.  The look on her face, the tears, her body language, all make the viewer begin to question whether she would actually do it.  There was a moment when you think she might really kill herself.  And the relief on her face when the moment was broken was perfect.  And that was all Fontaine.  She really gave us an amazing performance.