Category: Best Actress

1935 – Bette Davis

Dangerous

Bette Davis’s first Oscar nomination was only a year earlier in 1934.  But here she is again with her first Oscar win for Best Actress.  And here, I think the award was well-deserved.  Not only did I like the movie and her character more, but I think she played it beautifully.  She had just as much skill and conviction as she’d had the previous year, but here, there was the extra added bonus of a character that was almost relatable, almost likable.

There was a fire and a passion that Davis had that she knew how to use.  She had the sweet face of an angel, and those incredibly expressive eyes.  But based on her 1934 role in Of Human Bondage, and this performance, she was getting used to playing a certain type of woman, one that was a femme-fetal. The woman she plays is self-centered and even heartless sometimes, but Davis always plays it so well. 

At least here, her character had some redeeming qualities that made me like her, by the end of the film.  She played the part of talented stage actress Joyce Heath whose star had fallen, turning her into a pitiful drunk, wandering the city streets.  She believes herself to be cursed, only able to connect to men by draining them dry and destroying them.  But her character had a wonderful arc.  There was a moment of epiphany that changed her for the better, and by the end of the movie, she had become a good intentioned and honest woman who could set aside her own selfish desires in order to do the right thing.

And Davis played it all with skill and passion.  It wouldn’t be a Bette Davis film with the obligatory scene in which she yells at someone and tells them off.  It almost seems to be a trend or a signature with her.  But with those intense eyes, she is always able to pull it off.  And something else she had here was a little bit of sexy.  There was a scene in which she is trying to seduce Franchet Tone’s character, and she really gave off a smoldering, sexy vibe that worked pretty well.  And that’s something that I don’t really associate with Bette Davis as a celebrity or a personality.  She is dramatic, intense, and always, somehow, imperious, but rarely sultry.  So, well-done Bette.  You deserved your Oscar win.

1934 – Norma Shearer

The Barretts of Wimpole Street

Well, Shearer knocks it out of the park again.  But I don’t think it was her best performance.  But that’s like saying she was only a nine instead of a ten.  But she was still a nine.  One of the things I have come to love about the actress is her complete ease and her fluidity in front of the camera.  Shearer’s acting was like Karen Carpenter’s voice.  Just as easy and natural as it could possibly be.

But here, she played Elizabeth Barrett, a girl who is under the emotional thumb of a father so strict it far surpasses the line into cruelty.  She is ill, and has not left her sick bed for years, and her father actually tells her that he would rather have her sick and lame than disobedient and free to live her own life.  And while Shearer played the part very well, the easiness of her on-screen presence was tinged with an effort that she usually didn’t have.  It felt like she was trying a little too hard to be the character, instead of just being her.  There was a sense of effort or discomfort with the role, like she was putting on airs that she didn’t have to put on, like she was performing for the stage and not the movie camera.

But it wasn’t constant, and she was still a delight to watch.  I especially liked her in the climax of the film, when she sees her father’s absolute cruelty towards her younger sister, and decides to escape with her fiancée.  You see, she was pitted against another Hollywood powerhouse, Charles Laughton, and she easily held her own.  But the two played off each other well and the result was some pretty hefty drama.  Shearer really showed off what she could do, and as always, I was impressed.  And it didn’t hurt that her face was just made for close-ups.

And there was one scene where she had to sing a song.  All I can say about that is thank goodness they didn’t feel it necessary to overdub her voice.  It was definitely her.  And I like that it wasn’t perfect.  She was not a singer, but she did just fine, and it further added to the realism of the character.  It didn’t need to be a beautiful voice in that moment.  She really did the part justice and she really earned her nomination.  But she was up against Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night for the Best Actress Oscar, so maybe it was understandable that she didn’t win. Maybe.

1934 – Bette Davis

Of Human Bondage

I know that this review should really be about Bette Davis’s performance, and not about the movie she performed in.  But I have to say, I really didn’t care for this movie.  I didn’t like any of the characters or their motivations.  I didn’t like the plot.  I didn’t like a lot of the stylistic choices the director made.  And I didn’t like the poor picture quality.  But all that being said, Davis turned a powerful performance.

This was the first of eleven Best Actress nominations that Davis received over the course of her long and prolific career as an actress.  Her performance was so widely acclaimed that even though she was technically not nominated for the Best Actress category, several influential people mounted a campaign to have her name included on the ballot.  According to Wikipedia, “For a period of time in the 1930s, the Academy revealed the second- and third-place vote getters in each category: Davis placed third for best actress above the officially nominated Grace Moore.”

In this movie, she needed to play a woman who heartlessly uses a man’s affections to take advantage of him, and Davis really did the part justice.  I couldn’t stand the character.  She was mean and self-serving.  She was callous and manipulative.  I wasn’t really supposed to like her, and to Davis’s credit, I didn’t.  There would have been something wrong if I had.

In the first two thirds of the movie, the role of Mildred Rogers didn’t require a lot of range from the actress.  She was sweet and smiling with one man, then instantly cold and unaffectionate with another, and that was about it.  But in that final third of the film, Mildred went off the rails a bit.  She screams at Dr. Carey, saying that she never loved him and had to wipe her mouth whenever she kissed him.  The next day she trashes his apartment, slashes his beloved paintings, and sets fire to his securities and bonds, effectively destroying his medical school tuition funds.  After that, she becomes a prostitute, contracts tuberculosis, and dies alone and in extreme poverty.

It was during these final scenes where Davis really shined, especially the scene in which she learns that her illness is in its final and fatal stages.  I can totally see why her performance was lauded above Grace Moore’s mild performance in One Night of Love.  There was a clear power in Bette Davis’s performance that made her stand out in a movie that I didn’t really like.

1934 – Grace Moore

One Night of Love

Hmmm… Was the role worthy of a Best Actress nomination?  I’m not sure.  I mean, the character of Mary Barrett was a bit of a one-note part.  Well, she was an aspiring opera star, so I guess she was a many-note part.  All kidding aside, Grace Moore, herself, was a famous opera star in real life.  She was an operatic soprano nicknamed the Tennessee Nightingale.  Her films brought opera to a wider audience than her stage work.

In One Night of Love, the story was almost secondary to the music.  The movie was nearly an hour and a half, and at least a third of it was made up of Grace singing.  In order to nominate her for Best Actress, her performances in Bizet’s Carmen and Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, need to be considered as much as her performance as the romantic lead of the movie.  But really those scenes were all about her singing rather than about her acting.  Or maybe they were one and the same. Either way, she was nice to watch and a delight to listen to.

But that’s just it.  Her acting was just fine, I guess, but I didn’t really see it as any better than her contemporaries.  I mean, all you have to do is consider the two women she was up against in the Best Actress category.  The winner was Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, and the other nominee was Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage.  Moore just wasn’t on the same level as the other two leading ladies.  She was like a gimmick because of her fantastic voice.  There was nothing wrong with her skills as an actress, but they paled in comparison to her rivals.

That being said, she did have a great voice.  One of the things I’ve noticed about movies from those early sound films is that ladies’ voices, especially when they were singing, sounded shrill and sometimes squeaky, and I suspect it was because sound engineers and technicians were still perfecting their craft.  The higher the voice, the more shrill the sound.  But most of the time, Grace’s voice had a full and lustrous quality to it that was perfection.  A few of her high notes were a little piercing, but for the most part her vocal production and the sound recording were wonderful, and I can easily see why she was such a popular opera star.

1933 – Claudette Colbert

It Happened One Night

What a gorgeous woman!  One of the things she is famous for, when it comes to this film, is the hitch-hiking scene, in which she shows her shapely leg to flag down a car.  And though I am no expert on the legs of women, even I have to admit, it looked pretty darn good!  Colbert took home the Oscar for her performance in this film and I have to question if I think it was deserved or not.  I mean, she was up against some pretty heavy hitters like Norma Shearer and Bette Davis.  But, yes, I think her performance was Oscar-worthy.

True she didn’t have Shearer’s absolute ease in front of the camera, nor did she have Davis’s intensity.  But there was an earnestness that Colbert possessed that the other women did not.  When she cried, the tears were real, if not powerful.  When she laughed, it was unafraid, if not practiced.  Colbert’s performance in this movie was honest and reserved, and utterly delightful.

There was one scene in particular that caught my attention.  It was the scene where she and Clark Gable pretended to be a bickering married couple.  Gable was wonderful, but Colbert put her rich heiress persona on the shelf to show us another side, a comedic side to her skills as an actress.  She was both funny and cheeky at the same time.  It was a fantastically funny scene.

But there was another scene that caught my attention, and not necessarily in a good way.  It was the scene in which she and Gable were about to sleep in a haystack.  Gable stands in the moonlight a few yards away lighting a cigarette.  It was an intimate, quiet moment.  She asks the man what he is thinking, but suddenly her voice has dropped into a very deep register.  Was she trying to be romantic?  Sultry?  Sexy? Why did she sound like she was a completely different woman?  I’m not entirely sure why, but it took me out of the moment, wondering what had happened to her voice.  I think a little more consistency with how the character sounded for the rest of the film would have served the scene better.  But really, she was wonderful, and I can’t praise the shapely beauty of that leg enough.

1932-33 – Diana Wynyard

Cavalcade

I know my opinion might not be popular when it comes to Diana Wynyard, but I wasn’t terribly impressed with her performance in Cavalcade.  In it, she played a British wife and mother at the turn of the century.  The film was about the lives of the wealthy family and their servants, and as you might expect, much of it focused on her, rather than her husband or her children.  The movie was an ensemble piece, but if there was a lead, it was her.  Unfortunately, I just expect more from a Best Actress nominee.

First, and this one isn’t entirely Wynyard’s fault, there was the way the character was written, and the general narrative structure in which the story is told.  The turn of the century held some extremely traumatic events, and the character of Jane Marryot was written as a woman who is so reserved and emotionless that she seemed almost unaffected by the tragedies, like the death of one of her sons when the Titanic sank, or when her husband is forced to go to war, or when the Queen died.  I’m not sure the role itself was worthy of the nomination.

Wynyard did her best with the emotionally repressed character.  The few times when Jane’s emotions did boil to the surface, they were played with the proper poise and reservation, though I kept wanting more.  But one of Wynyard’s weak points was that in the whole film, she only showed three or four facial expressions.  She had the same countenance whether she learned that her second son had been killed in WWI, or when she was reflecting on a good life, despite the horrors and tragedies she’d had to endure, and that was on the actress, not the script-writer.

Another thing I didn’t care for in her acting was how she played her part, delivered her lines, as if she was on stage in a live performance.  Everything seemed too… forced.  Too rehearsed.  There wasn’t an ounce of natural ease or spontaneity in her performance.  The scant emotion she had to portray was carefully planned out and deliberate.  It felt false, like she was trying too hard to be dramatic.  Some of her lines actually came out in a kind of sing-song tone that wasn’t at all realistic.  Instead, it was distracting.  I know.  Probably not the most popular opinion.

1932-33 – May Robson

Lady for a Day

This was a movie that I’ve seen before since it was nominated for Best Picture, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  May Robson is, of course, the lady mentioned in the title, and she was fantastic.  In fact, if I had been a member of the Academy at the time, I might have voted for Robson to take home the Oscar for Best Actress.  She was fantastic, and honestly, as much as I enjoy the winner for 1933, Katharine Hepburn, I think Robson deserved the Oscar more than the well-loved Hepburn.

She begins the movie as an old lonely woman who is so poor that the only money she earns is made by selling apple on the street.  Everyone knows her as Apple Annie.  When she was a young woman, she left her infant daughter at a convent in Europe and spent the rest of her life sending her all the money she could to pay for her upbringing.  As the girl grew, Annie lied to her, making her daughter believe that she was a wealthy lady, a member of the high society in New York.

But when her daughter becomes engaged to a Spanish Count who wants to visit her in her in America, Annie is ready to kill herself rather than facing the shame of the lie and her life of destitution.  Fortunately, a wealthy and superstitious criminal thinks of Annie and her apples as his gambling good luck charm.  He takes pity on her, and sets Annie up as the lady her daughter believed her to be for the duration of the Count’s visit, giving her an extreme make-over to be convincing.

Robson was quite believable as the poor alcoholic woman living in near-squalor.  They gave her a haggard look that really sold the character.  But more than that, the look in her eyes held a poignant combination of sadness, shame, and a hint of the madness with which only desperate people are familiar.  But the transformation of the make-over was brilliant.  Being a member of the upper echelon of wealthy society is not something that can be learned in a week.  Robson played the character in such a way as to make it clear that she had once been as wealthy pretending to be.  And I can’t help thinking that after the movie’s end credits are done rolling, Annie was fated to go back to her squalor.  For me, it turns the happy ending into a very bittersweet one.  What a great performance, Robson!

1932-33 – Katherine Hepburn

Morning Glory

This is one of those strange instances where I like the actress, I like the performance, but I didn’t particularly like the character.  An acting role combines the script and the skill of the actor.  When the two are in synch, a wonderful and memorable character can be created.  This was Hepburn’s first of many Best Actress nominations, and her first win, and to be sure, she did a fine job in the part.  But I found the character annoying and a little unlikeable.  I’ll explain.

Hepburn played the part of Eva Lovelace, a determined young woman who’s most desperate desire was to be a famous stage actress.  However, though she was a essentially a good girl, she was clearly a pretender, a wannabe, and a bad liar.  She wasn’t completely in touch with reality.  I guess I was a bit turned off by the constant dishonesty of the character, as it was written.  However, Hepburn was a good enough actress as to make Eva believable.  And when she stopped the inane chattering written into the script long enough to do some serious acting, she knocked it out of the park.

There was one scene in particular where she really shined.  At a fancy party, she is, within seconds, utterly drunk after a few sips of champagne.  Again, I call that poor writing, but never-mind that.  Hepburn goes into reciting Shakespeare from both Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet.  Those little monologues were fantastic, and that was all Hepburn.  Also, she was perfection in the film’s climax.   She is unexpectedly thrust into performing the lead part in a new play.  We don’t get to see any of that performance within the context of the film, but apparently, she is so good that she is finally recognized as the great actress she’d been pretending to be all along.

Katherine Hepburn certainly had a unique look.  There was a loveliness in the severity of her features.  The corners of her mouth had a natural down-turn to them that made her always look like she was frowning, even when she was smiling.  Her cheekbones were high and sharp.  And her eyes were both soft and deep, and yet wise and imperious at the same time.  And as for that quick chatterbox dialogue, she never seemed to stumble or even skip a beat.  Very well done! 

1931-1932 – Lynn Fontanne

The Guardsman

Lynn Fontanne was married to her costar Alfred Lunt, and the two were both nominated for Best Actress and Actor, respectively.  While they both did a fine job, I think Fontanne was slightly overshadowed by her husband, whose role was far more interesting to watch.  Lynn’s character was shown as simply the Actress in the credits, and no actual name is ever given.  Apparently, she is so beautiful and desirable that she could have any man she wanted, and her husband is an insanely jealous man.  And that’s the basis for the screwball comedy plot.

It was as if the Actress played the straight man to the Actor’s comedy.  Unfortunately, most of her presence in the plot was, when talking to the Russian Prince, to say “Yes,” and, “No,” and, “I love you but I can’t have an affair with you.”  She would say, “I can’t ever see you again,” quickly followed by, “I shall be at the opera tonight, first tier, box four.”  Until after the opera, when she took the Prince into her bed.  Don’t worry, this was pre-code.

But was that just it?  Was that the allure of her character?  I suppose it must have been.  It was what drew audiences to the theatre.  It was the big question that was printed right at the top of the movie poster.  “His disguise was perfect – did she really know it was her husband when she surrendered to him?”  In the film, the question is never satisfactorily answered.  I was left with doubt.

In fact, that’s how the movie ends.  After he Actor’s ruse is finally revealed, we have to ask.  Did she know all along that it was her husband?  She is asked, “So you recognized him from the very first moment?”  And in that last shot, Fontanne sells it.  She doesn’t say a word, but smiles almost imperceptibly, and nods her head slightly.  Because of the brilliant way she played it, I was left wondering… did she really know, or was she desperately lying to cover up her infidelity? 

And that’s why she deserved her Best Actress nomination.  It was a credit to her skill as an actress.  I think it was intentional that the big question was never really answered.  And it was only effective because of how Fontanne played it.

1931-32 – Marie Dressler

Emma

Marie Dressler was, strangely enough, one of the most popular actresses in Hollywood between 1930 and 1934, when she died of cancer.  I say strangely enough, because, she is not your typical Tinsel-Town starlet.  She was an older woman, and not particularly attractive by the industry standards of the 1930s.  But it was her wonderful acting skills that put her on top of the Hollywood heap.  She was the common woman.  She was everybody’s beloved grandmother.

And Dressler had the ability to play everything, comedy or drama, characters who were wealthy or poor, scripted scenes or improvised.  After a long and successful stage career, and a good many silent films in the 20s, she was cast in the film Anna Christie, playing a supporting role alongside Greta Garbo.  That movie was finally her big break, and for the last four years of her life, she was Hollywood’s number one box office attraction.  And this movie was certainly no exception.

She played a woman who loved her life as a housekeeper.  She loved the family she served, and the children she helped raise.  Eventually, the widowed patriarch of the family asks her to marry him, and leaves his entire fortune to her after his death.  She was such a good and loving woman that she initially wanted to give everything to the children, ungrateful and irresponsible as they were.  But when they turned against her, accusing her of manipulating dear old dad into giving her all his money, she lost her temper and kicked them all out of the mansion.  But in the end she still believed them all to be good, and refused to let them be called bad people in court.  Dressler was able to sell it all with realism and believability.

The movie, as a whole, had elements of both comedy and drama, and Dressler did fantastic in both kinds of scenes.  There was a memorable scene in which the youngest boy, all grown up, tries to get her into a flight simulator machine with wonderfully comedic results.  Ronnie says, “If you don’t like it, you can get right out again,” to which she replies, “Well I aint’ gonna get out, hehe… cause I aint’ gonna get in!”  Later, when Ronnie dies in a plane crash, her devastation is heartbreaking to watch.  I think Dressler clearly deserved her nomination.