Wednesday
Aug032011
70s "Best Actress Character"
Wednesday, August 3, 2011 at 12:22AM Here we go again. We've been voting on the best Best Actress characters of all time. (Results of the 80s, 90s and 00s if you missed any.) These polls are not meant to represent which actress you would have voted for had you been an Oscar member but which characters are the most indelible in the Academy's history. Which of these fictional or fictionalized ladies from the 1970s take up the most mental real estate for you?
You can choose FIVE characters from each poll. The second poll is further down the page.
Ready Set Go
1971-1975
But wait there's more!
1976-1980
Happy Voting!
Please tell your 70s mad friends about the poll. What a decade in cinema that was...
tagged Best Actress, Oscars (70s), polls
Best Actress, Oscars (70s), polls
Reader Comments (44)
Sally Bowles and Mary Rose Foster for me.
Sally Bowles and Beth Jarrett are always on my mind.
Myrtle Gordon would be my hands-down #1 choice, if only she had been nominated...
these polls are reminding us again how dangerous it is to your reputation if a film is super hard to find on vhs or dvd.
sally bowles and annie hall
So many great characters to choose from! Sally, Annie and Claudine are the ones I'm always thinking about.
I love Evelyn and Diana, especially Diana. I might just be a Faye fanatic.
Gitl FTW =P
What Nate said. I've always been curious about both of Liv Ullmann's nods but damned if I can't find them anywhere but on lo-fi youtube segments. Same with Hedda, Travels With My Aunt and Cousin, Cousine.
I smell Capricorn Gold, Silver and Bronze for the 76-80 period :P
@ Mark, I can skype you "Travel With my Aunt"
Travels*
I better not vote this time. Besides having seen regrettably few of these films so far, I can't bring myself to even consider voting for Ellen Burstyn's ridiculous "new personality in every year" role in Same Time, Next Year. It's a truly terrible movie in every way, but I think about it sometimes when I'm watching something else that's wretched.
Speaking of Ellen, does anybody else think she and Glenda Jackson look like sisters?
Totally off subject, but James Earl Jones has become the 13th person to EGOT.
When I realized I could only honestly claim to have seen three of the films in the top poll, I realized I have a LOT of catching up to do. (I managed to squeak out five votes on the second half, but just barely, which still feels like cheating - they way AMPAS does, "Well, I've seen this so that's what I'll vote for". I'd like to be able to say I've seen them all and then chose, but at least this gives me an excellent viewing list.)
This is so much fun-the further back you get, the more you realize that a concensus builds through the years. 20 years from now, we may only remember Miranda Priestley, Clementine, and The Bride amongst the nominees of the Aughts.
Oh, wait...
Carrie -- but not Carrie's MOTHER..?! Sacrilege!
Sprague -- it's a "best actress" list. not a best supporting actress :) but yes Carrie's Mother is awesome. "THEY'RE ALL GOING TO LAUGH AT YOU."
btw, may we do the 60s too? I think they are slightly stronger, performance wise (based on what I've seen)
It is all about Jane Fonda for me.
RJ -- yes. i'm surprised that BREE DANIELS is as low as she is. I think it's one of the greatest performances of all time. If i did a TOP TEN BEST ACTRESS PERFORMANCES EVER it'd be on there.
EVERYONE -- if you want the 60s too you're goign to have to enlist 70s and 60s devotees to vote. These numbers are too low compared to the other polls. :)
It's a pity that numbers are too low this decade, it's the most awesome one, I didn't want to vote because I couldn't choose just ten. I want the sixties, Natahaniel!! Please!!!
I also love Bree Daniels, and thought it would be higher, but I don't know if I'd choose her in my particular Oscars existing Mrs. Miller. I'm so in love with Julie Christie and with that character in particular... Maybe her, Adele and Mabel Longhetti make my 70's decade. What a brave, fascinating, intelligent and unexpected cinematic decade. And those adjectives fit as gloves with all those women/ characters
Nobody should vote without seeing Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes' Mabel Longhetti, sorry. And, you know, it's the best performance ever.
I have to agree with Cal Roth about Gena Rowlands. On both counts.
People, Faye and Jane collectively rule the seventies (although Sally and Annie win on both counts for me). I sort of forgot that there are so me great female performances in the decade, even if I don't love the movies as much.
I love 70s film acting.
Agreed about Bree Daniels, Nathaniel. I would put that performance in a triumvirate with Carolyn Burnham and Marquis de Merteuil.
Bree got my vote too
Also Honey Bruce which I'm 100% sure Mike Figgis had in mind when he was writing Sera..
BTW, I can't help looking at these lists and thinking "What the hell happened in the cinema? Really? How did we go from these complex, mature films to a constant, steady slew of endless action and comic book pictures? Have we really become so infantile as a society?
Janice -- i really think the problem lies with audiences and not with Hollywood. I really do. When I talk to my friends outside of the big cities about movies and even some of my friends here, and these are smart friends with good taste in *other* forms of entertainment, they've invariably only seen the big hollywood efforts and say that they prefer tv and theater or whatever to movies because movies aren't very good.
they're grading on a really weird curve of course because they're only seeing the big studio all quadrant releases.
the problem is a complex one but all of my smartest friends who no longer go to the movies are a huge part of it. Once you lose an adult audience who only shows up when their little kids want to see a Pixar or Disney, you've lost any hope of regaining the complexity of 70s filmmaking.
I think this was hardest for me to vote on, since these- and not the 80's or 90's etc- are the characters I'm emotionally connected to ( and I wasn't even alivein the 70's!) Janice, I couldn't agree more; what happened? These characters are still so iconic (btw, it's ALL about KkkKatie Morosky for me!) after all these years because they were deep, and complicated, and had something to say. I wish we had more of those today.
As much as I think overall the movie business has declined since the 70s, the performances in any half decade, even the 70s, don't seem to me that much better than the nominated performances in the past five years. If we did this vote for the past five years, I think you'd see the same percentages of very good performances and some misses.
That said, there are some awesome roles that were nominated for the 70s, although I am surprised I'm losing to Lillian Hellman and Hey, Adrian!
I agree with Cal. Surely anyone who has seen A Woman Under the Influence thinks about Gena Rowlands's Mabel more than any other character in that list. It's unforgettable.
Marsha -- i loved you in CHAPTER TWO! also Lillian Helmann is a bore. seriously.
Heretic, Nathaniel. Lillian is NOT boring, didn't she physically abuse Meryl Streep's brother in Julia (Meryl is ridiculously fantastic in that movie, but of course not as fantastic as Vanessa.)
I want to know what people who think about Nurse Ratched think about her. I like the performance, but I've always felt a little thwarted by it, like there's not much left to ponder besides what's right there. I sort of feel that way about the whole movie.
Can I give an FYC for Rebecca in Sounder? There were a lot of perfs I hated to leave out of my five (Rebecca, Mabel, Claudine, Diana Christensen, and Annie Hall), but there was no way any of them was budging. Even for Carrie White. Or Billie Holiday. Or Kimberly Wells, who I think about a lot more often than I do Bree Daniels.
Wait, those can't be my five. I combined the polls. Whatever, I don't know what I'm talking about, but I did vote for all five of those women, plus five more, and I still couldn't vote for everyone I wanted. Like someone said, it's just tragic how far we've dropped.
Joanne Woodward's character in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams definitely deserves some votes, and is now available from Warner Bros. Archive on DVD or streaming. Face to Face is finally bowing on DVD this month, after never being available in any format except pirated VHS!
@ Nick re: Face To Face - WOW WHEN.
Bree Daniels, Bree Daniels, Bree Daniels. End of story.
Also: Marie-Christine Barrault is fan-fucking-tastic and so subtle in Cousin, Cousine. The character she created there moved me to my soul.
The further back we go the more I realize i need to get on a project similar to Nick's and FINISH seeing all of them.
Nick -- i feel like Joanne Woodward is really underappreciated these days. I wonder what it would take for a revival to start. And I wonder what the problem is exactly. was it the lack of warmth as a performer? I mean i haven't seen much but what i've seen she didn't seem remotely interested in pandering to audiences but just totally about whatever her character was about. She's not an "entertainer" per se like some actresses.
Lots of foreign language actress? Marie Chirstine Barrault, Liv Ullman twice (she deserved a thid nomination for Autumn Sonata, since she is even greater than Ingrid Bergman), Ingrid Bergman and my favorite one, Isabelle Adjani, who was 19 or 20 and gave one of the best performances ever (and it's not even the best performance of that year - the best one was Romy Schneider in That Most Important Thing Love) From my 50 female best performances ever, I think, 70% belong to the 50's and 70's.
You know? Best actress of the 70's:
1 - Gena Rowlands, A Woman Under The Influence
2 - Gena Rowlands, Opening Night
3 - Liv Ullmann, Autumn Sonata
4 - Romy Schneider, That Most Important Thing Love
5 - Isabelle Adjani, The Story of Adele H.
6 - Jane Fonda, Klute
7 - Liza Minnelli, New York, New York
8 - Julie Christie, McCabe & Mrs. Miller
9 - Liza Minnelli, Cabaret
10 - Isabelle Huppert, Violette Nozière
I'm sad the Shelley Duvall in 3 Women isn't on here.
Dylan -- I KNOW. she makes my list of nominees that year. And that's a good year, too.
Liv Ullmann as Dr Jenny Isaksson is by far the best performance from 1976 - 1980
Other favs are from the 70s:
Glenda Jackson as Alex Greville in Sunday Bloody Sunday
Liv Ullmann as Marianne in Scens of a marriage ( not in the poll from 1973)
Gena Rowlands as Myrtle Gordon in Opening Night
Fay Dunaway as Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown
Sissy Spacek as Carrie in Carrie
Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Diane Keaton as Kay in The Godfather Part II ( not in the poll, supporting)