by Nathaniel R
Edith Piaf and Judy GarlandPerhaps it was those uninspired Critics Choice nominations? Perhaps it's no critical year-end love for La Pfeiffer in her comeback year? Perhaps it was my anti-depressant prescription running out with no health insurance to renew it with? Or, probably, it's the generally miserable state of the world in which things are so dire that we're watching a kleptocracy filled with proud sexual predators, treasonous pathological liars, greedy overlord billionaires, fact-averse idiots, and blatantly sociopathic racists amass power at a record pace, dooming future generations to have it much much worse than we even do now? Meanwhile the good people of the world stare in disbelief whilst fighting amongst themselves for any number of reasons but the largest, we suspect, is a feeling of impotence against the actual enemies.
But since I was feeling terrible all day whilst trying to come up with our habitual trivia fun with numbers as we countdown, I kept remembering that Judy Garland died when she was just 47. (I'm working my way to a non-morbid point after the hand-wringing...)
People like to make a big deal about it being gay man who always obsess over Judy but I maintain that it has nothing to do with my sexuality just my impeccable taste 😉 because she earned that World's Greatest Entertainer title. And so many people like me, who arrived when she was already an iconic ghost, have still received tremendous joy and catharsis from her work. Curiously her contemporary French counterpart Edith Piaf also died at 47 years of age. Both tragic singers continue to haunt culture and inspire it; Judy Davis famously won both a Globe and an Emmy for playing Judy Garland in a TV miniseries and Marion Cotillard won the Oscar portraying Edith Piaf on the big screen.
47 is way too young to die. It's really so young if you think about it.
Artists can have entire second or third acts to their career after 47. I mean, hell, Katharine Hepburn still only had one Best Actress Oscar statue at 47 (with three more still a long ways off). Consider these amazing talents that turned 47 this year and how much great stuff they'll probably still deliver before they retire hopefully many many many many years from now: Uma Thurman, Taraji P Henson, P.T. Anderson, Christopher Nolan, Octavia Spencer, Matt Damon, Sarah Silverman, Rachel Weisz, Ethan Hawke, Raúl Esparza, Melissa McCarthy, Mariah Carey, Queen Latifah, Regina Hall, Mike White and Martha Plimpton.
Consider Meryl Streep. She was, I'd argue, at the nadir of her altogether amazing career at the age of 47. Around that time she was making movies people didn't care all that much about (at least comparatively to the rest of her career) - things like Before and After, First Do No Harm, Dancing at Lughnasa. Her record-breaking reclaiming of America's Favorite Actress Throne was still a handful of years away; she began to find legions of new and younger fans once Angels in America, The Hours, Adaptation, and Prada all hit it big in her fiftysomething years. Julianne Moore was in a similarly weak frame of her career at 47 until the Oscar FINALLY came in her fifties. Annette Bening had just lost her SECOND Oscar to Hillary Swank around that age and her two (arguably) greatest performances (The Kids Are All Right and 20th Century Women) were several years away still! Sandra Bullock turned 47 on the set of Gravity which became one of her most respected films.
The working-through-the-pain inspirational point is this: Stay alive. Perservere through tough times. Great things may still be around the corner.