1987: Vanessa Redgrave in "Prick Up Your Ears"
Thursday, November 5, 2020 at 1:34PM
Each month before the Smackdown, Nick Taylor looks at alternates to Oscar's ballot...
As Cláudio wrote sometime last year (that's how long ago Sunday was, right?), the 1987 Supporting Actress vintage boasts a truly unique set of contenders. Their specific careers, overall narratives, and individual performances and the films they were in could hardly have been more different. Add in the fact that all five were one-and-done nominees and the whole list takes on a genuinely ephemeral, one-of-a-kind quality, even if three of them have the same first name.
The presence of brand names just for A-list star power, would, in most years, dilute this quality. Still, it’s strange to see some of Oscar’s favorite names on the outside looking in during 1987. Top theorists have speculated for decades how Anjelica Huston failed to get cited for her sad, moving performance in The Dead. And what about Vanessa Redgrave in Prick Up Your Ears, who won NYFCC and was the only Golden Globe nominee who didn’t translate to Oscar’s ballot...
Redgrave’s track record with the Academy suggests a performer they hold in high esteem without necessarily feeling the need to nominate each time she shines. Was her absence a refusal to gratuitously recognizing a familiar name, or did the Academy box out a great performance by one of the most venerated British actresses of the silver screen?
“Oh dear. I can’t stand those things” says Peggy Ramsay (Vanessa Redgrave) as she sits down to discuss the lives of playwright Joe Orton (Gary Oldman) and his lover/murderer Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina) with American biographer John Lahr (Wallace Shawn) who instantly pulls out a video camera to record the interview. “Every little word. One can’t possibly be natural” she muses, pouting for a second before asking if it’s on. He says yes, and she immediately begins talking.
It’s a funny scene, not just because Vanessa Redgrave of all people is talking about how tough it is to present oneself on camera, but because Peggy so quickly looks at home as she starts talking about how she met Joe and became his agent while she massages her leg in front of Lahr. Given the few things we see her do before this interview - mournfully walk through the crime scene that is Joe and Kenneth’s apartment, swipe Joe’s diary from under a cop’s nose, lie to Lahr's face about not being able to find said diary and blaming it on her secretary while the woman gives her the stink eye - it’s hard to imagine what wouldn’t feel natural to Peggy.
Redgrave is by far the most fascinating element of Prick Up Your Ears, which is as much a testament to her skill as an actress as to the unevenness of the film itself. Director Stephen Frears has little feel for the seedy, unabashedly gay milieu Joe & Ken thrived in, rarely making his world of moonlit bathroom orgies and debauched vacations seem particularly enjoyable, let alone visually interesting. If we can partially credit him with shaping Redgrave and Oldman’s sly turns, we must also blame him for Molina’s bug-eyed theatrics which frequently threaten to topple the whole picture. It also doesn’t help that Alan Bennett’s script, hopping between multiple perspectives and time periods, somehow makes the ties binding his characters even harder to grasp in satisfying ways as the film continues.
Even in these circumstances, Redgrave offers a succinct, coherent characterization. She plays Peggy as essentially the same woman across the film’s twenty-odd year timespan, lavishing in her exqiusite outfits and forgoing the opportunity to delineate Past and Present selves. Redgrave's trademark intelligence gives Peggy instant credibility as an agent, even as she’s spacey enough to abort a call with an American producer because she can’t remember how to pronounce his name. It’s a subtly comedic performance too, underplaying laugh lines and finding the right tenor for her jokes so that we can't dismiss Peggy out of hand.
She mainly acts as an observer regaling us with tales of Joe’s professional and sexual life, yet Redgrave never reduces Peggy to a voyeuristic audience surrogate or someone living vicariously through their client. The grin on her face and the satisfaction in her voice when she talks about his exploits suggests someone who’s had plenty of her own adventures with late-night liaisons. As they say, real recognizes real, and Peggy sounds plenty impressed by his stories, especially given that homosexuality wasn’t legal in Britain at the time. Her brainy, casually aroused attitude as she recalls Joe’s first sexual encounter while wolfing down a melon is sexier than anything else in Prick Up Your Ears. It’s no wonder Lahr’s wife (a quiet, intriguing Lindsay Duncan) looks worried about how close he’s become with Peggy while writing his biography.
What adds to her magnetism is that Redgrave plays Peggy as a savvy liar without making her an actively unreliable figure. The script certainly makes sure to boldface this, with so many scenes of her blatantly and comfortably lying about something important to whoever she’s deceiving. But even after so many scenes of her withholding crucial information or pretending Joe isn’t hiding in her office, we never really see her as totally untrustworthy, especially since Redgrave refuses to flag for the audience when Peggy is being insincere. She seizes opportunities to reveal Peggy’s emotional depth, most notably in her last interview with Lahr, where she looks freshly upset thinking about how no one would know who Ken was if he hadn’t killed Joe before grinning at one of her own jokes. On a moment-to-moment basis, she’s as reliable in one scene as she is in any other, depending on how much you typically believe anything she says. Maybe she really liked Ken’s cat wall, maybe not. Maybe she had aims on Lahr, maybe not. Redgrave suggests these possibilities while leaving room for us to guess, turning Peggy into one of the film’s only real sources of ambiguity.
All of this more or less happens in the first twenty-ish minutes of the film, surely laying the foundations for an indelibly explored character, right?
Wrong!
Bennett’s script basically drops the storyline following her and the Lahrs, with them cast as Joe and Kenneth and Peggy as the other woman. The total reorientation around Joe and Ken’s relationship more or less pushes every other character out of the film completely. Sometimes Peggy pops back up for narrating duties or cameos in a flashback - we even see that first meeting with Joe she described, where she’s as curt about his play and amazed at his sexual candidness as she said she was. Redgrave is practically handed the film’s ending, but by the time she's front and center again Peggy seems almost arbitrary to whatever story the film is trying to tell.
Redgrave is giving a deftly layered performance, operating on a tonal wavelength that Frears should’ve worked like hell to emulate, but Prick Up Your Ears doesn’t reward her efforts in any meaningful way. It’s easy to imagine voters leaving her off their ballot in dismay of how little she gets to do, but Redgrave nevertheless delivers a sparkling, multifaceted sense of personality in a role that doesn’t automatically afford it, in a far more relaxed register than many actresses would attempt. It’s the kind of rescue work this category is often happy to honor, and more than that, it's a sterling example of Redgrave's singular resourcefulness. A shame the film doesn't let her plumb deeper, but what's there is more than enough for her to thrive.
more on 1987
- Over & Overs: Baby Boom
- Over & Over: Moonstruck
- The Living Daylights
- Veronica Cartwright in The Witches of Eastwick
- What's streaming from 1987?
- Sally Kirkland's Legendary Best Actress Campaign
Reader Comments (14)
I like the film a bit more than you but agree that Vanessa is both one of the strongest asset and one of the underused ones the film has.
It's almost enough to say she's Vanessa Redgrave so of course she's brilliant but she does the work digging in and making someone memorable of Peggy in her too brief screen time. Vanessa's always been a bit of a political hot potato for the Academy ever since her controversial acceptance speech (and probably before). They brought her back in in '84 so it seems odd she was left out, she certainly could have taken Anne Archer's spot, but she might have fallen into the dreaded sixth spot. A shame it's very fine work.
What a great performance! When I saw her in the summer of 87 she immediately rose to the top of my personal Supporting Actress picks, but I didn't think she'd get much awards traction until she won the NYFCC award. Then I got my hopes up, only for nothing to materialize. If she'd been nominated (especially over Anne Archer), she would have been my choice for the win.
I suppose it's only fitting that the post got Halliwell's last name wrong.
I'd nominate here just for the way she rubs her legs,specific well thought out character building,we know she is a liberal and had a life just from this act,she's at ease around men too.
The "It's a gesture dear not a recipe" is one of her best ever line readings,I laugh everytime she says it.
One of my favorite actresses . In this movie she demonstrates how much she can do iwith little time on screen.
She was "almost there" also for: Blowup (1966) and Atonement (2007)
@joel6 - Hard to imagine she wasn’t the sixth spot of this quintet, though given the lineup we got I’m ready to be wrong on that. Weird to think the Academy couldn’t make room for her here but brought her in for Howards End when the Globes and BAFTA didn’t.
@kens - She would’ve been a merciful switch-in for any of the Ann(e)s, honestly. If anything I’d dump Sothern first.
@Working Stiff - Oops! Poor guy. Fixed the spelling, thank you for pointing that out.
@markgordonuk - I think those are my two favorite individual beats of her whole performance, give or take everything she does at the dinner table with Shawn and Duncan. Lovely melon indeed.
@Cafg - Would have loved to see her get nominated for Blowup. Such a funny, creative performance.
I would have nominated not only the stunning Vanessa, but also Oldman and Molina.
Oldman yes but Molina no,that 87 line up is fairly awful outside Nicholson and Douglas who for my money is better in Fatal Attraction.
My lead/support Nominees 87
John Lone
Michael Douglas
Jack Nicholson
Gary Oldman
James Woods
Holly Hunter
Bette Davis
Cher
Maggie Smith
Glenn Close
Ian Bannen
Sean Connery
Will Patton
Albert Brooks
Morgan Freeman
Anjelica Huston
Veronica Cartwwright
Vanessa Redgrave
Anne Ramsey
Norma Aleandro
Total agreement about the movie, the focus on the relationship isn’t something I object to on principle but after setting up so many different and interesting strands of the art worlds, it’s acutely felt when all of that stuff is suddenly shunted to the side. And I think Molina is actively terrible. Have to admit while I IDOLIZE Redgrave and do think she’s doing some of the best work in the film after Oldman, the pride of place this performance has held amongst her others has maybe unfairly contributed to my feeling that she’s kind of overrated here. The real life woman she’s playing actually was a very different type according to those who knew her, and while I don’t object on principle in any way to not just imitating a known person, I do think Redgrave does kind of sand away this women’s sharpest edges and doesn’t coast exactly but a lot of her work relies in a bit to overtly on her propensity for being “ethereal”. I do agree a lot of that is the fact that she ceases to be integral to the movie in the final third or so, but I find her performance tends to kind of evaporate along with the movie even though I enjoy her while I’m watching.
I hope to god you or someone else is doing a write-up about Huston in the Dead. It is my favorite performance of hers and a pretty good movie in its own right.
Let me join this chorus of (mostly) approval for Redgrave's Peggy Ramsay in Prick Up Your Ears. I was at that period a few years back of wanting to watch all of Gary Oldman's films and saw this in between Romeo is Bleeding and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Oldman is fantastic but Redgrave stayed longer with me.
Love the way she changes color for each person she happens to speak to while maintaining her authoritative and slightly sly character. She's memorable in all the scenes she's in but that initial interview with Wallace Shawn's Lahr is wonderful (a bit titillating really) especially her instantly snapping into all-business character when she knew the camera was rolling: "I know nothing about him..." with a theatrical flourish. Also uproarious was the dinner scene with Shawn and Lindsay Duncan where Redgrave vividly recounted Joe Orton's early sexual exploits in Leicester and ending with a "lovely melon!" after just talking about Joe's oral sex experience. She can be nurturing too when she bought Ken Halliwell's art piece in that "Be-good-to-Ken" exhibit in a basement space. When Oldman tells her: "You don't have to", she quipped "I want to" effectively ending the conversation.
I wish Redgrave got nominated here -- a wonderful film performance before she would wow onstage with her Lady Torrance in "Orpheus Descending" a few years later. Of Redgrave's 'late career' roles, I like her bizarre turn as Queen Elizabeth in Anonymous: scary makeup, indelible characterisation, supreme actress. And as Max in Mission Impossible especially her interactions with Tom Cruise.
P.S. When I saw her on stage in "Driving Miss Daisy", I was riveted by the tiny tiny things she does with her hands while speaking. She's showing Daisy's age in microscopic ways. I marvel at how she can get her body to do things idiomatic of the character she's playing.
Dear God, I thought I was staring at Natasha Richardson in that first picture. 😢
Everyone needs to talk more about Vanessa! The Sublime Vanessa
It's puzzling how she missed here because the performance is great. I'm guessing she didn't have the career narratives that excited the press like Ann Sothern, Anne Ramsey or Norma Alejandro.
I alws feel her nom fives yr later for Howards End, is a make up to this snub!