Jessica Lange: 75th Birthday and "Men Don't Leave"

by Eric Blume

One of our great screen icons, Jessica Lange, celebrates a big birthday this weekend:  75 years, and thankfully still going strong.  Lange is one of only 24 actors to win the Triple Crown of Acting (she has 2 Oscars, 3 Emmys, and 1 Tony).

Lange is a personal favorite actor of mine, and I’ve written about her on the site numerous times, so I thought for her three-quarter-century mark, I’d hold a moment for one of her less-heralded, lesser-known performances, a bit of a departure from her usual delivery:  her soft, lightly comic, and sweetly sad performance in Paul Brickman’s 1990 film Men Don’t Leave...

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Happy Birthday, Jessica Lange (& Nina Foch)

by Cláudio Alves

Like Mark said in his Veronica Cartwright tribute, this 4/20 is an essential date for actressexuals... among others. After all, we celebrate the horror queen's 75th birthday and that of Jessica Lange as well. Initially, I thought about writing about the star's upcoming adaptation of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, but that film seems trapped in some nebulous distribution limbo. By all accounts, production wrapped in late 2022 after a brief halt due to financing issues. Since then, there's been hardly any news, and Lange herself speculated it might not yet be finished in a Vulture interview. Let's hope we don't have another Blue Sky situation in our hands, though that farrago resulted in a Best Actress Oscar.

So, instead of dwelling on that mystery, why not remember The Film Experience's collective love for Jessica Lange? Going through the site, I came up with a selection of write-ups worth revisiting, plus some bonus Nina Foch to mark her centennial…

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Happy 75th, Veronica Cartwright

by Mark Brinkerhoff

Veronica Cartwright in a 2020 documentary "LIfe After The Navigator" exploring one of her 80s films

Happy 4/20, which happens to be the birthday—same day/month/year—of both Jessica Lange and one Veronica Cartwright, the British-born former child star and current character actor extraordinaire.

When did you first clock the extraordinary Veronica Cartwright on screen? Though she mainly does TV guest spots (and the occasional direct-to-VOD titles) nowadays, I can say that she made an immediate impression for me in the mid-‘80s, starting with The Right Stuff (1983), Flight of the Navigator (1986), and most notably The Witches of Eastwick (1987)...

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Sherlock Jr. @100: For the love of Cinema

by Cláudio Alves

This week, one of the best comedies ever made and a silent film masterpiece celebrates its centennial. It's none other than Sherlock Jr., Buster Keaton's 45-minute miracle of stunt work and cinematic considerations about cinema as materialized dream and broken escapism. A meta-movie for the ages, I consider it the old Stone Face's crowning achievement. Sure, The General is much more complex and Steamboat Bill, Jr. trumps it in sheer iconography. As for technical innovation, something like The Play House is probably Keaton's peak. However, there's something special about the 1924 lark, a simplicity that bolsters perfection, an ingenuity that rekindles my love for cinema whenever I set my eyes on it…

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Stanley Donen @100: The Most Charming Speech of All Time

by Baby Clyde

With their increasingly bizarre choices and lamentable decision to move recipients from the main telecast, long gone are the days when the Academy’s Honorary Awards made any cultural impact. We’re all the losers, because not only did truly deserving legends of the industry being belated rewarded give deep satisfaction to the Oscar nerds at home, from an ailing Myrna Loy and triumphant Charlie Chaplin to a sprightly Lillian Gish and a regal Deborah Kerr, they created some of the most memorable and moving moments in Academy history.

None more so than the man who celebrates his centenary yesterday, Stanley Donen. The master of the movie musical was unaccountably never nominated for a competitive Oscar during his illustrious career but took his opportunity at the 70th Annual Academy awards to give the most charming speech of all time...

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