Best Supporting Actress 1972

1927/28 through 1997

Best Supporting Actress 1972

Jeannie Berlin - The Heartbreak Kid
6
20%
Eileen Heckart - Butterflies Are Free
10
33%
Geraldine Page - Pete 'n' Tillie
1
3%
Susan Tyrrell - Fat City
8
27%
Shelley Winters - The Poseidon Adventure
5
17%
 
Total votes: 30

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Precious Doll
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Post by Precious Doll »

A very respectable line up in an ordinary year.

My choices are:

1. Pat Ast for Heat
2. Eileen Heckart for Butterflies Are Free
3. Andrea Feldman for Heat
4. Tonny Huurdeman for Turkish Delight
5. Shelley Winters for The Poseidon Adventure
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Post by Damien »

A good line-up, except for those two irritatingly mannered Ladies of the Stage -- Madames Page and Heckert.

Susan Tyrell gets my vote -- a very strong performance in an admittedly actor-friendly role. When I saw Fat City i the summer of '72, I figured the Supporting Actress race had been decided.

Jeannie Berlin is hilarious in The Heartbreak Kid and more than a little sad. Adorable performance.

And Shelley Winters is great fun in The Poseidon Adventure. It's not a great characterization -- you don't actually buy the woman she's playing for a second, but that's the nature of the beast, the beast in this case being the ludicrous screenplay -- but you can't take your eyes away from her whenever she's on screen, and Shelley Winters being that charismatic means she was doing something right. And she put on all that weight for a movie.

My Own Top 5:
1. Vivien Merchant in Frenzy
2. Ellen Burstyn in The King of Marvin Gardens
3. Susan Tyrell in Fat City
4. Jeannie Berlin in The Heartbreak Kid
5. Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure




Edited By Damien on 1281427659
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Post by Big Magilla »

Madeline Kahn did receive a Golden Globe nomination for Most Promising Newcomer, losing to Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues and did go on to win back-to-back nominations the next two years.

The film won the WGA for Best Comedy Written directly for the screen but as big a hit as it was at the time the critical consensus went more toward The Heartbreak Kid which was being compared to The Graduate at the time although now it's a fairly obscure film whereas What's Up, Doc? has grown in popularity much the same way as Bringing Up Baby, the film it copiously steals from, has.
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Post by FilmFan720 »

I've only seen Winters and Tyrell, so I won't vote here, but will just point out that the absence of Madeline Kahn in this category makes voting a ridiculous thought. Was she considered at all in 1972? Was the film considered for anything? I know it was a commercial hit, but what was the critical reaction? It is my family's favorite film, and I was curious whether we were alone on that?
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Post by Big Magilla »

1972 was the year of The Godfather and Cabaret. Everything else was an also-ran as far as Oscar was concerned. With no one from either film nominated in the Supporting Actress category it was a wide open field, but not for me.

From the moment I first saw her as the over-protective mother of the young blind man in Butterflies Are Free,I knew Eileen Heckart would win for that delicious performance. That was in July, three weeks before I saw Susan Tyrrell's marvelous performance in Fat City and more than five months before I saw the rest of the nominees.

I didn't really expect the critics to recognize Heckart and they didn't. The National Board of Review went with Marisa Berenson in Cabaret and the National Society of Film Critics and New York Film Critics, whose membership overlapped, went with Jeannie Berlin in The Heartbreak Kid. The first choice I thought was silly, the second ridiculous.

I found Berenson's comic timing in Cabaret an unexpected delight, but I found Berlin completely annoying in a one-note portrayal of Charles Grodin's dippy bride. It's one thing to be annoying and funny like say Madeline Kahn in What's Up, Doc?, it's another to be simply annoying. I thought the critics had lost their mind. When I re-watched the film the other night in preparation for this, I found her even more annoying and the win even more preposterous.

If they had wanted to throw their weight behind a promising newcomer, Susan Tyrrell would have been a much better choice. I also re-watched this one the other night and was astounded all over again by the depth of her performance.

Fat City is a slice-of-life film about a few days (weeks, months?) in the lives of a down-and-out former fighter (Stacy Keach), a naive, upcoming one (Jeff Bridges) and the women in their lives - Candy Clark as Bridges' girl and Tyrrell as the perpetually sad barfly Keach picks up and lives with for a time. All four actors are terrific and although the general consensus at the time was that Keach's performance was the best, Tyrrell is the one you can't take your eyes off of. It's a shame she never had a follow-up role anywhere near the equivalent of this one.

Shelley Winters who played the role Berenson had in Cabaret when Christopher Isherwood's original I Am a Camera was made into a film was back in the Oscar race big time. She already had two in this category when nobody else did but that didn't stop her from campaigning for a third. She went on every talk show there was to blab about how she put on forty pounds to play the heroic fat lady in The Poseidon Adventure. When she won the Golden Globe she wasn't there but they broadcast her telephone acceptance. She gushed about how nice it was to "finally" win a Globe as though it was her right.

It was a good performance and a deserving nomination in a weak year but nothing more.

Geraldine Page in Pete 'n' Tillie I just don't get. I didn't much care for the film, and didn't think she added anything to it.

I would have replaced Berlin with Ellen Burstyn as the former beauty queen in The King of Marvin Gardens and Page with the egregiously ignored Ida Lupino as Steve McQueen's mother in Junior Bonner. Others on a very short list of also-rans this year would be Anna Massey as a most amusing murder victim in Hitchcock's Frenzy, a very funny Madeline Kahn in the screwball comedy, What's Up, Doc? and the afore-mentioned Marisa Berenson in Cabaret.

The favorites going into the race were Berlin and Winters, though I still can't fathom why. Heckart, who was not nominated for a Golden Globe even though practically everything else connected with her film including the movie itself, was, finally had a shot. She was nominated for an Oscar and I was convinced she was not going to go home empty-handed. For once I was not disappointed.




Edited By Big Magilla on 1294512990
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