Big Magilla wrote:My vote goes to Fay Bainter as the grandmother of the brat in The Children's Hour, a sublime performance by an actress who always gave 110% whether the role was small or large. This was one was somewhere in-between, but she runs the gamut from haughty, wealthy matron to trouble-making gossip to defeated, genuinely sorry miscreant and is wholly believable at every turn. It was her best screen performance and that's saying a lot.
I agree.
Fay Bainter was a lovely presence in all the films she appeared in but I never understood her Oscar win for Jezebel (in fact I preferred her nominated lead performance that same year for White Banners). Here she is devastating in the scene at the end. Her eyes say it all.
My top 5:
Fay Bainter, The Children's Hour
Lotte Lenya, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
Rita Moreno, West Side Story
Piper Laurie, The Hustler
Judy Garland, Judgement at Nuremberg
Rita Moreno gave the best performance in West Side Story - singing, dancing, acting, but wait, her singing voice was dubbed! Should that have disqualified her? No, but for me there was a better choice.
Judy Garland was probably Moreno's closest competition, but it had more to do with her landmark Carnegie Hall concert earlier in the year and the best-selling album derived from it that put her back on top, than her performance in Judgment at Nuremburg. She was poignant and touching but seemed miscast as a woman considerably younger than herself. Her co-star Marlene Dietrich as the proud widow of a German General executed after a previous tribunal would have been a better choice.
Another German actress/singer, Lotte Lenya became a household name thanks to her inclusion in Bobby Darin's 1959 hit recording of "Mack the Knife" from her husband Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera. She starred in both the 1931 film version and the acclaimed 1954 off-Broadway production. Modern film audiences finally got a chance to put a face with the name when she assayed the role of the female panderer in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, giving new meaning to the word "wunderbar"!
Una Merkel had a rare dramatic role as Geraldine Page's kleptomaniac mother in Summer and Smoke. Alas, she had more screen time that year as Brian Keith's housekeeper in The Parent Trap.
My vote goes to Fay Bainter as the grandmother of the brat in The Children's Hour, a sublime performance by an actress who always gave 110% whether the role was small or large. This was one was somewhere in-between, but she runs the gamut from haughty, wealthy matron to trouble-making gossip to defeated, genuinely sorry miscreant and is wholly believable at every turn. It was her best screen performance and that's saying a lot.
