Best Supporting Actress 1991

[Precious Doll]

My God Damien, we posted our posts at the same time and have Emma Thompson listed!

[Precious Doll]

I voted for Mercedes Reuhl. The scene in which Jeff Bridges dumps her was heart breaking.

I enjoyed Jessica Tandy's work (along with her co-stars) in Fried Green Tomatoes and Diane Ladd's working in the otherwise dreary Rampling Rose.

Juliette Lewis was the only decent thing about Cape Fear, though she was hardly worth a nomination. I didn't care for Kate Nelligan in a rather thankless role in The Prince of Tides. I don't recall her in Frankie and Johnny but would have nominated her in 1981 for Eye of the Needle.

My choices are:

1. Mercedes Reuhl for The Fisher King
2. He Caifei for Raise the Red Lantern
3. Elizabeth Perkins for The Doctor
4. Cao Cuifeng for Raise the Red Lantern
5. Emma Thompson for Impromtou

Also worthy were the Fried Green Tomatoes quartet (Bates, Masterson, Parker & Tandy), Judy Davis in The Naked Lunch, Gosia Dobrowoska in A Woman's Tale & Helen Mirren in The Comfort of Strangers.



Edited By Precious Doll on 1287733088

[Damien]

Jessica Tandy is lovely in Fried Green Tomatoes. She's not Mary Stuart Masterson, but then again, who is?

In the late 80s early 90s, Kate Nelligan was seen as a great stage actress who would be her generation's equivalent of Katherine Cornell/Helen Hayes Geraldine Page/Julie Harris. Didn't happen (Cherry Jones and Jan Maxwell came along instead). Nor did she have much of a film career. She's very formidable in the laughable Prince of Tides, which meant that she did what was asked of her.

Juliette Lewis was fairly impressive in the rather silly Cape Fear, but became less so when you realized she was about 10 years older than her character, so her "innocence" seemed calculated rather than natural.

Mercedes Ruehl -- horrid actress. Can we say "OVER-EMOTE"? She was the clear favorite back then for her hideous performance. I'm just glad she's pretty much gone away.

Diane Ladd -- luminous, warm, funny. Easily the best of the bunch, the class of the group,and in a perfect world we would have had Daughter/Mother Oscars that night.

My Own Top 5:
1. Jobeth Williams in Switch
2. Lorraine Bracco in Switch
3. Diane Ladd in Rambling Rose
4. Wendy Phillips in Bugsy
5. Emma Thompson in Impromptu

[Reza]

What a deathly list of nominees. Don't know what Ladd and Tandy were doing on this list and how and why Ruehl won. Nelligan was good in Tides (although her old age makeup looked incredibly fake) but better that year in Frankie and Johnny as a sexier version of Eve Arden.

Voted for Lewis here. Yes, she overacts in most scenes but she is excellent in her scenes opposite De Niro (also wonderfully hammy).

My top 5 of 1991:

Kate Nelligan, Frankie and Johnny
Judy Davis, Naked Lunch
Mary Stuart Masterson, Fried Green Tomatoes
Amanda Plummer, The Fisher King
Juliette Lewis, Cape Fear

[Sabin]

Jane Horracks should have won for Life is Sweet. Mike Leigh was half a decade away from becoming one of the more oddly-embraced auteurs in Oscar history, but he now has six Oscar nominations to his name for writing and directing! Horracks had wins from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics and I have to believe that at least put her in some form of competition for the award, but, considering that Sally Hawkins couldn't get in, I doubt Horracks' sublimely unpleasant Nicola could during the first Bush administration.

I don't have a huge problem with Lewis. I get what she's doing and I think it works for the most part. Cape Fear as a whole is an overbaked mess...but with moments. She's not Oscar-worthy though.

Can't really get onto Fried Green Tomatoes' wavelength. There are two films going on in that film: the one with Masterson and Louise-Parker, and the horrible one with Kathy Bates. Tandy bridges the two but coming off of her incredibly beautiful work in Driving Miss Daisy, it doesn't feel like anything special. And anyway, the old, wise lady performance of the year is Mrs. Potts.

I barely remember the performances of Ladd and Nelligan. I remember them far more vividly in other films. Mercedes Rhuel absolutely gets my vote. She has the best lines of the bunch and she walks off with that pseudo-disastrous mess of a movie, The Fisher King. Her career may have subsequently stagnated but I can't begrudge her win here.

[Mister Tee]

As you can quickly tell from my vote, we see the year somewhat differently.

I found 1991 one of the better movie vintages of this era, but this category was a mess. In many cases, the voters found the right movie but the wrong performer -- or the right performer, but the wrong movie. I'll detail as I go through the nominees.

I didn't find alot of unbearable omissions. O'Hara was certainly press-hyped for Only the Lonely, but I thought it was a silly role and the support for her was strictly nostalgia. The only one I'd point to among the utterly unmentioned would be Mary McDonnell in Grand Canyon -- nothing great, but as respectable a she was in Dances with Wolves, and better than some nominees.

I always found Mercedes Ruehl shrill. She was somewhat better in Fisher King than she'd been in Married to the Mob, but, for me, the female performance of Fisher King was Amanda Plummer's -- highlighted by her touching date scene with Robin Williams.

I think the world of Jessica Tandy in general, but the sections she and Kathy Bates shared in Fried Green Tomatoes were grindingly bad. If someone was going to be chosen from the film, it should have been Mary Stuart Masterson.

Kate Nelligan was, for a time, an ascendant actress, and she gave a wonderful performance that year -- in Frankie and Johnny. But Frankie was a box office disappointment, so her nomination was instead for her rather small role in the soggy but successful Prince of Tides. She's certainly decent in the part, but she just doesn't have enough to do.

I wouldn't have minded if Diane Ladd had won for the likable Rambling Rose. Ladd has limitations as an actress, but this role was well within her range. She finishes second, by me.

But -- and, I swear, not just to antagonize Magilla -- my vote goes to Juliette Lewis. I went into Cape Fear with much trepidation. I'd found the original -- low-key, black-and-white, largely TV cast and all -- an unbelievably unnerving experience. Knowing that Scorsese, at that period in his career, had shown no hesitation at pouring on the gore, I steeled myself for something unbearable. (Honestly, without the nominations, I might have skipped it) And it WAS, by the finale, pretty hard to take. But, early on, I enjoyed a good bit of it, most especially Lewis and DeNiro in that teasing seduction scene. Lewis, too, is limited as an actress, but she does some things well. (Unlike many, I like her in Natural Born Killers, as well) And in this (for me) pretty weak field, she's the standout. Wonder if I'll be the only one.

[Big Magilla]

Four good performances and a depressingly bad one, the latter all the more irritating because it came in place of my pick of the year's best performance in this category.

I'm talking about Juliette Lewis whose dreadful overacting in Martin Scorsese's unnecessary and ridiculous remake of Cape Fear for which no one one deserved a nomination, least of all Ms. Lewis and Best Actor nominee Robert De Niro, who was even worse.

The performance I had hoped to see nominated instead, and win, was that of Maureen O'Hara as John Candy's overbearing Irish Catholic mother in Only the Lonely, a part that fifty or sixty years earlier would have been played by Sara Allgood or Una O'Connor, both of whom O'Hara worked with and apparently learned much from. But it wasn't to be. The film was a rare flop for Candy and direcotr Chris Columbus and kept both O'Hara and the also quie excellent Ally Sheedy far away from the year's awards.

Instead the year's old lady slot went once again to Jessica Tandy who Hollywood finally took notice of two years earlier when it awarded her the Best Actress Oscar for Driving Miss Daisy after ignoring her as far back as 1947's A Woman's Vengeance. Tandy was wonderful as always in Fried Green Tomatoes but they weren't about to give her a second Oscar in three years.

Daine Ladd was excellent as the hard-of-hearing mother in Rambling Rose, but they weren't likely to give her an Oscar for a film in which her daughter (Laura Dern) was nominated but had little chance of winning in the lead category.

So it came down to Mercedes Ruehl and Kate Nelligan.

Ruehl's stardom was short-lived. Early in the next decade she would be reduced to occasional guest appearances as a judge on TV's Law & Order. In the meantime she managed to bring an urgent personality to the fore in a couple of memorable roles, most notably that of Jeff Bridges' girlfriend in The Fisher King for which she won her Oscar.

In the absence of O'Hara, I was pleased that Ruehl won, although I'm voting here for Kate Nelligan because it's the only chance we have to vote for this excellent, versatile actress who in this one year gave two completely different, yet highly memorable performances. She was intensely dramatic as Nick Nolte's mother in The Prince of Tides, for which she was nominated, and hysterically funny as the waitress Al Pacino has a fling with before moving on to Michelle Pfeiffer in Frankie & Johnny. Alas, she, too, has succumbed to playing judges on the Law & Order franchises. Her latest credit is as one on Law & Order: SVU.