Best Supporting Actress 1984

[Hustler]

Amy Madigan would have been the right choice this year. Unfortunately she was snubbed. My vote goes to Peggy Ashcroft.



Edited By Hustler on 1285332177

[Big Magilla]

I remember the Anne Francis brouhaha, but I wonder if it really was under Streisand's orders. The film was too long and had to be cut. Francis' part was not all that important to the film. Kay Medford's part was, and that, too, was cut to ribbons, although she still managed to garner an Oscar nod for the little that was left of it.

[Damien]

I wonder how Lahti's shredded performance managed to land a nomination while D'Angelo's (for Coal Miner's Daughter) didn't in what I'd consider an equally dire year. Was Hawn really that insecure about her "star status"? What are other examples of leading ladies having their supporting co-star's performances on celluloid cut to ribbons?

According to Robert Osborne, regarding Funny Girl: "Anne Francis, who played her Ziegfeld girlfriend, asked to have her name removed from the picture's credits because so much of her footage had been scissored under Barbra Streisand's orders."

[Uri]

a result of dreadfully thin fields,

There were a few respectable contenders who would have made stronger alternatives -- particularly Sabine Azema

Should I really say anything else? Azema's collaboration with partner Resnais has resulted in endless joyous performances over the last 30 years, and she was very good elsewhere too. Thank God there's this lean year so she can sneak in here.

[Reza]

The other situation involved Joan Crawford and The Women. Crawford claimed that Shearer made her change her dress something like 39 times, each costume change designed to make her look less attractive.

Don't know how accurate Crawford's claim could be considering she was jealous of Shearer.

[Cinemanolis]

MY TOP 5

*Peggy Ashcroft - A Passage to India*
Sabine Azema – A Sunday In the Country
Jacqueline Bisset - Under the Volcano
Nastasjia Kinski – Paris, Texas
Geraldine Page – The Pope of Greenwich Village

[Big Magilla]

All the other nominees this year were fill-ins including New York Film Critics winner Christine Lahti who played Goldie Hawn's friend in Swing Shift, a laborious flop comedy.

I don't recall Swing Shift being a "comedy" (although I was under ten the last time I saw it). Wasn't it more of a light-hearted dramedy?

After Bruce's praise for Lahti, I think I might check it out again.

I wonder how Lahti's shredded performance managed to land a nomination while D'Angelo's (for Coal Miner's Daughter) didn't in what I'd consider an equally dire year. Was Hawn really that insecure about her "star status"? What are other examples of leading ladies having their supporting co-star's performances on celluloid cut to ribbons?

It was sold as a comedy which may have been part of the problem. It wasn't particularly funny probably due to Robert Towne's rewrites. Towne excelled at heavy drama, but had no clue when it came to writing anything remotely funny.

Supposedly a director's cut of the film exists but who knows if that's true or not. Goldie Hawn owns the film and would presumably have a say in whether or not Jonathan Demme's cut ever sees the light of day.

The story I heard wasn't that Lahti's part was cut because she was stealing the film from Hawn - she managed to do that anyway - it was that Hawn wanted the film re-shot to make herself look younger. Whatever the reason, it's a mess. It was pulled from theatres after only three weeks.

I don't know of any other instances where other actresses' parts were cut at the the insistence of the leading lady but
there are at least two examples of Norma Shearer exercising undue control over female co-stars who she was jealous of.

The first was Edith Evans who was brought to Hollywood to reprise the role of the nurse in Romeo and Juliet which she had just played on Broadway in support of Katharine Cornell. Shearer thought she was stealing the film from her and her fired and replaced by the more amiable Edna May Oliver who stole the film from her anyway.

The experience so unnerved Evans that she refused to make another film in Hollywood and kept her promise until 1977's Fitzwilly. All her other Hollywood financed films were made in England.

The other situation involved Joan Crawford and The Women. Crawford claimed that Shearer made her change her dress something like 39 times, each costume change designed to make her look less attractive.



Edited By Big Magilla on 1285104471

[flipp525]

All the other nominees this year were fill-ins including New York Film Critics winner Christine Lahti who played Goldie Hawn's friend in Swing Shift, a laborious flop comedy.

I don't recall Swing Shift being a "comedy" (although I was under ten the last time I saw it). Wasn't it more of a light-hearted dramedy?

After Bruce's praise for Lahti, I think I might check it out again.

I wonder how Lahti's shredded performance managed to land a nomination while D'Angelo's (for Coal Miner's Daughter) didn't in what I'd consider an equally dire year. Was Hawn really that insecure about her "star status"? What are other examples of leading ladies having their supporting co-star's performances on celluloid cut to ribbons?



Edited By flipp525 on 1285102901

[Bruce_Lavigne]

Like most, I see Christine Lahti as the runner-up. Unlike most, I think she's a wholly worthy one. I'd love to see her full performance -- the one that was supposedly so great that Goldie Hawn had the movie cut to ribbons to downsize it. But even in its heavily-edited form, Lahti's work is outstanding, and I could easily vote for her with no qualms.

But as much as I hate to vote for an old-timer when a younger, fresher alternative is available -- and indeed, I wouldn't be doing so had Nastassja Kinski been nominated for Paris, Texas as she should have been -- I have to concede that Peggy Ashcroft is a lot more than just an old-timer in A Passage to India. She's still very much a master at that late point in her life (unlike some of the "biddies" we see receive votes here), and she's on her A-game. For the second year in a row, Oscar voters went with one of the most deserving performances ever to win this award, and for the second year in a row, I second their choice.



Edited By Bruce_Lavigne on 1285113189

[Mister Tee]

Among those who might have been considered: ....LAFC winner Melanie Griffith in Body Double

Just to nit-pickingly correct what was clearly a typo -- Griffith won NSFC, not LAFC.

[Mister Tee]

Uri wrote a short while back that we were now into the golden age of supporting actresses -- years when there were stellar choices, and the Academy actually selected them. In some cases, this atypical Academy good taste was a result of dreadfully thin fields, over which one contender simply towered. 1984 may be the extreme instance of this.

There were a few respectable contenders who would have made stronger alternatives -- particularly Sabine Azema and Melanie Griffith. But Azema suffered from subtitled-support-avoidance (if Wallgren couldn't make it a year prior, this one was mission: impossible), and Griffith, while a bracing presence, was handicapped by a movie Academy members probably loathed. (Even a dePalma fan like me had trouble defending the grisly drill sequence) Unfortunately, Griffith was passed over when she was truly fresh (here and in Something Wild), and only noted when she became tamped down and domesticated in Working Girl.

As to the actual nominees...I almost laughed when I saw Glenn Close turn up as a nominee, so puny had her role been. If it had happened during the computer age, I might have believed a rumor that people had been working from the previous year's ballot and inadvertently left her unchanged. Easily the least merited of Close's five nods.

Page had been nowhere in the pre-nomination conversation, so I didn't see her performance till a year or so after the Oscars (when I finally got a VCR). She's flashy and assertive, but it's a small part, and her appearance on the ballot showed both the thinness of the competition and the Academy's tendency to nominate her for damn near anything. Thankfully, when she finally won the following year, it was for something more deserving.

Lindsay Crouse obviously rode on the back of her best picture-nominated film (and, maybe a little, on the accumulated strength of her un-cited performances in Prince of the City and The Verdict the two previous years). I'd agree that Amy Madigan put on a better show (for me, a much better one than she did the following year, when she got her overdue nod). Crouse is decent enough in Places, but no threat.

I've always liked Christine Lahti, and I guess I'm happy she got nominated, though I thought Swing Shift (the version I saw) was pretty lousy. Lahti almost totally owes her nod to the fact that the NY Critics, having pushed Ashcroft to lead, had to find SOMEONE to cite as supporting, and Lahti was the lottery-winner. She may, god help us, be second best here.

Twice in the 80s ('87 the other case), a supporting actress category with seemingly no potential Oscar victor in sight was rescued by a December entrant. I thought critics in general were wildly hyperbolic in their embrace of A Passage to India. Many of the same folks who'd flayed Lean over Zhivago and Ryan's Daughter were suddenly ready to name him Master Filmmaker of the Age...possibly because the dreck of the 80s was so much worse than they'd ever imagined that Lean looked a lot better in retrospect. (Similar to the way some Democrats in the 80s fawned over VP candidate Lloyd Bentsen, who represented everything they'd rebelled against in the 60s/70s, but in comparison to Reagan seemed not half-bad) I found the film respectable but not nearly the new classic I'd been promised.

One element, however, I thought unimpeachable was Peggy Ashcroft's Mrs. Moore. She carried off the ethereal, wise-beyond-society's-measure quality the role required, but she also conveyed serious human frailty -- helping us see the fear that made her absent herself in a key moment from a conflict she thought she couldn't win. This was a performance so beyond that of anyone else in the category I presume the vote was closer to a census than a contest. It's only a shame circumstances prevented her being there to accept in person. She gets my vote easily.



Edited By Mister Tee on 1285092481

[Big Magilla]

I had no idea that Katharine Hepburn was the original choice for Mrs Moore... Thank God it didn't happen - I mean, she'd have been even more miscast than Alec Guinness, let's be honest.

I think she realized that, which is why she declined the offer to be reunited with her Summertime director.

Guinness should have done the same, but Lean considered him a good luck charm and cast him in most of his films. He reluctantly played Godbole as a favor to Lean, but was very uncomfortable in the part. Saeed Jafrey, who played the part opposite Gladys Cooper on Broadway, would have been a much better choice. Jaffrey was in fact in the film in a minor role, the same one he played in the 1965 BBC production with Sybil Thorndike and Virginia McKenna. Michael Bates was Godbole in that production.

If Lean had made this film in 1965 instead of Doctor Zhivago, chances are he would have cast either Cooper or Thorndike in the role and one of them would have won the Oscar. It's essentially a fool-proof part in the right hands.

Ashcroft almost declined the part as well. She was reluctant to travel to India. She demurred by telling Lean, "I'm 75 years old." His response, "So am I!" won her over.

[Damien]

Oh look, another eccentric old British lady.

Ah? It's 1984. The last time "eccentric old British" actress was even nominated was back in '63-4, when indeed we had an outburst of affinity for this kind of freak creatures (Evans twice, Rutherford and Cooper). Contrary to the common perception here, Magilla is not the academy. You may not like Ashcroft and it's your prerogative, but rewriting history to suit your claim is so unlike your usual self, isn't it?

Uri, I didn't mean to limit the term "eccentric old British lady" to Oscar nominees but rather as a prototypical role we've seen so many times before and after Ashcroft in A Passage To India (Dame May Whitty, Margaret Rutherford, Mona Washbourne, Joan Plowright, Joan Hickson, Katie Johnson, Cathleen Nesbitt, and so on. These characterizations are usually enjoyable but there is a certain sameness about them.

Interestingly, as written by Forster, Mrs. Moore is truly a singular character. Too bad David Lean removed her depth and mysteriousness by making the adaptation so literal and flat adaptation -- but then again he was probably congenitally incapable of doing anything else.

Flipp, "colorful" would have been a better descriptive word than eccentric.

[ITALIANO]

I had no idea that Katharine Hepburn was the original choice for Mrs Moore... Thank God it didn't happen - I mean, she'd have been even more miscast than Alec Guinness, let's be honest. Peggy Ashcroft is - and I don't use this adjective often - perfect for that role; the movie has some problems I think, but her presence in it has the effect of making it seem better than it really is. At least till she's there; after she dies, it still has probably one hour to go before it's over, and seems even more. Impossible not to vote for her, even for those who usually aren't fans of old actresses - and anyway the light in Ashcroft's eyes expresses an energy that many younger actresses lack.

Also, as others have pointed out, the competition was far from excellent, Crouse and Close are both bland - Close must have realized that, despite all the Oscar nominations she could get, this kind of roles wouldnt have taken her anywhere, and wisely turned to different, and more powerful, material. Crouse wasn't a bad actress, but it's true that even Amy Madigan - in a very short part - was more memorable in Places in the Heart.

Geraldine Page has only two scenes in The Pope of Greenwich Village - the second a monologue about, if I remember well, her recently deceased son; the camera is on her all the time and I guess that this, plus respect for her stature as an American legend, led to her being nominated again. The whole performance must have taken one or two days to shoot and for someone who had done Williams and O'Neill it must have been even too easy. We all thought by now that she'd been one of those who never win - but obviously we were mistaken.

So - even if the movie is a failure, and despite its director not even an interesting one - Christine Lahti, a probably intelligent actress and by far its best aspect, is second-best in this group. But a very distant second.

[flipp525]

I haven't actually seen any of the nominees this year but I did work on a featurette of The Natural where they interviewed Glenn Close. Interestingly enough, she attributes her Oscar nomination for that role to the fact that she was fabulously lit in a pivotal scene when they had the light shine through her hat like a halo on an angel. Nothing to do with her performance per se. She basically said that Academy members mistook great cinematography for a great performance.

That moment when the sunlight shines down on Glenn Close's character right as she stands up in the bleachers really is one of the best in The Natural. As mentioned by Close herself (via anonymous), it's definitely more an acheivement of cinematography rather than much work done on her part. But if she managed to milk a nod out of it, hey, good for her. It's a beautiful cinematic moment.

Lindsey Crouse rode a Places in the Heart wave to this nomination, which doesn't necessarily mean it was a bad performance. She is a rather stoic and handsome woman which somehow helped her in this role. I'm usually a huge fan of Geraldine Page, but what exactly did she do in The Pope of Greenwich Village? I would rather her blink-or-you'll-miss-it moment in The Day of the Locusts had been recognized a decade earlier.

Christine Lahti is a fun sidekick in Swing Shift, a movie that used to play on Channel 20 on Saturdays when I was growing up ad naseum it seems. Not necessarily nomination-worthy, but I like the actress and I'm glad she's got a nod at some point in her career.

I'm with the consensus vote on this one. Peggy Ashcroft is so marvelous, so almost ethereal in the pivotal role of Mrs. Moore, her luminous presence haunts the rest of A Passage to India long after she's left the screen. Again, one of the most worthy winners this category ever produced.

And, to dovetail onto what Uri said, there is something decidedly un-fussy and un-biddy about Ashcroft's work in Lean's film. I can't see how she's the inheritor of this "eccentric old British lady" mantle at all.



Edited By flipp525 on 1285085881