Betty Lou Gerson in One Hundred and One Dalmations (1961) - Supporting Actress Sundays - Died in 1999

I offer this Supporting Actress profile for two main reasons. First, it's part of my newish series ("Born In..."/"Died In...") in which I contemplate supporting actressness as a circle of life by profiling on a performance by a Supporting Actress who entered or left this mortal coil in the year featured in that month's Supporting Actress Sundays. (Last month, we looked at 1999.) And second, this profile seems a fitting connection to the "Magic Kingdom" theme happening over at Nathaniel's Film Experience, where I'm pitching in as a guest blogger during his well-deserved vaction. (And, yeah yeah, the guest-blogging theme also happens to provide me a handy alibi for my tardiness on finishing up the 1999ness.) That said, from a fairly exceptional roster of actresses at the edges who passed in 1999, y'all chose...

...Betty Lou Gerson in One Hundred and One Dalmations (1961).

approximately 8 minutes and 55 seconds
13 scenes
roughly 11% of film's total running time

Betty Lou Gerson voices Cruella De Vil, the vicious, fur-obsessed villainess of this simple canine caper.
In an animated feature where the dogs look like dogs, the people look like people, and they all sound like proper citizens of England, Cruella De Vil looks and sounds the freak. Which she is but, due to Betty Lou Gerson's witty vocal performance, Cruella emerges as an iconic -- and surprisingly delightful -- villain.
Cruella De Vil's construction as a Disney villain is brilliant in its economy.
First, Cruella's got a catchy theme song and an indelible character design. Both sear themselves into the audience's imaginary on first encounter, making Cruella's first impression nearly impossible to shake.
Second, as a character, Cruella's efficiently crafted as a particular sort of monstrous female. A proto-fashionista, Cruella's stick-thin and ghostly white, her green cigarette smoke wafting from her as a cloud of sickness. Such imputations of perverse illness are fortified by the fact that Cruella's a wealthy single woman with no "natural" desires (ie. home, husband, children). Instead, Cruella nurses a particular devotion to her comely school chum while professing her singular desire for FUR (specifically, fur coats that she procures for herself in a dark criminal underworld). In short, Cruella De Vil is a wealthy, man-hating fashionista with crypto-lesbian tendencies and a fur fetish. Plus, as if that weren't enough to make Cruella an especially terrifying villain in the patriarchal Disney universe, Cruella also likes to murder puppies.
Yet, in a final touch of creative artistry, Cruella is also thrilling, even delightful, largely because of the expert voice performance offered by Betty Lou Gerson. Gerson's vocal performance brings Cruella's disparate design elements -- the character's song, visual look, backstory -- to vividly and plausibly human life.
Gerson voices Cruella with a voice that is itself unforgettable and perverse: a high-throated rasp inclined to bellowed commands and maniacal laughter. Gerson voices Cruella as a forceful shriek which amplifies what's most necessary about the character: she's fearsome; she's formidable; she's female. Yet, because of Gerson's humanizing wit, Cruella's also got flair.
Cruella seems to embody everything that is terrifying about female power in Disney's unrepentantly patriarchal "Magic Kingdom" which is why Cruella's "cop out" vanquishment remains so dissatisfying.
(The character's cheap ending is compounded by the fact that the narrative doesn't really stage a confrontation between Cruella and the piece's ostensible hero -- puppy papa Pongo. Pongo's valor is demonstrated by how adeptly he avoids the gender monstrosity Cruella, itself a fascinatingly oblique moral to this gender story.)
I suspect that Cruella De Vil remains an iconic Disney villain largely because of the complexity and clarity with which the character was brought to vocal life by Betty Lou Gerson. The character design and narrative make her monstrous but it's Gerson's funny, terrifying yet somehow human vocal performance that makes Cruella enduringly fabulous.

Madeline Kahn in Judy Berlin (1999) - Supporting Actress Sundays - Died in 1999

I offer the following post as my own contribution to the Madeline Kahn Appreciation hosted by, well, me. I do so as a roundabout way of acknowledging the fact that Madeline Kahn played no small part in making me the actressexual that I am today. (Blame it on Kahn's long creative collaboration with The Muppets.) So, when Criticlasm mentioned his appreciation of Kahn's final screen performance, I knew I need to take the time to see...

...Madeline Kahn in Judy Berlin (1999)
approximately 20 minutes and 41 seconds
15 scenes
roughly 22% of film's total running time

Madeline Kahn plays Alice Gold, a Long Island housewife discovering the insecurities within the very secure life she's led as wife (to an elementary school administrator) and mother (to a struggling filmmaker son).
At first blush, Kahn's Alice seems to be the sort of woman who never knew a silence she couldn't fill.
Her fanciful riffs and sentimental musings -- all delivered in Kahn's distinctive staccato soprano -- are dense with private jokes, whimsical memories, and melancholic vulnerabilities.
Yet as Alice uses her words to reach out to her beloved men, her chattery monologues serve only to deepen the very chasm they aim to bridge, with both her husband and son recoiling from the touch of Alice's voice. (Even the Golds' housekeeper Carol has learned to leave the vacuum cleaner turned on when Alice enters the room.)
The central event of Eric Mendelsohn's pensive film is a midday solar eclipse. This cosmic disruption to the daily order of things (aided by Jeffrey Seckendorf's luminous cinematography) also transforms the ordinary landscape of this ordinary suburb into something suddenly extraordinary. And for Mendelsohn, whose style of storytelling seems steeped in the style of Woody Allen's comic tragedies of domesticity, this eclipse operates as a narrative device for his characters to encounter previously unseen corners of their own hearts. During the eclipse Alice's husband and son undertake parallel, vaguely romantic encounters with, respectively, a prickly schoolteacher and her exuberant daughter. In contrast, Alice's eclipse odyssey is largely a solitary one. As she explores the newly unfamiliar streets of her neighborhood, Alice amuses herself with a running, unfunny joke about being a space man walking the moon.
As Alice experiences the eclipse, first with her housekeeper and then a neighbor and finally alone, Kahn's performance quietly reveals that Alice's melancholy estrangement from her husband and son might be more complicated than anyone yet knows. Mendelsohn's screenplay charts Alice's character arc through her struggle to remember the final lines of a nursery rhyme (a poem which, not insignificantly, rhapsodizes about unknowability and age). Recitation after recitation stalls at the same line and no on seems to have any idea what poem she's talking about. Only when Alice is walking alone in the silence of the eclipse do the poem's final lines arrive to her and, with them, a quiet clarity. Here, Kahn's particular gifts as a performer suit the subtle challenges presented by the role of Alice. In particular, Kahn's verbal agility -- a tippling voice capable of astounding precision and dexterity -- coupled with the comedienne's veiled vulnerability make Alice a haunting and moving figure.
Kahn's Alice knows that her husband is becoming lost to her or -- perhaps more frighteningly -- vice versa. And though the film never answers the question of whether or not this intimate estrangement is due to middle-class-middle-age malaise or something more ominous (like Alzheimer's or mental illness), Kahn's performance itself provides the simple cues that Alice knows that she's on the verge of disappearing -- of forgetting or losing touch with the reality she has shared with her family and community. As I read Madeline Kahn's performance, I see her Alice as a woman who knows that she's losing touch (think of the way she privately fumes when her neighbor penetrates her reverie with a reminder of something she's forgotten) whether through Alzheimer's or some other mental change. Further, Kahn's Alice seems to understand that the one person who might help maintain her connection to this world is her husband, Arthur, a man as terrified of the changes in his wife and son as he is of those in himself. It seems to me that Kahn's Alice alone appreciates the gravity of this estrangement, especially as the eclipse heightens Alice's lucidity about her stark circumstances.
When I think of Kahn's performance Alice, I think of a balloon slowly descending to the ground: she begins all silly and exciting, bouncing at the corners of the ceiling, but as the movie unfolds her buoyancy diminishes and she comes close to touching the ground. Yet her lightness remains.
Madeline Kahn's work in Judy Berlin is gorgeous in its simplicity and humanity. Alice has little of the galvanic potency of Barbara Barrie's brittle schoolteacher; nor does Alice burst with the exuberant faith of Edie Falco's Judy. Yet Kahn's Alice moors the emotional arc of the whole film with a wit, a poignancy and a stability that is transcendent. It's a sublimely discreet performance, ripe with mystery and teeming with humor: a moving exit for one of the greater actresses at the edges of the 2oth century.

Blessings, dear Madeline.