QUESTION: Supporting Actresses in Fiction, Film & TV?

Today, I was literally stopped in my tracks by a startling realization: I can name a number of film, tv and literary accounts of female performers nominated as "Best Actress," or something similar; yet, I'm hard pressed to name even a handful of such depictions of fictional supporting actressness. I feel like I should have a better list. Can y'all help me out and add your thoughts/suggestions/recommendations in comments?

COMING ATTRACTIONS - Supporting Actress Smackdown - 1993

Thanks once again to ALEX (of Alex in Movieland & My Latest Oscar Film) we can whet our actressexual appetites for this weekend's Supporting Actress Smackdown, featuring the nominated Supporting Actresses for 1992.

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The Smackdown's scheduled to post at noon or thereabouts this Sunday (U.S. time). See you there!

Programming Note: SAS Profile Routine

Lovely reader. Due to a variety of factors (mostly an important looming deadline, but also the pressures of other competing writing obligations and the fact that today's my birthday), I have elected NOT to push to publish today's profile. This decision has impelled several other similar decisions. First, the Smackdown for 1993 will continue next week, even though most of the profiles have not been published. Second, we'll proceed into whatever year is finally selected for October. Third, there will be no Smackdown for November, and I will use that time to catch up on profiles from this and next month. The plan for December remains an open question, as is my overall strategy for 2010. Don't mean to disappoint, but that seems to be the direction things are heading. Thanks for your continued attention/support. xo.StinkyLulu

Enjoy That Cake! (Celebrating the Sophia Sisterhood!)

enjoy that cake!

Happy Birthday, Sophia!

From The Sophia Sisterhood

"Moist Moments with Mandy" - Yentl (1983) - Assorted Moments of Random Cinematic Hotness

This post is part of my ir/regular series, featuring screencaps of "Assorted Random Cinematic Hotness" encountered during my home movie adventures...

Moist Moments with Mandy
Yentl (1983)

This single sequence...

...is responsible for an irrational (and sometimes tedious) crush...

...on Mandy Patinkin...

...which -- alas -- survives to this day.

Thanks, Babs.

VOTE: OCTOBER's Supporting Actress Sundays!

Continuing a tradition that began in 2007, when an accident of timing permitted me to profile Judith Anderson's performance in Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca on Halloween week, I'll be devoting October's Supporting Actress Sundays to the variously monstrous, haunting and thrilling performances nominated in the category (they're the ones with the underlines). So, in anticipation of October thrills, I ask...

What year deserves the focus
for OCTOBER'S month of
Supporting Actress Sundays?

1937: Alice Brady in In Old Chicago, Andrea Leeds in Stage Door, Anne Shirley in Stella Dallas, Claire Trevor in Dead End, May Whitty in Night Must Fall.
1946: Ethel Barrymore in The Spiral Staircase, Anne Baxter in The Razor's Edge, Lillian Gish in Duel in the Sun, Flora Robson in Saratoga Trunk, Gale Sondergaard in Anna and the King of Siam.
1956: Mildred Dunnock in Baby Doll, Eileen Heckart in The Bad Seed, Dorothy Malone in Written on the Wind, Mercedes McCambridge in Giant, Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed.
1960: Glynis Johns in The Sundowners, Shirley Jones in Elmer Gantry, Shirley Knight in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Janet Leigh in Psycho, Mary Ure in Sons and Lovers.
1964: Gladys Cooper in My Fair Lady, Edith Evans in The Chalk Garden, Grayson Hall in The Night of the Iguana, Lila Kedrova in Zorba the Greek, Agnes Moorehead in Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte.
1968: Lynn Carlin in Faces, Ruth Gordon in Rosemary's Baby, Sondra Locke in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Kay Medford in Funny Girl, Estelle Parsons in Rachel, Rachel.
1973: Linda Blair in The Exorcist, Candy Clark in American Graffiti, Madeline Kahn in Paper Moon, Tatum O'Neal in Paper Moon, Sylvia Sidney in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams.
1987: Norma Aleandro in Gaby - A True Story, Anne Archer in Fatal Attraction, Olympia Dukakis in Moonstruck, Anne Ramsey in Throw Momma From the Train, Ann Sothern in The Whales of August.

Let your voice be heard by voting fairly in the column at right or by clicking HERE.

Anna Paquin in The Piano (1993) - Supporting Actress Sunday

It's suffered some delay (and will likely see something like a marathon in the next ten days or so) but, with this post, Supporting Actress Sundays for 1993 have officially begun. And we begin, as we always do, with the winner -- who just happens to be among Oscar's most precocious. As I noted in a post a while back about "Precocious Supporting Actressness," assessing performances by kid actors can present special challenge. But with this week we happen to have a (still) young actress who has defied all the cliches to develop a career that might just be one of the most distinguished among her fellow nominees, an all the more remarkable accomplishment when we recall that she took home the trophy at age 11 for her film debut. So without further ado: let's consider the abundantly precocious, trophy-snagging work of...

...Anna Paquin in The Piano (1993)
approximately 37 minutes and 35 seconds
61 scenes
roughly 31% of film's total running time

Anna Paquin plays Flora McGrath, the tenaciously devoted daughter of the silent Ada (Holly Hunter, in a stunning performance).
Ada's just been married off to a New Zealand settler and Paquin's Flora is along for the ride, serving as her mother's translator as the two journey from Scotland and arrive in this astonishing "new" land.
Paquin's Flora is a precocious child, to say the least. Her mother's love buoys Flora, even as her mother's dependence fortifies the child's unusual confidence and certitude. Moreover, Flora's a girl as yet unfettered by the stymying self-consciousness of adolescence.
The combination establishes Flora as a significant force to be reckoned with amidst a narrative fraught with charged intimacies.
The construction of the character of Flora is among director Jane Campion's deftest strokes in a film lush with cinematic mastery.
See, the character of Flora, when it comes right down to it, functions as a plot device (a mechanism through which crucial information is conveyed and essential action is impelled).
Yet, Campion -- in Flora -- has crafted an utterly plausible character: a smart, creative and witty person entirely capable of doing everything the narrative requires of her while still behaving as a smallish child.
Moreover, Campion and Paquin permit Flora's conflict to be a simple one: she's used to having her mother all to herself and she's not especially happy when she must share her with not just one but two other people.
This choice on Campion's part -- creating a bold, complicated kid character but anchoring it within a sublimely simple character arc -- permits the kid actor Paquin to do "behave" as Flora rather than "act" each scene.
It's a risky "turn 'em loose" strategy for directing a kid actor but one which, at least here, elicits a captivating -- by turns sweet, silly, and serious -- performance from Paquin. Campion does not ask Paquin's Flora to provide the cutesy commentary for the film, nor does she depend on the char/actor to stir easy sentiment. Rather, as perhaps the most decisive character in the narrative (and the only character implicitly trusted by everyone else, for better or worse), Paquin's Flora becomes an active ingredient in the curious chemistry experiment Campion stages in The Piano, a supporting kid character that both serves the narrative requirements of the film while somehow feeling uncontrived.
Campion's clarity is all the more admirable for the ways she refuses the easy out of letting blame hover over the "blameless child". Campion neither absolves Flora for her actions, nor does she punish Flora for her part in the intimate tragedy.
Paquin's Flora is simply (like all the major characters in this film) complicated and flawed, capable of great kindness and great cruelty -- she's never "just" a kid.
As an actor, Paquin's clearly following a script (and Campion's meticulous direction) at the same that she is improvising Flora's reality in each moment.
Paquin inhabits the character with alacrity and verve, her chattery vocality creating the film's most memorable non-musical soundings. And while I think it would be a mistake to call Paquin's performance "natural" (as this is clearly a sculpted and shaped performance), Paquin's work in the role maintains an ease and spontaneity that remains impressive.
Anna Paquin's performance as Flora is an essential component of Jane Campion's extraordinary, enigmatic and haunting film and it might just be some of -- if not the -- best work by a kid actress "actressing at the edges" of the category in the 70+ years since its inception.

Hurry Up and Wait!

I'm sure Anna Paquin's got something to say about this week's Supporting Actress Sunday profile being delayed, but such is the way of things when StinkyLulu chooses to go to the mountains (instead of to the screening cave) over the long weekend.

In the meantime, witness the precocity.

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Supporting Actress Sundays for SEPTEMBER '09: 1993

Hear ye, hear ye -- September's month of Supporting Actress Sundays will devote its attention to...

1993

Oscar's Supporting Actresses for 1993 are:

Holly Hunter in The Firm
Anna Paquin in The Piano
Rosie Perez in Fearless
Winona Ryder in The Age of Innocence
Emma Thompson in In the Name of the Father

Supporting Actress Smackdown for 1993:
Sunday, September 27.
Featuring a Smackdown panel of 6 or 7 Smackdowners TBA.
(Contact StinkyLulu via email
to express interest/availability for Smackdowner service.)

So we've got a brave tart, a precocious tot, a grieving mother, a sweet young thing, and a steely dame. Sounds like a fairly standard roster of Supporting Actressness to me, but we'll see what shakes out as the profiling begins (if not next Sunday, then soon thereafter).

Hopelessly Devoted - StinkyLulu's List of 20 Adored Actors

As you well know, lovely reader, I tend to reserve this space for actresses. But every so often an opportunity arrives that instigates me to a serious contemplation of their male counterparts (aka "actors"). This week, Nathaniel of The Film Experience posed just such a challenge. So, in no particular order, please enjoy the actors to whom I remain forever devoted, pictured in the roles that carved their special place in my actressexual heart.

Can YOU name the actor?
Can you name the ROLE?
WITHOUT imdb?

Can YOU name the actor?
Can you name the ROLE?
WITHOUT imdb?