Leading Actress 1962

Wow, a bunch of heavy names I recognize here. Should be a really great year for this category, fingers crossed.

1962 Best Actress

Anne Bancroft - The Miracle Worker

This project has made me a big fan of Anne Bancroft and made me realize she is a legitimately great actress. I always just kinda knew her as Mrs. Robinson and the husband of Mel Brooks and that was the extent. But she is utterly fantastic in everything I have seen her in during this project. That's why I wanted to do this thing in the first place. Bancroft is one of the very few actors to win the triple crown of acting which is a Tony, Oscar, and Emmy. Not quite the EGOT, but very impressive regardless. Bancroft's second, yes second, Tony Award win was for playing this same role of Anne Sullivan on Broadway. It's honestly no surprise that she won the Oscar here because both her and Patty Duke have this great chemistry and you can tell they are comfortable in their roles. Bancroft is the teacher that helps Duke's Helen Keller come out of her shell by teaching her to communicate. It's a frustrating role to watch in a good way. Duke is combative and thrashes about for most of the film and you just kinda feel like she is never going to learn how to communicate. But then she does and it's a feel good moment. Bancroft up until that time is determined and stubborn and exhausted and exasperated and just plain focused on getting through to Helen. Everyone will point out the long food fight scene for good reason because there are only two words spoken the whole time yet so much is communicated between Bancroft and Duke in this scene. It's incredible acting and a true Oscar moment for both. I also like how Bancroft reminds me of Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove with the glasses she wears sometimes throughout the film. Not nearly as funny, though. It's just a strong performance for me. There are a lot of frustrations with what's going on because we want Helen to get it and for Anne to succeed and both actors suck you in to rooting for them. Bancroft is great in the role and she should be considering her pedigree with it, but also just enjoyable from an acting perspective.

Bette Davis - What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Ah, Bette Davis. We will be seeing a lot of her eventually, but I feel like for a lot of people this is her most recognizable role. She plays the crazy Baby Jane Hudson, a washed up child star living with her crippled sister who was the bigger star in the family, played by Joan Crawford. Their actual real life feud is well documented, so its interesting to me that they would appear in the same film together, especially one like this. Davis goes full bore into the role. She created her own wild makeup look which has become somewhat iconic now. You can see her picture and know exactly who and what the film is without ever having seen it. This film also helped usher in the psycho biddy film genre where older actresses who were once prominent then terrorize those around them. I feel like all of this is because of how intensely Davis took this role and created something very memorable. I actually really like her acting style, too. It's almost as if this crazy woman wandered on set and just started reacting to those around her. Compare it to Crawford's style which still feels old school melodramatic and Davis stands out even more. It surprised me because I was expecting something more like Crawford and instead it's a performance that feels way more fresh and modern. The way she switches from being crazy and threatening to acting like an innocent child is kind of fun to watch. We are watching an actor just go for it and create something long lasting in the process and it's a joy to witness. A very good effort from Davis and we have about nine more reviews of hers to go, which I am excited about.

Katharine Hepburn - Long Day's Journey Into Night

Katharine Hepburn. She of the twelve nominations and four, four!, wins. She won her last three nominations in 1968, 1969, and 1982. I hated her 1982 win for On Golden Pond, completely undeserved. She was awesome in 1969 for The Lion in Winter and tied with Barbra Streisand, so maybe didn't deserve that one - up for debate. Have no clue why she won for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner in 1968. So basically maybe shouldn't have won her last three nominations and only had one win. As I travel back in time, I have more chances to see if/when Hepburn should have been rewarded. This film is a film adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's play. Not really an adaptation, I guess, but just using his play straightforward word for word. It's an interesting role and performance for Hepburn. This is one of those family dramas where everyone is fucked up and the film is about how they don't discuss how fucked up each person is and just avoid confronting anything. Hepburn is a morphine addict with a super successful veteran actor husband who cheated on her a lot. Her youngest son is a drunk who is also sick with consumption. Her older son is a drunk and I guess just an overall degenerate and womanizer. Her husband is a drunk. Addiction is in the family. Hepburn's performance to me feels way too melodramatic and theatrical. She is playing to the back row and I feel this would have been great on Broadway. But she is reciting lines she memorized and rehearsed more than she is giving a lived in performance. She is all over the place and that fits the addict aesthetic but doesn't quite fit what the role is. She is just too actorly. It does fit with the rest of the film and the performances and I kinda like the direction from Sidney Lumet, but it's a filmed play. I actually think that Dean Stockwell as the younger son is the best actor of the bunch. Jason Robards is pretty great because he is 40 years old playing I think maybe 20s or 30s. Ralph Richardson is as theatrical as Hepburn is. It just really is not a natural performance. It suffers from being so calculated and rehearsed that I can't really enjoy it as much as some of these other women in this category. To make clear, she is a good actress, but I feel she doesn't have the right tone for the film and it just seems off to me. I know she can be better and I'm hoping this is a blip in her many nominations.

Geraldine Page - Sweet Bird of Youth

If you have followed this blog at all, you know I have not been very kind to Geraldine Page in my reviews of her. This is the sixth out of her eight nominations I have reviewed and I have to say that this is the best one I have seen so far. That isn't any faint praise or anything, she gives her best performance so far to me. It's a Tennessee Williams play that Page originated the role on Broadway and was nominated for a Tony Award for it. So this performance has that lived in quality where the actor is more than familiar with the role and character and it shows. Page plays a movie star who is getting away from Hollywood due to her own perceived notion that her career is over. She is a drunk and pill popper and sleeping with Paul Newman as they hide out in his hometown. She mostly just stays in her hotel room, figuring out who Newman is and where they are and coming back down from her bender. She laments her work and her life and she is a very dramatic type of person with wild mood swings, definitely the Hollywood type. Page plays all of this very well without it ever feeling melodramatic or it being too much. Her interactions with Newman are fun to watch as they are both using each other to get what they want. Page also looks the best that I have seen of her, she looks like a movie star. She plays a woman trying to figure out her life and assuage her fears and Page communicates the myriad of emotions wonderfully. It's nice that I have enjoyed one of her performances finally because I hate to dislike an actress, especially one that people consider one of the best to ever do it. Hoping her final two nominations are on this same level.

Lee Remick - Days of Wine and Roses

This is a film you could probably consider a forgotten gem. Yes, it also stars Jack Lemmon in an amazing dramatic role, but I think it feels mostly forgotten in today's film and Oscar world. Which is a shame because it's a great film. Remick plays a young woman who works as a secretary at a public relations firm and meets Lemmon and is mostly standoffish to him. I actually really enjoyed Remick early in the performance because not only was she so natural in her acting unimpressed with Lemmon, she felt refreshing in that she didn't feel like an actress from the early 60s. She felt very modern and her swatting Lemmon down at every turn was nice to see. Eventually she agrees to go out with him and he gets her to start drinking. They get married one night after getting drunk and there we see that this is a story about alcoholics. The two become heavily co-dependent on each other and the booze and we see them get into all kinds of issues because of drinking. Lemmon loses his job, there are arrests and hospital visits, Remick burns the house down while Lemmon is away. It's a greatest hits of all the terrible things that alcohol can do to two normal, functioning adults who have a great life. They have a baby and Remick actually stops drinking, but then is urged by Lemmon to do so because he misses her being drunk. This parasitic relationship is tough to watch and Remick is so good in the role. I appreciate how she plays her drunken character because it never devolves into campiness or anything theatrical or melodramatic. It feels real, especially because she is this beautiful woman who as the films goes on gets less attractive and looks like an old barfly. Both she and Lemmon have great chemistry even when drunk and watching their trainwreck unfold is mesmerizing. You can't look away even though it's pretty raw at times. And there is no happy ending, which I liked about the film. It's true to life because she doesn't magically one day become sober and all is perfect again. That's why this is a devastating performance from Remick because she is this bright, beautiful, independent woman who has a great future and alcohol utterly destroys all of that and leaves her a shell of her former self. A really strong performance from Remick that I recommend watching.


Damn, what a great year for this category! Actually kinda hard to figure out where to place everyone and now I see the limits of a ranked system. I know I was a bit harsh on Hepburn, but she is the weak link for me. Some people would probably vehemently disagree and that's okay. Just didn't think the performance meshed well with the film. Page surprised me that I actually really enjoyed her. Maybe because she was playing an actress coming off a bender that it wasn't much acting? Not saying anything about Page personally, don't know her like that, but it feels like that's a role that is easy to have fun with and make into something good. Davis was awesome. Way more modern than I anticipated and just a crazy fun performance. Man, if not for Bancroft living in that role and owning it, Remick would be an easy winner. She is so good at her role and especially playing the drunk parts, which is usually so hard to do and comes off campy. Bancroft deserved the win and I loved it. Great group of nominees and what I always want this category to be.

Oscar Winner: Anne Bancroft - The Miracle Worker
My Winner:  Anne Bancroft - The Miracle Worker
Lee Remick
Bette Davis
Geraldine Page
Katharine Hepburn