Best Actress 1967
Winner: Katharine Hepburn, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
Nominees: Anne Bancroft, The Graduate
Faye Dunaway, Bonnie and Clyde
Edith Evans, The Whisperers
Audrey Hepburn, Wait Until Dark

The Field: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★


Ranking Oscar's Ballot
 
 My Pick:
Faye Dunaway, Bonnie and Clyde ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

From There:
Anne Bancroft, The Graduate ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Bancroft often professed regret that, to the general public, she was most closely associated with her role as Mrs. Robinson, since she didn't particularly care for the performance, and nor—for reasons that Mark Harris catalogues in his wonderful book Pictures at a Revolution—was the filming of The Graduate a particularly happy experience. But, however superior Bancroft was in other films, many of which worked harder on behalf of her character than this one does, it's happy for the audience that she's here. The Graduate both thrives and stumbles on the inchoate self-absorption of Dustin Hoffman's young protagonist, of whose passivity and immaturity the film constantly reminds us. Yet there is almost no blow too low for The Graduate—with itz zippy, New Wave-ish editing and its Antonioni-made-funny habits of framing human anomie—to disparage the old in favor of the new, or the familiar at the expense of the unfinished. Look how Katharine Ross, an adept line-reader and an interesting presence, gets her performance and her character arc completely colonized by Benjamin's abrupt shifts in mood and agenda, and by the film's peremptory willingness to go along with all of them. But not so for Bancroft, who, conspiratorially with her director, but also quite palpably as her own contribution, stays living and breathing in The Graduate, autonomous if unhappily so, as a small but smoking volcano of peevish disappointment. Not for her the costume designer's infantile motifs of wild animal prints, or the film's other strategies for making her exotic, even horrible. Bancroft allows us to see that Angeleno sprawl is discontenting for other people besides young turks, and she makes that discontent real and muscly, instead of wispy and entitled. She isn't frisky as she seduces Benjamin; she's almost bored with how handily she'll be able to lure the kind of empty, rudderless boy that her suburb would produce, and annoyed when it requires a little bit of trouble, like trying to grab a slippery fish who's already quite caught. And she's tough and severe without just being caustic in the long hotel-room scene when Benjamin wants to talk, and she doesn't, though she does talk, and memorably. Bancroft makes the movie feel weighty, or at least accountable to something besides post-collegiate upstarterism and Nichols' sprightly and gifted but indulgent embrace of it. And, she's funny. In three reactions in the Taft Hotel lobby, her arc encompasses a muffled exasperation that this kid really can't do anything, then a moment of feeling flattered that she could get him so addled, and then a more pragmatic realization that he'd be out of joint with anyone, but she can at least, rather nastily, but also quite humorously, enjoy the spectacle of his horny misery. Not enough here, and even less in the script, especially in the second half, to qualify as a great performance, but she elevates the film without yanking it away from Hoffman, Nichols, or their core audience. And, much as she might have prefered otherwise, who has ever forgotten her?

Katharine Hepburn, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
As a lifelong Katharine Hepburn fan, a state of being I have already described here, I have often been regretful and even disdainful that this performance, not the ones in Alice Adams or The Philadelphia Story or Long Day's Journey into Night or several other films, finally returned her to the winner's circle. The sentiment around Spencer Tracy's passing and her own emotional and financial support of the movie basically adds up to the most extratextual, sentimental reason for rewarding any Best Actress performance this side of Mary Pickford's status as an Academy founder or Elizabeth Taylor's tracheotomy. Plus, the performance itself seems so much more limited and backgrounded than most Hepburn performances or most Best Actress-winning performances, and it includes a few miscalculations. For example, she is too overtly startled, I think, upon learning that John Prentice (Sidney Poitier) is her daughter's fiancée, above and beyond any good-liberal impersonation of equanimity, and as though she's never met a black man before. She can be coy about where in the frame she places herself and gives several of her scenes away to Tracy, to Poitier, to Cecil Kellaway, and seizes her big sendoff to her snotty, bigoted coworker as though she's been waiting to do more in other sequences. A funny thing happens, though, as one gets older, especially if one is a Hepburn fan, and the version of "herself" that she seems to play here seems like more and more of an elaborate artifice, and as the warm, spontaneous materanlism of this performance seems more and more distinct as an achievement for any screen mother, especially from a woman who had only allowed herself to play two other mothers by this point in her career: Evelyn Venable and Mary Tyrone, both of them nightmares. Much more crucially, as one ages and becomes even more aware of how stacked and clichéd and god-awful this script is, the actors' facility in endowing it with life, sometimes with charm, even with pathos, becomes even clearer. Tracy is inestimable in how far he goes to give annoyance, recalcitrance, and skepticism a fair hearing within this scenario, but no one else in the movie does what Hepburn does, playing every scene as though she's worried about the people in this predicament, in her family, rather than worrying about the politics of race and the rhetorical ambitions of the piece. In her watchfulness, brilliant listening, and illuminating shifts in manner and gaze, she personalizes relationships that the script and several of its interpreters have left totally schematic, and she reads several monologues beautifully: about her happiness at her daughter's happiness, about her conscientious objection to her husband's stance, about her memory of when she was "most helpful" to her young, struggling partner, and how that remains her favorite memory of a marriage that exists, now, mostly as memory. Beautifully judged and generous shading, even if it's a conceit of a character and by no means the most prepossessing achievement on this actor's resumé. There were better choices on this ballot, too, but I used to think that Hepburn coasted through this film, and that the Academy cheapened itself as well as the actor by honoring it. Reader, I was wrong.

Audrey Hepburn, Wait Until Dark ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
The gleaming photography and the woe-unto-Audrey scenario of Wait Until Dark conspire to make this nomination seem like an easy "get," rewarding an actress with a penchant for preciousness for withstanding the increasingly dire threats of three thugs (Richard Crenna, Alan Arkin, and Jack Weston) and for doing so in well-tailored daywear while playing blind, for God's sake. Wait Until Dark, based on a play by Frederick Knott, is one of those pieces that offers an actress a showy role and gives her lots to do without enabling her to go very far; Susy Hendrix doesn't amount to much beyond the thriller-mechanics of her entrapment, and Hepburn compounds that limitation by missing several opportunities for playing frustration, romantic ambivalence, sexual attraction to at least one of her tormenters (Crenna), a more complicated mix of attachment and reluctance to little Gloria who lives upstairs... Even in a script that dangles more around the character than it really allows her to deliver, Hepburn is a little less ambitious than she might have been. But nor is she the waifish gamin that Hepburn once was, and nor is she an entirely diaphanous construction: when Susy gets impatient with her husband's go-get-'em encouragements and blurts out, "Do I have to be the champion blind lady of the whole world?" the woman's tenacity (Susy's and also Audrey's) is momentarily gripping. She is subtler with the blind stuff than a lot of other actors before and since, and her graduating, well-justified fear that almost everyone around her is primed to kill her is nicely balanced here with the thrill of outwitting some criminals (Susy likes all this danger, just a little bit, especially when she's with Gloria). Her horror in the climactic scenes, one of them as the phone rings twice when she isn't expecting it to, another when she Forgets About The Refrigerator, consequently originates not just from the lurid scenario but from her own self-critical despair that she hasn't been smart enough, hasn't thought of everything she could have, and maybe should have. I'd have been annoyed to see Hepburn up at the winner's dais for this performance, and she'll never be in my pantheon of prefered entertainers, but it isn't the pure "filler" nomination that I had remembered. Remarkably committed to the film and the genre, and never played with evident Oscar-hunger.

Who gets your vote in this field, and on my dream ballot below? VOTE HERE!


My Favorites from 1967:

My Pick: Bibi Andersson, Persona
Nominees: Anne Bancroft, The Graduate
Nominees: Faye Dunaway, Bonnie and Clyde
Nominees: Katharine Hepburn, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
Nominees: Liv Ullmann, Persona

Honorable Mentions: Audrey Hepburn, Wait Until Dark


Gourmet Prospects: Geneviève Bujold, La Guerre est finie; Julie Christie, Far from the Madding Crowd; Sandy Dennis, Up the Down Staircase; Audrey Hepburn, Two for the Road; Larisa Kadochnikova, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors; Shirley Knight, Dutchman; Hayley Mills, The Family Way; Jeanne Moreau, Chimes at Midnight; Madhabi Mukherjee, Mahanagar (The Big City); Elizabeth Taylor, Reflections in a Golden Eye; Ingrid Thulin, La Guerre est finie

Further Research: Doris Day, Caprice; Angie Dickinson, Point Blank; Patty Duke, Valley of the Dolls; Jane Fonda, Hurry Sundown; Marcelle Hainia, Boudu Saved from Drowning; Susan Hayward, The Honey Pot; Susan Hayward, Valley of the Dolls; Barbara Jefford, Ulysses; Anna Karina, Made in U.S.A.; Sophia Loren, A Countess from Hong Kong; Shirley MacLaine, Woman Times Seven; Elaine May, Enter Laughing; Elaine May, Luv; Barbara Parkins, Valley of the Dolls; Vanessa Redgrave, Camelot; Debbie Reynolds, Divorce American Style; Rosalind Russell, Rosie!; Simone Signoret, The Deadly Affair; Maggie Smith, The Honey Pot; Inger Stevens, A Guide for the Married Man; Inger Stevens, A Time for Killing; Susan Strasberg, The Trip; Sharon Tate, The Fearless Vampire Killers; Elizabeth Taylor, The Comedians; Elizabeth Taylor, The Taming of the Shrew; Shelley Winters, Enter Laughing

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