Laurette Taylor/Amanda Wingfield
The greatest performance in the history of the American theatre?
Robert Gottlieb in The New Yorker, October 18, 2013
“…the true rapture was reserved for the play’s star, Laurette Taylor, reappearing after a difficult interlude of alcoholism, but still a revered name in the theatre. Her biggest success, decades earlier, had been in the comedy ‘Peg O’My Heart,’ which she performed for years both in New York and around the country, and in a movie adaptation. Now, as Amanda Wingfield, first in Chicago and then on Broadway, she emerged as an actress without peer, her performance referred to again and again as the greatest ever by an American actor. When I saw her, I knew it was the finest acting I had ever seen, and, more than sixty-five years later, I still feel that way. But why? What did she do that made her acting so unforgettable?
“She simply didn’t act. Or so it appeared. She wasn’t an actress; she was a tired, silly, irritating, touching, fraught, aging woman with no self-awareness, no censor for her ceaseless flow of words, no sense of the effect she was having on her children—or the audience. It was as if you were listening in on the stream of her consciousness. Her self-pitying yet valiant voice, reflecting both the desperation of her situation and the faded remnants of her Southern-belle charm, was maddening, yet somehow endearing. You wanted to hug her, to swat her, to run from her—in other words, you reacted to her just the way her son, Tom, did.
“The crucial thing was the absolute naturalism: her acting wasn’t ‘realistic’—that is, like real life. It was real life. The production was in some ways stagey, but there wasn’t a touch of staginess about her. She knew exactly what she was doing, though; she just didn’t want you to know what she was doing. What she deplored, she once wrote, was when ‘you can see the acting.’
“Here are some of the things people in the theatre have had to say about her performance:
“Patricia Neal: ‘The greatest performance I have ever seen in all my life.’
“Hal Prince: ‘I knew when I watched it and I sat in the balcony, you’ll never see greater acting as long as you live.’
“Charles Durning: ‘I thought they pulled her off the street. She was … so natural.’
“Martin Landau: It ‘was absolutely like this woman had found her way into the theatre, through the stage door, and was sort of wandering around the kitchen.’
“Fred Ebb: ‘Laurette Taylor turned around and pulled down her girdle, and I have never been that affected by a stage action in my whole life. It made me weep.’
“Maureen Stapleton: ‘Oh boy … I can’t describe what she did or how she did it, but boy …. ‘
“Marian Seldes went to see her four times, Uta Hagen five times.
“And Tennessee Williams himself: ‘Of course I consider her the greatest artist of her profession that I have known…. In this unfathomable experience of ours, there are sometimes hints of something that lies outside flesh and its mortality. I suppose these intuitions come to many people in their religious vocations, but I have sensed them more clearly in the work of artists, and most clearly of all in the work of Laurette Taylor. There was a radiance about her art which I can compare only to the greatest lines of poetry, and which gave me the same shock of revelation, as if the air about us had been momentarily broken through by light from some clear space around us.’”
Text @TheNewYorker