The Geraldine Page Centennial

Today would have been the 100th birthday of the great stage and screen actress Geraldine Page (1924-1987). This is the second of a projected trio of pieces I’m doing the mark the occasion. The first was about the series of centennial screenings her children are presenting at Torn Page, their art space in her old townhouse. The third (knock wood) will be a conversation about her life and art with her talented progeny. And today, one of my customary Travalanche type tributes.

Many or most photographs of Page on the internet (matching her roles) stress a Plain Jane quality; she was known for Ugly Duckling character parts. But one can also find a goodly amount of glamour shots, especially from her early career, which sell her as a convincing and vivacious beauty, even a Marilyn style sexpot. I loved and chose the one above because, for me, it cuts right down the middle, demonstrates her potential for heading in either direction.

As contrasted with the British, we don’t have too many lady chameleons in American show biz, nor that many male ones either, for that matter. Hollywood has conditioned audiences to the star system, where actors are expected to the same fairly uninteresting thing every time they step in front a camera. I find it mind-numbingly boring but apparently it’s good enough for people who like to get a good night’s rest 24/7. For me, playing a wide variety of characters, as diverse and specific and eccentric as possible, is the whole shmear, the entire reason theatre exists in the first place. And that’s what Geraldine Page contributed. Her list of significant roles is incredible. People really ought to drop her name the way they did with Ethel Barrymore or Helen Hayes when they speak of the giants…but no one does that anymore. But her Oscar, her two Emmys, and four Tony nominations were surely some consolation.

Raised in Chicago, Page got her first theatrical experience in church productions of Little Women and Excuse My Dust (the latter best remembered as a Red Skelton comedy). She attended the Goodman School of Drama, and then came to New York, where she studied with Uta Hagen for seven years, followed by years of instruction with Lee Strasberg at the Actor’s Studio.

She first attracted attention for her performance in Jose Quintero’s 1952 off-Broadway revivial of Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke, a role she would reprise in the 1961 film. Her first substantial screen role was in the excellent John Wayne western Hondo(1953), for which she was nominated for an Oscar. But Hollywood studios were queasy about employing her due to her leftist associations, so throughout the ’50s she worked mostly in live television drama and on Broadway. Stage roles from this time included The Immoralist (1954) with a young James Dean (with whom she had an affair), the original production of The Rainmaker (1955), and the original production of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). During the latter production she met actor Rip Torn. Both reprised their roles in the 1962 screen version. They married the following year.

Selected screen credits include Toys in the Attic (1963), Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), stage and screen versions of The Three Sisters (1964, 1966), Truman Capote’s The Thanksgiving Visitor (1969), Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1968), The Beguiled (1971), Pete ‘n’ Tillie (1972), The Day of the Locust (1975), Disney’sThe Rescuers (1977), Woody Allen’s Interiors (1978), The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984), her Oscar winning turn in The Trip to Bountiful (1985), screen adaptations of Richard Wright’sNative Son (1986) and Synge’sRiders to the Sea (1986).

Amongst these screen performances there were occasionsal stage triumphs such as the Broadway premier of Absurd Person Singular (1974) and Agnes of God (1982), and the short-lived but historically important Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), the last Tennessee Williams play to premiere on Broadway during the playwright’s lifetime. At the time of her death by a heart attack in 1987, she was starring in a Broadway revival of Noel Coward’sBlithe Spirit. When you look at her list of credits during those final years (there are many I didn’t list here) it’s no wonder her heart stopped. She was carrying a big workload for a woman of 62.

Most heartening to me in looking down her list of credits is the level of quality control she was able to maintain. Yes, I’ve presented a selective list, but among the many credits I didn’t mention there is almost no dreck. Almost everything she chose to do reflected taste, discretion, deliberation, integrity. Why aren’t more actors able to match that high bar of standards?