The Twilight of the Goddesses:
Hollywood Actresses
in the 1960s

From its inception at the end of World War I, the Hollywood "star system" was predicated on packaging talent in ways that increased the likelihood for producers and distributors to maximize the opportunity for market control by promoting a movie on the basis of its stars and their celebrity status. Over the decades, the presence of star players in a movie would reliably attract audiences into movie theaters. The serious dislocations for production and the eroding audience in the theatrical exhibition sector confronting the American feature film industry by the early 1960s at first was interpreted as heightening the stakes for presenting established stars to audiences. For a time at the very beginning of the decade, the movie industry invested greater hopes in the effectiveness of "star power."

Hollywood stardom itself, of course, was based on assumptions not clearly defined about a particular kind of screen presence. The cinema in the United States had never developed the traditions of Great Britain and Europe, where actors and actresses crossed easily back and forth between stage and screen. Hollywood thespians normally had far less formal acting training than their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic. Indeed, an actor's capacity to transform into new and different characters had arguably been less important in Hollywood than the capacity of a screen player to fit into type. Central to an effective screen portrayal was the physical image on screen, which evoked an audience response that appeared to be based heavily on anticipation and the easy recognition of identifiable traits.¹

During the 1960s, actresses in particular found that it was very difficult to navigate the murky waters of sustained success in Hollywood. It remains a challenging question to what extent this situation was caused by the changing motion-picture production environment, the changing tastes of the audiences, or the values of the counterculture that flourished among college-age adults during the final few years of the decade. Moreover, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the challenges confronted by major American screen actresses must have had something to do with changing attitudes toward women, their work, their sexuality, and their place in American society during the decade.

By the late 1960s, a woman's right to sexual pleasure was more widely acknowledged, at least among the younger generation of Americans, and was facilitated by the relatively commonplace availability and use of the birth control pill. This fact in itself, however, did not mean that the "sexual revolution" was truly about sexual equality for women. The sexual revolution constituted a demonstrable shift in behavioral mores that did not necessarily redefine gender roles. Moreover, the more politicized forms of protest of the late 1960s were not inherently based on greatly altered concepts of masculinity and femininity. Women were active in the ranks of the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and other counterculture causes, yet all of these movements were led by men. Feminism as a movement had not yet become a major factor in American society. In fact, the rhetoric of protest, from the 1968 sanitation workers strike in Memphis, Tennessee-led by Martin Luther King, Jr., right before his assassination-to the exhortations of the Chicago Seven, to the confrontational style of the Black Panthers, to activism in the antiwar movement, was decidedly traditional. The picketing city sanitation employees in Memphis carried placards proclaiming "I Am a Man!," and other political protesters on the left in the 1960s, as distinguished from flower children, assumed public postures of toughness and militancy.²

The central historical questions of just how much, with whom, and how quickly attitudes and perceptions toward gender evolved in America during the 1960s are impossible to unravel. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, challenged stereotypes of femininity and questioned the concept of "proper roles" for women in society. Nonetheless, even those who read Friedan and agreed with her were still inclined toward a reasonable interpretation of her book as a forum on consciousness as a matter of personal change, rather than one setting a clear feminist political agenda. It was not until 1971 that Germaine Greer's bestseller The Female Eunuch, by arguing precisely that the personal was political, shifted the concept of women's liberation clearly to a collective political action. Thus, it was left to a later period, after the 1960s, for the full thrust of feminism to emerge in America. For all its claims to liberation and radical transformation, the late 1960s was neither especially hospitable to women's claims for equality in society, nor did the era prove to be amenable to the screen careers of Hollywood actresses. Moreover, the social and cultural upheaval of the last several years of the 1960s raised questions about whether the fundamental ethos and social reality of the American counterculture was more about hedonistic self-indulgence, or about liberating all men and women. Aspects of the 1960s counterculture remained disturbingly close to the hindsight of the neo-conservative social critic Wendy Shalit, who argued that "any society that has declared war on embarrassment" is one that is essentially hostile to women. The cultural imperative to "do your own thing" and a widespread emphasis in society upon "letting it all hang out" might well be so interpreted.³

Screen stars and their roles convey powerful gender images. The demographics of an increasingly younger audience for movies is assumed to mean that a greater portion of that audience becomes interested in depictions of maleness and femininity because of their own concern with their emerging social roles as young men and women. Nonetheless, it can also be argued that even Hollywood stars who are cast by type are not necessarily being seen by movie viewers as standing in for gender roles in real life. The stars may be types whom audiences are inclined to interpret sociologically beyond the films in which they appear, but, more importantly, they function as precise dramatic personae, rather than as gender emblems in their actual screen playing. In addition, as with all phenomena of culture and their interpretation, even the most clearly defined stars and screen types still remain open to conflicting, and frequently contradictory, interpretations.

DORIS DAY One female type that appeared set to survive the 1950s and move relatively unscathed into the early 1960s was the chaste and wholesome female image portrayed by Doris Day. With her box-office appeal still firmly in place, Day was in a position by 1961 to negotiate a multi-picture deal with Columbia Pictures that would utilize her husband, Marty Melcher, as producer for her films.⁴ As Hollywood's outstanding female box-office draw in each year from 1962 to 1965,⁵ Day was a success held to be based primarily on her physical looks. She was widely considered to personify a "girl next door" type, and this image was closely linked with cultural attitudes and conventions associated with the 1950s that continued through the first half of the next decade.⁶

Although Day's typical character can easily be dismissed as a stereotype of the 1950s virgin, her popularity and staying power in the movies suggests something more authentic and complex.⁷ It is notable, moreover, that Day's box-office appeal through the early 1960s was global, which makes it at least somewhat problematic to maintain that her continuing effectiveness on screen was based solely on a shallow reflection of mainstream American cultural values in the period immediately following World War II.⁸ As the critic Molly Haskell argues in her seminal study of female images in the movies, From Reverence to Rape (1974), there is "something here beneath the plot contrivances [of Day's movies], and something in Doris Day, that is truer to the American reality than most critics would like to admit." Her characters' virginity was less emblematic as an expression of middle-class values than it was a comedic device invariably integral to the obstacle course encountered by Day's characters. As Haskell observed further, many of Day's films could be interpreted plausibly as going against the grain of the 1950s' concept of motherhood, since in the majority of them her character's right not to be a mother is steadfastly asserted.

Day's strength was her singular interpretation of "naturalness," which she was able to reliably exploit over and over again. Day's was a calculated characterization that resulted not only in chaste portrayals, but which also counterpointed her character to Hollywood's other great female stereotype of the late 1950s-the sex goddess. Nowhere is this counterpoint more clear than in Day's performance in THE THRILL OF IT ALL! (1963), which satirizes a Marilyn Monroe look-alike who slithers out of a bubble bath to give a panting, nearly breathless, advertising pitch. Unimpressed, however, a group of soap company executives decide that they prefer Day's character's straightforward testimonial to how she got her children to wash with their product.⁹

A nurturing Doris Day (here with Brian Keith in WITH SIX
You GET EGGROLL) modified her screen image and played a
role to fit the changing times in 1968.

Interestingly, although Day was number one on a list of Hollywood's "ten most profitable stars" for each of the years from 1960 to 1965, she did not even make the list for the years 1966 to 1970.¹⁰ In her case, the "decade split" was absolutely clear. Moviegoers of the early 1960s adored her; those of the late 1960s did not. Turning increasingly to television work after 1965, Day managed to maintain a prominent place in the pantheon of American popular culture icons, appealing primarily to an older audience while becoming a prime target for ridicule by cultural critics and a substantial number of young adult moviegoers. After having left the big screen for the relative security of television, Day adjusted her on-screen image by playing the mother of an eighteen-year-old son in WITH SIX YOU GET EGGROLL (1968, produced by CBS television's feature film division).¹¹ Originally titled There's a Man in Mommy's Bed, the movie featured a rock music score by the Grass Roots and a script that had, as a Variety review noted somewhat incredulously, Day's character "bedding down" with her boyfriend (played by Brian Keith) before their marriage.¹²

MARILYN MONROE The exact opposite of Doris Day's screen image was embodied in Marilyn Monroe, who reached the peak of her career in SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959), a well-crafted comedy directed by Billy Wilder. Over the next several years, however, her film career and her life unraveled. In THE MISFITS (1961, John Huston), the last film that Monroe completed, she co-starred with Clark Gable while working in a constant stupor from drugs and alcohol. THE MISFITS was a superbly shot (the director of photography was James Wong Howe) "anti-western" about the twilight of the American frontier that ends with a symbolic round-up of wild mustangs for slaughter. What could have been a strong and dark film is compromised by a verbose and glib screenplay by Arthur Miller (Monroe's husband at the time). THE MISFITS will be remembered primarily as the final screen appearance of two Hollywood legends, Monroe and Gable.

Marilyn Monroe's last appearance on screen came in THE
MISFITS (1961).

By the beginning of the 1960s, Marilyn Monroe appeared to many observers of the Hollywood scene as being burdened by her celebrity, and her reputation in the industry was becoming increasingly negative. Monroe, who had been considered difficult to work with for a number of years, was by then regarded as a disruptive individual on sets and as an irresponsible and unreliable talent. On June 8, 1962, after weeks of difficulties and missed shooting days (she had shown up for only twelve of the thirty-five days for which she had been on call), Monroe was fired from SOMETHING'S GOT TO GIVE, in which she had been cast opposite Dean Martin. Two months later she was found dead in her home. On orders from Police Chief William Parker, the Los Angeles County coroner declared her death a suicide.¹³

In death, Monroe's image was to become tragic, fueled by consistent media attention, speculation about her relationships with President John F. Kennedy and his bother, Robert, as well as subsequent artistic exploitation of her by the artist Andy Warhol and the writer Norman Mailer. While Monroe may not have been considered a great beauty by the standards of other eras, her screen image during the 1950s had captured a sensuality that came to be considered iconic. She had been at her best in those roles in which her characters toyed cleverly with the notion of the sultry dumb blond, with THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH (1955) and SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959). Monroe remains a figure largely definitive of the 1950s and the blossoming of the international influence of American popular culture in the non-communist countries of the world. Her screen persona was developed during the 1950s and became emblematic of that decade because it appealed to what many cultural historians recognized as America's fundamentally Puritan roots. Her vibrant and vivid image was fraught with contradictions. Primary among them was that her sexuality evoked deeper fears about our natures while simultaneously promising that sex could be innocent and without danger. The nude photo of Monroe that graced the pages of the first edition of Playboy magazine in 1953 can be seen as a beacon of sensuality anticipating the subsequent sexual revolution of the 1960s.¹⁴

After her death, Monroe was celebrated in ways having little to do directly with her films. Seen either as a symbol of 1950s tastes, or as a precursor of the sexual revolution, or as a "camp" icon, Monroe was quickly transformed into a subject of both adoration and satire that was quite unique, even in the emerging celebrity culture of the United States. In the process, fascination with her life and loves off-screen and a fixation with her photographic image in itself soon transcended any real consideration of even her successful roles on screen. Monroe was placed in an odd pantheon in which she was celebrated as an embodiment of American popular culture during the two decades following World War II and simultaneously portrayed as one of its most prominent victims. Ultimately, her image became a caricature much in the way that Elvis Presley's had after his death. Her influence on American screen actresses in the 1960s was largely to turn them away from the image that Monroe had crafted. Following Monroe's death, Hollywood screen stars tended to nourish screen personas that were psychologically far more complex than hers and visual appearances that were far less simplistically sensual.

JANET LEIGH AND JOANNE WOODWARD Two actresses who had done extremely well during the 1950s, Janet Leigh and Joanne Woodward, both entered the 1960s as the spouses of Hollywood male stars of roughly equal prominence, Tony Curtis and Paul Newman. As Marion Crane in PSYCHO (1960, Alfred Hitchcock), Leigh earned a supporting actress Academy Award nomination for her character, who is stabbed to death sooner than halfway through the film. In this role, Leigh played in one of the great "turning point" films of cinema history, and also reached the apex of her own Hollywood career. She and Tony Curtis divorced in 1962 after a decade of marriage, and she married a stockbroker. Her remaining films in the 1960s were THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1963, John Frankenheinier), BYE, BYE BIRDIE (1963, George Sidney), AN AMERICAN DREAM (1966, Robert Gist), and HARPER (1966, Jack Smight).

In her most accomplished role among these, the thirty-six year-old Leigh was cast as an "oldster" alongside Dick Van Dyke in BYE BYE BIRDIE. They manage the career of a teen rock idol named Conrad Birdie, who performs a swivel-hipped send-up of an Elvis Presley-type rock singer. Leigh and Van Dyke are soon deeply engaged in plotting the pivotal event of the film, and of Birdie's life and career, by setting up a last kiss for Conrad with his middle-American sweetheart, played by Ann-Margret, before he departs for military service. While there was parody, of course, in describing Leigh as an oldster in her BYE BYE BIRDIE role, there was also a telling reality about the way in which Hollywood still perceived aging female screen talent. By her mid-thirties, an actress might well be considered past her prime. In contrast, Leigh's ex-husband, Tony Curtis, a year older than her, was still starring in major roles as late as 1968 with his portrayal of the confessed killer Albert de Salvo in THE BOSTON STRANGLER (directed by Richard Fleischer) and finding supporting parts into the 1980s.

Joanne Woodward in RACHEL, RACHEL (1968) directed by
husband Paul Newman.

Similarly, in 1963, when Joanne Woodward was thirty-three and honored at Graumann's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard with a ceremony during which she ritualistically placed her hand prints in wet cement, her movie acting career appeared to most pundits to already have passed its peak and to be headed for a normal decline in the Hollywood profession.¹⁵ Never considered conventionally beautiful, Woodward had managed a difficult role in THE STRIPPER that same year, playing a part originally intended for Marilyn Monroe. To nearly everyone' surprise, however, Woodward marked a significant professional triumph five years later by playing a middle- aged woman trying to break out of her role as a small-town spinster in RACHEL, RACHEL (1968), directed by her husband, Paul Newman, whose own acting career was on the upswing (the couple's young daughter, Nell, was cast in the movie as well). Woodward garnered an Academy Award nomination for best actress even though many traditionalists in the industry dismissed the performance as a "character" portrayal. Other observers, however, recognized immediately the skill that Woodward displayed in handling this role. Her performance as a spinster school teacher trying to break out of the boredom and frustration of her life was seen by them as an example of stunning and mature acting because Woodward worked so hard and so successfully to keep her own distinctive, personal mannerisms tightly in check. In this sense, she was playing directly against the more glamorous persona of her earlier screen career that had been established during the 1950s.¹⁶

Woodward's career was believed to have peaked a decade earlier. In 1957 she won an Academy Award for best actress in THE THREE FACES OF EVE (Nunnally Johnson), and then played in two films, THE LONG, HOT SUMMER (1958, Martin Ritt) and, opposite Newman, in RALLY 'ROUND THE FLAG, Boys! (1958, Leo McCarey). In RACHEL, RACHEL, Woodward marked her transformation into a more mature screen presence by demonstrating her adeptness at doing something that relatively few female stars in Hollywood history had managed up until that time. Nonetheless, Woodward's career from 1968 on provides a stunning contrast to Paul Newman's that was emblematic of the gender difference for acting talent in feature films. While her husband could plunge ahead, playing highly dynamic and active roles in COOL HAND LUKE (1967) and BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969), and parlaying his box-office and critical successes into increasing prominence as a major Hollywood star, Woodward's career had to be defined by screen roles reserved for "mature women" alongside occasional television work. Indeed, Newman would still be starring in a forceful, masculine role as late as 1981 in FORT APACHE, THE BRONX (Daniel Petrie), where he plays a tough cop with a lover who looks to be thirty years his junior. The disparate career tracks of this talented couple, in microcosm, summarize a simple and long-standing truism about acting in Hollywood: normally, the careers of male leads could endure as much as fifteen to twenty years longer than their female counterparts.

ELIZABETH TAYLOR Among serious dramatic screen stars who had entered the decade of the 1960s at a high level of prominence and demand within the industry, only Elizabeth Taylor sustained a successful career throughout the entire decade. Janet Leigh, who had been nominated for a supporting actress Oscar for 1960, played in roles of declining importance after that, and Joanne Woodward regained prominence playing the role of a single, mature woman in a film produced and directed by her husband. Taylor's career, by contrast, was in the ascendancy, and survived the star's ill health, personal scandals, and even her starring role in that financial catastrophe, CLEOPATRA (1963).

In 1960, with the $750,000 salary that she had negotiated for her role in BUTTERFIELD 8, for which she won the first of her two Academy Awards for best actress during the 1960s, Taylor became the most important woman, with the most financial clout, in Hollywood.¹⁷ Nonetheless, Taylor was star-crossed. In the early 1960s, she struggled to survive both serious illnesses and a very public scandal caused by her romance with costar Richard Burton on the set of CLEOPATRA while she was still married to singer Eddie Fisher. As for her screen career, it was remarkable that she could rise professionally above the hostile criticism heaped on CLEOPATRA, even though she was widely faulted by the critics because of her emotional temperament and lazy work habits as having contributed to picture's runaway cost.¹⁸ Taylor was closely and inexorably associated both with the star image and the production values that made CLEOPATRA a caricature of big-budget Hollywood run amok. In one especially biting article, the critic Sybil March linked the colossal financial failure of the film directly to the "vapid performance" by Taylor and pilloried the actress as "Hollywood's last orgasm."¹⁹

Elizabeth Taylor in her Academy Award-winning performance in WHO'S AFRAID OF
VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966).

Yet, later in that same year, director Anthony Asquith wrote a compelling portrait praising Taylor's uncanny sense of rhythm and pause in all of her work.²⁰ Shortly thereafter Richard Schickel of Time magazine called Taylor Hollywood's last great star. In spite of the resonating sound of finality to his claim, he surely intended the comment as the highest level of professional praise. Whether Taylor's career in the early and mid 1960s really marked the end of a great era of screen playing or not, she personally demonstrated a startling adaptation to the new circumstances of the industry and to changing audience tastes. Taylor's greatest triumph of the 1960s came with her masterful performance in the role of a highly negative character in WHO's AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966). In this film adaptation of Edward Albee's emotional stage play, Taylor broke the long-standing and traditional dictum of a female Hollywood star by drastically aging her face and fattening her body to achieve a disheveled and slovenly look for the role of the middleaged harridan Martha. Inspired by the direction of Mike Nichols, Taylor, more importantly, transcended the mere physical appearance of the role by convincingly turning herself into an angry, frustrated, screaming, and lewd professor's wife on screen.²¹ Through a combination of her own talent and daring on the one hand, and the changing audience taste for movies in America on the other, Taylor won both critical acclaim and an Academy Award for best actress. The film gained a considerable following among the college-aged audience, who were defining a new demographic of moviegoers to which Hollywood had to appeal. Hence, Taylor's character marked a turning point for major Hollywood actresses to potentially play against type and to play against the physical attractiveness and values of character classically associated with star roles.²²

Taylor led the way among major Hollywood actresses in successfully negotiating the changing professional landscape for screen acting careers in the mid 1960s. She also led the way for herself and for her fellow professionals by demanding and getting substantial guaranteed salary commitments as well as positioning herself to play a prominent role in influencing the major decisions about a production. By the end of the 1960s Taylor's price per film had risen to $1.25 million and she was taken seriously, indeed, whenever she voiced her opinions concerning the packaging of production projects or actual artistic and technical decisions made on the set. Taylor was Hollywood's great female survivor of this turbulent decade that otherwise proved such an extraordinarily difficult and challenging one for female stars.²³

NATALIE WOOD The daughter of Hollywood set designer Nick Gurdin, Natalie Wood began her acting career as a child in 1945. By the early 1960s, Wood's adult career appeared headed on a steady upward course. Her work opposite Warren Beatty in SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS (1961) earned her an Academy Award nomination for best actress. That film was followed by WEST SIDE STORY (1961), a hit even though Wood's performance was not considered a strength by critics. During that same year, however, and immediately after her marriage to the actor Robert Wagner, she became involved in a dispute with Warner Bros. that led to the longest suspension-a full eighteen months-of any contract actor or actress in the history of Hollywood. Although the dispute was eventually resolved in Wood's favor, giving her the right to take on roles in films produced by entities other than Warner Bros., the suspension was costly to the development of her career and left many powerful men in the industry with feelings of resentment toward her.

Natalie Wood (right, with Rita Moreno) in WEST SIDE STORY before her eighteen-
month suspension by Warner Bros.

Wood returned to the screen with the leading role in LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER (1963). She played an Italian-American shop girl who becomes pregnant by a jazz musician (played by Steve McQueen) and elects to have a back-alley abortion rather than reveal the pregnancy to her parents. In a gritty production directed by Robert Mulligan, Wood gave one the strongest performances of her career. Given the naturalism of the film, which led many to place LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER on the cutting edge of what they hoped would be Hollywood's new direction, and by having tackled an especially challenging role, Wood appeared ideally positioned to prosper in a Hollywood environment where the establishment was looking for new talent and concepts to rescue it from financial doldrums caused by a downturn in production.

For the next several years, Wood's versatility was readily acknowledged in an industry known for typecasting, and she became widely regarded as a rising star in the Hollywood firmament. Wood also was one of the few women acknowledged as a major player in the new Hollywood business environment, being recognized as a powerful talent who could routinely approve directors and co-stars on her projects. She suffered a major setback, however, in THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED (1966, Sydney Pollack), which co-starred Robert Redford. Industry insiders believed that this adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play, with a screenplay co-authored by a young Francis Ford Coppola just out of graduate school at UCLA, and with cinematography by the veteran James Wong Howe, promised great critical and financial success. Those expectations were clearly dashed within a very short time of the movie's release. THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED bombed at the box office and was panned by critics.

Objectively, Wood's career should have accommodated this setback relatively easy. Both men associated with the production, Pollack and Redford, continued their upward ascent in Hollywood unscathed. By contrast, from this single professional failure, and likely driven by a complex set of underlying circumstances and personal issues, Wood entered a period of a deep psychological depression that culminated in her attempted suicide toward the end of 1966. Although her suicide attempt was successfully kept secret for many years,²⁴ after the release of THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED Wood simply disappeared from the screen until 1969. She reemerged in director/writer Paul Mazursky's attempt to capture the ethos of the sexual revolution and the attempts of suburbanites at being hip in the rollicking comedy, BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE (1969).

AUDREY HEPBURN "The chief characteristic of her skill," wrote critic Simon Brett of actress Audrey Hepburn, "is its apparent absence. The distinction between [her] and the character she is playing is almost impossible to draw, so completely does she identify with her." As a contract star at Paramount during the 1950s, Audrey Hepburn earned three Academy Award nominations that were followed by a fourth for BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S (1961). Playing Holly Golightly, an upscale Manhattan prostitute whose career is deftly disguised in the sweetened screen adaptation of the Truman Capote novel, Hepburn was aptly described as a cross between a grown-up Lolita and a teenaged Auntie Maine. Playing a party girl whose self-positing willfulness disguises her deeper insecurity marked the pinnacle of Audrey Hepburn's career. On the basis of her success in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S, Hepburn was selected over Julie Andrews-who had created the role in the stage play on Broadway in the 1950s-to play Eliza Doolittle in the musical MY FAIR LADY (1964, George Cukor). Hepburn managed to negotiate a $1 million contract for her work on the film. Subsequently, however, many critics assessed her as "awkward" in the role.²⁵

Audrey Hepburn (with co-stars "Cat" and George Peppard) in BREAKFAST AT
TIFFANY'S (1961).

In retrospect, Hepburn's "Holly Golightly" character in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S possessed a free-spiritedness and abandon that might have been seen as a precursor for the counterculture image of more independent-minded young women during the late 1960s. After MY FAIR LADY, however, Hepburn actually found Hollywood disarmingly disinterested in her as the second half of the 1960s brought the "film generation" into its wholesale takeover of audience demographics for theatrical releases. In 1969, Hepburn married an Italian psychiatrist and essentially put her acting career on hold for more than a decade. The complete slide of her career after the mid 1960s, followed by her personal choice to leave Hollywood entirely at the end of the decade, marks Hepburn as one among many actresses whose screen careers disintegrated in the late 1960s, either because of a rapidly changing culture or for personal reasons.

Julie Andrews starring in THE SOUND of MUSIC (1965) mid
setting nets standards fur Hollywood "typecasting."

JULIE ANDREWS The 1960s provided fleeting stardom for several unusually promising actresses whose careers fizzled nearly as quickly as they soared. Julie Andrews was one of them. Her career flourished at mid-decade only to flounder by decade's end. Andrews was described by industry insiders at the beginning of the 1960s to be "up for grabs in Hollywood, with absolutely no takers."²⁶ Although Warner Bros. passed on her for the lead in MY FAIR LADY, in which she had starred on Broadway, Andrews did THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY (1964, Arthur Hiller), and Disney Studios cast her for the lead in MARY POPPINS (1964). The former was a black comedy about a British war widow (Andrews) falling for a cowardly American marine (James Garner) who appears far more dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure than he is to the idea of hitting the beaches in Normandy. The latter topped the scale for exuberance and memorable songs, with Andrews playing an Edwardian names. The enormous success of MARY POPPINS Won Andrews not only an Academy Award for best actress, but the lead in THE SOUND OF Music (1965) as well.

THE SOUND OF Music won the Academy Award for best picture, and Andrews gained a nomination for best actress (she lost out in that category to Julie Christie, of DARLING). After her triumph in THE SOUND OF MUSIC, Andrews was at the peak of her career. Nonetheless, her triumph was brief, as she soon found herself to be a victim of Hollywood typecasting. Her rise to stardom had been little short of meteoric, and she had been well paid for her roles in both MARY POPPINS and THE SOUND OF MUSIC ($750,000 for each). However, the two pictures combined to place her in the apparently inescapable niche of saccharine sweetness and vapidity.²⁷ Moreover, it was not a case of her failing to recognize the problem. Andrews intentionally tried to play against this sweet image by taking the role of the fiancee of a scientist (Paul Newman) in TORN CURTAIN (1966, Alfred Hitchcock), a cold war spy thriller. She did a credible enough job, but that hardly sufficed to change Andrews' Hollywood image, or to redirect her screen career.²⁸ She was next cast as the friendly wife of a missionary in an adaptation of a James Michener novel, HAWAII (1966), and then played the lead as a young Kansas woman who arrives in New York City in search of spouse in THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE (1967, George Roy Hill). Returning to type with a vengeance, Andrews played this role to the hilt with every drop of sweetness and sunshine for which she was by then overly famous.²⁹

Her career bubble burst quickly. Coming off THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE, Andrews headed directly to STAR! (1968), produced with the hope that it would be the equal of THE SOUND OF MUSIC. Instead, this ill-fated biopic musical directed by Robert Wise failed abysmally at the box office. The financial catastrophe of STAR! immediately labeled Andrews as "box-office poison." Within a year of being at the top of Hollywood stardom, her bankability plummeted. As if they had been lying in wait for her to falter, contemporary critics spared few negatives in describing her performance in STAR! As the failure of the film registered in Hollywood, columnist Joyce Haber asked rhetorically about Andrews' career, "is she still a star?"³⁰

This single flop had come for her at precisely the wrong time. In a rapidly changing culture Andrews went within four years from being box-office gold, to being pigeonholed as a stereotype, to enormous failure. STAR! bombed in a year that many industry insiders hoped would mark a return to traditional Hollywood production values that reestablished stardom once again as a guarantee for stunning profits. Andrews' career might have weathered the adversity of this one major failure much better in an era less charged with social and cultural unrest and defined less clearly by the demographics of a rapidly shifting audience for theatrical movies.

Only a handful of Hollywood careers have plummeted as quickly as Andrews'. Her story graphically illustrates the underside of the "free-lance" system that had replaced the reliance of studios on contract players. The only bright spot for Andrews at the end of the decade was personal: in 1969 she married director Blake Edwards. In 1981, Edwards produced and directed S.O.B., a bitter look back on the roller-coaster ride that his wife's acting career had taken in the mid and late 1960s. This savage portrayal of a Hollywood producer trying to save a floundering production by adding pornographic sex scenes had Andrews baring her breasts on screen. S.O.B., however, appeared to have been released ten years too late to have much real bite. Its satire was dated, and by the early 1980s audiences apparently cared little about the titillation of seeing Julie Andrews' bosom.³¹

Faye Runaway, highly stylized as Bonnie Parker in BONNIE AND CLYDE, and highly
promising as a future female star in 1967.

MACLAINE, DUNAWAY, AND Ross Shirley MacLaine's promise in the early part of the 1960s (THE APARTMENT, 1960, and IRMA LA DOUCE, 1963) was not really built on and exploited during the rest of the decade. Throughout the 1960s MacLaine was perceived in the industry more as a "cartoon character" than a talented actress who could effectively satirize conventional culture. MacLaine's physical beauty was truly a veneer over a comedic chaos raging beneath its surface, but during the 1960s this persona was too easily interpreted by a considerable part of the audience as being inauthentic and deceptive. SWEET CHARITY (1968), which marked Bob Fosse's debut as a film director, nearly ended MacLaine's career. Playing a "taxi dancer" (someone paid to dance) with a heart of gold, much like her prostitute character in IRMA LA DOUCE, MacLaine was widely blamed in industry circles for the failure of this uneven and complex musical. Only in the mid 1970s did MacLaine manage to reemerge a Hollywood star by finding a new direction for herself as a mature and seasoned character and by gaining a great deal of publicity because of her "New Age" passion for channeling spirits. As a result, she successfully reinvented her screen career.³²

Faye Dunaway's success in BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967), in which she had performed for $35,000, catapulted her abruptly into a position where she could demand $600,000 a film, which she received the following year for THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR. As Bonnie Parker, playing opposite Warren Beatty's Clyde Barrow, Dunaway brought a coolness to her interpretation of a character that marks the role as a turning point in the American cinema. As an amoral thrill-seeker whose detached exterior appears to cover a fragile and potentially sensitive inner-self, Dunaway created a stylized interpretation that proved to have an enduring impact on an emerging new type of female role.

Dunaway's ascendancy with BONNIE AND CLYDE and THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR, however, marked her in Hollywood at the end of the 1960s as only a tentative star. In the eyes of the industry, she remained far too problematic as a box-office draw. Audiences might appreciate her, but producers could not quite fathom why, and, hence, were reluctant to count on audiences necessarily wanting to continue to see her. For the time, Dunaway's image as a sort of updated Bette Davis character, essentially tough and just a little bit nasty, was accepted only begrudgingly by the Hollywood establishment and, even then, only to a limited degree.³³ Only with her success in CHINATOWN (1974), in which she found a role that fit nearly perfectly her screen persona of the tough exterior hiding a more complex and fragile inner-self, did Faye Dunaway regain the prominence that she had briefly held in 1967-1968 and stake an unchallenged claim on stardom.³⁴

Katharine Ross, who had played with mediocre success in four films prior to THE GRADUATE (1967), appeared poised to become a major female star after it. Over the next two years, however, Ross proved reluctant to accept any of the many movie projects that were offered to her. In the estimation of some Hollywood observers, she was being overly cautious and choosy. Then she played between Paul Newman and Robert Redford in BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969), which seemed to rekindle her promising career. This offbeat hit, however, was carried largely by the performances of her two male co-stars, whose "buddy" antics created a screen legend. Her performance in the movie surely was satisfactory, even if most critics focused on the stellar play of Newman and Redford. Still, whatever promise Ross's career had right after BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID was not developed for both professional and personal reasons. Ross virtually disappeared from the Hollywood scene following that movie. Even though she was offered a number of major roles at the time, Ross turned down every one of them. The veteran Los Angeles movie critic Charles Champlin eventually was able to observe and to report the comparatively startling news for the movie industry that Ross actually had decided that she preferred stage work to movie acting, and that she was more content acting at small playhouses around Los Angeles than in making major features for the big screen.³⁵ Her personal life also may have interfered with her career, as the Newsweek columnist and movie critic Joe Morgenstern suggested. Through most of the 1970s, with her film career effectively on hold, Katharine Ross was living with Conrad Hall, the director of photography whom she had met while filming BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID.³⁶ Whatever the reasons for her decision, Ross was one enormously promising female lead in Hollywood at the end of the 1960s who essentially turned her hack on playing in Hollywood movies.

JANE FONDA By the late 1960s, Shirley MacLaine, Faye Dunaway, and Katharine Ross had each displayed flashes of promise for stardom. Despite their several distinct successes, however, their prominence was not realized until much later in their careers, if at all. In contrast, the two women who emerged as the top actresses of the American cinema right at the end 1960s, Jane Fonda and Barbra Streisand, both positioned themselves for stunning and sustained success throughout the 1970s. They were entirely different types: Jane, the daughter of screen legend Henry Fonda, had remarkably delicate hands and a slightly affected Vassar accent; Barbra was pure Brooklyn, through and through.

Jane Fonda entered movie acting at the end of the 1950s with a golden name and great promise. In 1962, the critic Stanley Kauffmann had written of her, "I have now seen Miss Fonda in three films. In all of them she gives performances that are not only fundamentally different from one another but are conceived without acting cliche and executed with skill."³⁷ Kauffmann's enthusiasm for these three films, however, was bracketed by a career that had begun with a disastrous first film, TALL STORY (1959), in which Fonda played a cheerleader opposite Anthony Perkins, and by THE CHAPMAN REPORT (1962), a misguided and unsuccessful feature. Indeed, her performance in THE CHAPMAN REPORT was considered so inept that the Harvard Lampoon named her the worst actress of the year. Coming off this debacle, the middle years of the 1960s did not prove especially favorable for Fonda.

Jane Fonda transformed her "personality starlet" image into
a mature and complicated screen presence in THEY SHOOT
HORSES, DON'T THEY? (1969).

In 1967, however, she recovered a good deal of critical acclaim by playing opposite Robert Redford in an adaptation of a Neil Simon romantic comedy, BAREFOOT IN THE PARK. She followed that appearance by playing an intergalactic ingenue in her husband Roger Vadim's BARBARELLA (1968), based on a sometimes truly zany script by Terry Southern, but which, as a whole, drew a decidedly mixed response. Many critics felt that Fonda was playing only a relatively simplified and cartoon-like character. BAREFOOT IN THE PARK and BARBARELLA were successful in their own ways, but both movies left many critics pondering whether Fonda was better suited for "stupid cupid" roles (as in the former), or potentially best exploited as a "sexpot" (as in the latter). At the end of 1967, a near that marked a genuine turning point in the American cinema, there was no assurance as to what direction Jane Fonda's screen persona and acting career might follow and sustain.³⁸

A considerable body of critical opinion continued to write her off as a weak female stereotype until her stellar performance in THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY? (1969) firmly anchored her career.³⁹ In this movie about desperate men and women trying to win prize money in dance marathons during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Fonda was applauded for her sensitive and insightful interpretation of that era's psychology. Under Sydney Pollack's direction, Fonda would often appear to be looking directly at people but without focusing on them. She created a character that was held together and sustained throughout the movie by a consistent inner logic that also effectively communicated a larger sense of malaise.⁴⁰ With her role in THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY?, Fonda was transformed immediately from a "personality starlet" into an accomplished "character actor".⁴¹ At the end of the 1960s, it was difficult to ignore the interpretation that the sudden maturity and sharpness seen in her performance in THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY? marked an on-screen parallel to Fonda's own off-screen transformation into a politically conscious, activist figure. As the 1970s dawned, Fonda was positioned perfectly to capitalize on that success and to enter the heyday of her career.

Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice in FUNNY GIRL (1968).

BARBRA STREISAND In 1968, Joanne Woodward successfully revived her career with a stellar performance as a lonely spinster in RACHEL, RACHEL. That same year, Katherine Hepburn also returned to the screen in THE LION IN WINTER (officially listed as a British production). Both Woodward and Hepburn were nominated for Academy Awards as best actress. Woodward finished as a runner-up in the voting, while Hepburn shared that year's Academy Award with a Hollywood newcomer named Barbra Streisand.

Streisand debuted on Broadway in 1962 at nineteen in I CAN GET IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE. Four years later, having swept Broadway and having completed two specials for television, she came to Hollywood with $35 million worth of movie musicals lined tip for her before she had ever faced a camera.⁴² Streisand arrived in town just as Hollywood was turning to lavish musicals in the mid 1960s in a desperate attempt to win back a disappearing mass audience.⁴³ Although she fit none of the classic models of the Hollywood star, she triumphed immediately. The critic Sidney Skolsky suggested that Streisand's instant success was emblematic of how truly low the Hollwood industry had declined in the mid 1960s, implying that only an industry in dire crisis could have fallen back upon her problematic looks and talents.⁴⁴ By contrast, however, Tom Ramage argued that Streisand's performance in a pedestrian musical like FUNNY GIRL (1968) was the sole reason the film could rise above sentimentality and mediocrity. Her talents were great, he maintained, and her screen presence was truly effective.⁴⁵

By the time she worked on HELLO DOLLY! (1969), Streisand was not only earning $1 million dollars per film, but was contractually guaranteed a percentage of the movie's gross earnings worldwide. The 1960s ended without Streisand having the opportunity to show her versatility for the dramatic, or to fully exercise her importance as a powerful figure in the entertainment business. Nonetheless, she had established herself by the end of the 1960s as Hollwood's most important female screen discovery of the decade. Fonda and Streisand positioned themselves to become central figures in Hollywood during the next few years. Both of their careers marked successes that were not entirely predictable by classic Hollywood standards. Changing audience demographics, along with the changing tastes that were spawned by the counterculture in America, marked the late 1960s as a pivotal era for a substantive transformation of the character types who prevailed in American feature films. The more traditional Hollywood "types" found dwindling response. The stakes for an acting career had gotten higher with the demise of contract playing, and, as a result, both startling career triumphs and abrupt eclipses of a given star's popularity became more common among Hollywood leads.

Fonda's screen presence evolved into a portrayal of savvy and sensitive women who transcended the fragility and dependency that often characterized that screen type in the past. In this regard, Fonda's personal political commitment and her opposition to the Vietnam War likely contributed positively to the public's perception of the roles she took on screen, especially among moviegoers of college age. Streisand, whose persona combined a basic pleasantness with a touch of zaniness, was, by contrast, able to carry genre and period pictures. She was an actress of plain looks who could still play successfully opposite the most highly photogenic of male leads, while her singing voice gave her a versatility that was rare and widely admired.

Notes

1. Mary Ellen O'Brien, Film Acting: The Techniques and History of Acting for the Camera (New York: Arco, 1983), pp.29, 30.

2. See the excellent discussion on this point in Michael Kummel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), pp.269-272 ff.

3. Wendy Shalit, A Return to Modesty: Rediscovering the Lost Virtue (New York: Free Press, 1998), p.248.

4. Los Angeles Herald-Examiner; January 8, 1961, p.24.

5. Sidney Skolsky, "Tintypes: Doris Day," Los Angeles Citizen News, August 26, 1966, p.28.

6. O'Brien, Film Acting, p.43.

7. George Morris, "Doris Day: Not Pollyanna," in Danny Peary, ed., Close-Ups: Intimate Portraits of Movie Stars by their Co-Stars, Directors, Screenwriters, and Friends (New York: Workman, 1978), p.78.

8. Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, March 6, 1963, p.21.

9. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974), pp.262-267.

10. Paul Kerr, "Stars and Stardom," in David Pirie, ed., Anatomy of the Movies (New York: Macmillan, 1981), p.108.

11. Variety (Daily), January 18, 1968, p.12.

12. Variety (Weekly), August 7, 1968, p.1.

13. Michael Munn, The Hollywood Murder Casebook (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), pp.18, 19.

14. Barbara Learning, Marilyn Monroe (New York: Crown Publishers, 1992), p.431.

15. Variety (Meekly), December 11, 1963.

16. Maureen Dowd, "Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward: A Lifetime of Shared Passions," McCalls (January 1991).

17. William Leonard, "They Love Liz Taylor, Shocks and All," Chicago Tribune Magazine, June 12, 1960.

18. New York Times, March 13, 1962.

19. Sibyl March, "The Intense Boredom of Elizabeth Taylor," The Seventh Art (Fall 1963).

20. Anthony Asquith, "A Director Views Liz," Los Angeles Times, September 1, 1963, p.42.

21. See Maureen Turim, "Elizabeth Taylor: In the Public Eye," in Pirie, ed., Anatomy of the Movies, pp. 187, 188.

22. Foster Hirsch, Acting Hollywood Style (New York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc./AFI Press, 1991), p.247.

23. Thomas Thompson, "While Burton Romances Rex, Liz Weighs Her Power and Her Future," January 17, 1969.

24. The details of Wood's suicide attempt are discussed by the director Henry Jaglom, a close friend of hers, during an interview in the E-TV (Entertainment Television) documentary, Natalie Wood, first aired on E-TV; December 1997.

25. Simon Brett, "Audrey Hepburn," Films and Filming (March 1964).

26. Los Angeles Citizen-News, August 28, 1965, p.25.

27. Anthony Holden, Behind the Oscar: The Secret History of the Academy Awards (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), p.254.

28. Hollywood Reporter, June 20, 1965, p.7.

29. Robert Windeler Julie Andrews: A Life on Stage and Screen (Secaucus, N.J.: Birch Lane Publishing, 1997) , p.133.

30. Joyce Haber, "More Slippage for Julie's Image," Los Angeles Times, January 15, 1969.

31. Windeler, Julie Andrews, pp.186, 187.

32. Bill Condon, "Shirley MacLaine: Early Rebel," in Peary, ed., Close-Ups, pp.272, 273.

33. See Robert Stone, "Faye Dunaway: A Classic in Her Own Time," Cosmopolitan, May 1968, and James Monaco, American Film Now: The People, the Power, the Money, the Movies (New York: New American Library, 1979), p.94.

34. Mason Wiley, "Faye Dunaway: Breaking the Id," in Peary, ed., Close-Ups, p.545.

35. Charles Champlin, "Katharine Ross: A Seedling in Lotusland," Los Angeles Times (undated, in the files of the Center for Motion Picture Study at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences).

36. Joe Morgenstern, "A Careful Comeback," Elle (March 1986): 102.

37. Quoted in Stephen Farber and Marc Green, Hollywood Dynasties (New York: Putnam, 1984), p.938.

38. Hirsch, Acting Hollywood Style, pp.158, 257.

39. Paul Kerr, "Stars and Stardom," in Pirie, ed., Anatomy of the Movies, p.113.

40. Jeff Corey, "Jane Fonda: Actress with a Message," in Peary, ed., Close-Ups, pp.983, 284.

41. O'Brien, Film Acting, p.43.

42. Dorothy Manners, "Barbra Streisand's Solid Gold Highway," Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, May 19, 1967, pp.32, 33.

43. Ira Mothner, "A Frantic, Brassy, Tender 'Funny Girl,'" Look, October 15, 1966. (The author offered the opinion that Streisand had "made life better for a helluva lot of homely little girls.")

44. Sidney Skolsky, "Fade Out, Fade In for Hollywood," Hollywood Citizen-News, November 21, 1968, p.22.

45. Tom Ramage, "Barbra Transcends 'Funny Girl' Bonds," After Dark, September 25, 1968.