Lee Remick

I found her to be such an intelligent, focused and determined actress.  She was also a versatile one who made a few good movies with top actors and directors, made a name for herself on Broadway and when she ultimately headed for television, it was not in the standard episodic rot but in acclaimed programs where her skills were evident and her recognition soared.

She was never greatly into the Hollywood scene and was not interested in being a personality.  She felt she was a serious, well-trained actress and she expected some respect.  But like so many before and after her, she fell a little into the sexpot starlet thing in the beginning and she fought against it for some years afterwards.  I thought she was pretty rather than beautiful but admit that in her 40s she could glam up with the best of them.

Acting was in her blood from the womb.  Born in 1935 in Quincy, Massachusetts to an actress-mother and a father who was a successful department store owner.  Achievement was stressed in the Irish-English household and her talent for performing as a child was apparent.  She danced all over the house, loved dressing up and gave great performances using a broom as a microphone.

She later trained in dance and after moving to New York studied acting at Barnard College and attended the famed Actors Studio.  She performed in summer stock during her school years.  She gave five performances in her first Broadway show (before it closed) and worked in appeared on television.  It was in one of these shows that she was noticed by director Elia Kazan.  He had been involved with the Actors Studio and left before Remick appeared on the scene but there's always that bond among those who've attended the school and they seemed to keep track of one another.

Her first screen appearance was as a cunning, ambitious majorette in Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957), one of the great films of the 50s.  Its prophetic focus is an Arkansas drifter who becomes a media sensation and is seduced by power and fame.  Andy Griffith gives an astonishing performance and in ably supported by Remick, Patricia Neal, Anthony Franciosa and Walter Matthau.  She lived with a local family to learn the local accent and baton-twirling.

With Andy Griffith & Patricia Neal

She married TV director Bill Colleran in early 1957.  The union would produce a son and a daughter and last for 11 years.

She signed a short contract with 20th Century Fox and immediately went to work for director Martin Ritt in The Long, Hot Summer (1958) as Franciosa's flighty, giggly wife. The tale of a drifter who ingratiates himself with the town's richest family was highlighted in these pages earlier.  While she and Franciosa were excellent, they were overshadowed by Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and Orson Welles.

These Thousand Hills (1959) is a fairly ordinary western about a cowpoke (Don Murray) and a rancher (Richard Egan) who duke it out over a saloon girl (Remick).  It bombed at the box office and Remick said it was the worst movie she ever did.  I didn't like it either which proves I haven't liked every western ever made.

Fox wanted her to star in The Jean Harlow Story and Remick balked, saying it was exactly the kind of movie she didn't want to do.  The studio had also wanted her to change her name and she adamantly refused to do so.  Remick didn't go looking for trouble but she didn't run from it either.

Lana Turner and autocratic director Otto Preminger had their differences over costumes (she says) and the interpretation of her character (he says) which became Remick's good fortune when she replaced Turner as the leading lady of Anatomy of a Murder (1959).  Remick is at the heart of a case that has James Stewart defending Ben Gazzara for killing a man who supposedly raped his trampy wife.  While perhaps a bit slow and methodical, it is a very well-done film.

Wild River (1960) is a superbly acted and directed movie.  Director Kazan was delighted to work with Remick again.  He said he liked her confident sense of her own worth.  He must have felt just about the same of Jo Van Fleet (the best thing about the film) whom he'd earlier directed to an Oscar in East of Eden (1954).  He extracted a promise from Montgomery Clift to not drink during production which the actor kept with the help of his two costars.

With Montgomery Clift

Clift plays a Tennessee Valley Authority bureaucrat who comes to the river to evict a stubborn, cantankerous woman who is in harm's way from the rising waters.  The director and his three stars were all alumni from the Actors Studio and worked well together.  Remick and Kazan said Wild River was their favorite film.

Fox gave her top billing to star in their lackluster version of William Faulkner's steamy southern tale, Sanctuary (1961).   But I do know that the premise is about a governor's daughter who is raped by a Cajun who continues to harass her after she marries.  It was so watered down from the novel that few went to see it.  Yves Montand was not my idea of a sexy leading man.

In 1962 the actress made two films for director Blake Edwards.  The first, Experiment in Terror, is just that.  Ross Martin plays a creep who couldn't score with a nymphomaniac on a desert island but via telephone assaults threatens Remick and her sister Stefanie Powers with the intent to get Remick to steal money from her bank.  It had a few jump-out-of-your-seat moments.

With Jack Lemmon... her best work

Her second outing with Edwards produced the best work Remick ever did, The Days of Wine and Roses.  A go-getter alcoholic salesman encourages his teetotaling wife to start drinking so they can be on the same wavelength.  In the end she becomes a bigger alcoholic than he ever was.  Her performance is unforgettable and I consider it to be one of the 25 top female performances of all time.  She and Lemmon, no slouch here himself, were both nominated for Oscars.  She claimed he was her favorite leading man. 

Remick acquired some unusual publicity in 1962 when she was signed to replace the recently-sacked Marilyn Monroe in the troubled production of Something's Got to Give.  (Imagine an actress who scorned sexpot roles replacing MM.)  But costar Dean Martin said that while he meant no disrespect to Remick, he signed on to work with MM and if she wasn't going to do the film, neither was he.  Of course, history shows that MM was rehired but then died and the project, a remake of 1940's My Favorite Wife, was scrapped. 

The Running Man (1963) was directed by Sir Carol Reed in Spain and Ireland and concerns a man (Laurence Harvey) who fakes his own death to collect on an insurance policy and is hunted down by an insurance inspector (Alan Bates).  Remick plays Harvey's wife whom Bates falls for.  I enjoyed its cat-and-mouse tension despite what critics had to say.  About Harvey she said the tales I can tell about working with him are too horrendous to repeat, joining a chorus of a number of his costars.

Remick had certainly cemented her status as a leading lady when she was billed over Steve McQueen in Baby, the Rain Must Fall (1965).  It's a fairly depressing little Texas tale about a woman who takes her daughter with her across the state to meet her husband as he's released from prison.  She then wants to settle down and try to make a life together while he wants to be a country singer.

I found it to be one of Remick's better roles and McQueen himself thought she acted him off the screen.  Critics thought so too.  Like with many of his female costars, McQueen had a location affair with Remick for most of the shoot, only to be interrupted for a week while she flew off to resume her affair with Robert Kennedy. 

If she thought These Thousand Hills was bad, apparently she never saw herself in the slapstick comedy western The Hallelujah Trail (1965).  Despite the added presence of Burt Lancaster, Brian Keith and Jim Hutton, it was embarrassingly bad.  She then returned to Broadway and the lead as the blind lady in Wait Until Dark which ran for 373 performances.

She was a sexy and saucy in the serial killer flick, No Way to Treat a Lady (1968), but was nothing more than a love interest for George Segal.  Her turn as Frank Sinatra's nympho wife in The Detective (1968) was an unnecessary role and slowed down the main, heavy-handed story.

In 1970 she married producer and second-unit director Kip Gowans and moved to England.  He would produce a few of her future works and they would be married until the end of her life.

She flew back to Oregon to film the logging drama Sometimes a Great Notion (1971) but we won't discuss because it's coming up next.

Remick had been casual friends for years with Katharine Hepburn and both were delighted to be working together as mother and daughter in A Delicate Balance (1973).  It is a filmed play, a genre which had gathered a certain popularity around the time with a small segment of theater and art film devotees.  It concerns three days with a dysfunctional family and too much honesty and booze.  While it's rather stagy and stiff, it's hard to push away from a cast that includes Paul Scofield, Joseph Cotten and Kate Reid.   

Her last great theatrical movie was The Omen (1976), a doozy of a frightening thriller.  She plays the wife of Gregory Peck, a U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, who adopt a child whom they come to suspect is the antichrist.  Harvey Stephens playing Damien is one scary little boy.  Scareflicks don't usually attract the pedigree of these actors but some of us are glad this one did.

While Remick continued to act in theatrical films, most of them were beneath her talents.  One exception for me was James Ivory's version of Henry James's The Europeans (1979) which I very much liked.  She said at the time I make movies for grownups.  When Hollywood starts making them again, I'll start acting in them again.  Otherwise she dotted the TV landscape in mainly superior movies and miniseries such as The Man Who Came to Dinner, QB VII, Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill, Hustling, Torn Between Two Lovers, Ike: The War Years, Haywire, The Women's Room, The Letter, Mistral's Daughter and more.  It was always a pleasure to see her.

She discovered in 1989 that she had tumors on her kidneys and lungs.  She treated and a year later it was said her cancer was in remission.  However it returned with a vengeance and lovely Lee Remick lost her life in 1991 at the age of 55.  She was in her Brentwood, California, home with Gowans and her family.  

Angela Lansbury, her costar on Broadway in Anyone Can Whistle, said Remick was a brave and positive-thinking person.  She never gave in to the cancer for one second.  Charles Bronson, her costar in Telefon said I am so sorry she is gone.  She was a beautiful, warm and giving individual as well as a very unselfish and professional actress.  Lemmon said knowing and acting with Lee will always remain one one of the most joyous experiences of my life.  She was precious and certainly the embodiment of grace.  Peck said she possessed a rare quality which I would call a depth of womanliness.  She played her onscreen and offscreen roles with an open heart, an open mind, keen intelligence and honest emotion.  She made all her leading men look good.  I'll never forget this clear-eyed Yankee girl.

She prepared intensely for the roles she played.  She had to know everything she could about her characters, including a back story, whether it was directly used in the film or not.  While she was well-trained, she claimed to be an instinctive actress but added that she regarded herself as a housewife who happened to act.  She appeared fragile sometimes but she never was.  In fact it is her innate inner strength, I believe, that made her such a good actress.  She was so young when she died.  She had so much more to do.