Beyond the Stars: Small Parts and Supporting Actors by film writer, Matt Olsen
One of the most rewarding experiences when watching a film is encountering an entirely unexpected performance. For all of the obvious reasons, most audience members go into a movie knowing who’s going to carry the lead roles. Such that, it’s not generally a surprise that a movie starring someone like Isabelle Huppert or Michael Caine, for example, is going to feature, at the very minimum, an engaging lead actor. (Fill in the blanks based on your own tastes and preference, of course. Maybe you’re a massive Jake Busey fan. I don’t know.) Of course, getting the very thing that you expect feels satisfying. That’s undeniable. But what happens when an actor appears in the role of a tertiary character and hits an absolute bull’s eye? Not enough to steal the spotlight from the marquee names or derail the story – that would be an actor in conflict with their own film – but enough to make their moments on-screen instantly unforgettable.
I’ve chosen three performances that continue to hold firm in my ever-withering memory. Though each has its own quality, they share a peculiar bond which is enough to justify my linking them together: these are roles in American films of the nineteen-seventies from actresses who never achieved massive stardom despite each of the following performances earning an Academy Award nomination (and one win) for Best Supporting Actress.
Susan Tyrell in Fat City (1972)
In the role of the singularly-named Oma, a codependent alcoholic, Tyrell creates something that would have to be called beyond a full character. It would be impossible (or, at least, inadvisable) for a performance to be much bigger than this. Oma is, generously, a full and proper mess. How she’ll react to any prompt is entirely unpredictable yet it always feels absolutely authentic. Over the course of barstool banter, she ranges from disengagement to mania, anger to giddiness, belligerence to brittleness, while always eliciting audience empathy. Even when she’s at her most unlikable – which is often – there’s an earned compassion. At least, from anyone capable of feeling. Well aware of the appalling odds against it, we truly want her to find peace. She reveals herself as a simultaneously strong-willed and emotionally fragile survivor of abuse, misfortune, poor decisions, and a medley of addictions. Oma can’t be wholly defined by any one of those components, though. It also bears mentioning that she’s frequently hilarious with a score of wild-eyed expressiones and animated gestures. Under a set of different circumstances, Oma could have filled the slippers of a daffy comic-romantic lead instead of breaking the audience’s hearts in a moment of bare honesty when she tells her fellow barroom denizen, Stacy Keach, “You’re the only son of a bitch worth a shit in this place.”
Barbara Harris in Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (1971)
Probably the most well-known of the three actresses here and easily on par with any of the most-heralded film actors, Barbara Harris appeared under the direction of giants like Hal Ashby, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and even Alfred Hitchcock but is probably best remembered for switching bodies with a teenage Jodie Foster in the original Freaky Friday. Her role in …Harry Kellerman… Is effectively a fifteen-minute segment comprised of two monologues played against Dustin Hoffman who, in their scenes, appears utterly transfixed by her. Where Susan Tyrell’s performance in Fat City is predominantly external and chaotic – Oma spits bile at the world, no exceptions made – Harris takes the opposite approach. She pulls the audience in. Her character of Alison Densmore, a fading actress / current file clerk, is inescapably fettered by loneliness. At an audition for a very of-the-moment rock musical, Alison sings a not at all of-the-moment morose cabaret melody. She knows she has failed and, furthermore, it’s clear that this is not an unfamiliar experience for her. When Hoffman’s character responds with kindness, her acknowledgment of and resignation to her situation is devastatingly stoic. The emotion remains primarily inside her. A quiver in her voice and a tiny, strained smile are the cracks on the surface; signals of deeper, unseen fractures. In spite of this, the character is not entirely bleak. Indications of a cynical sense of humor and life flicker beneath layers of fatalistic sarcasm. Toward the end of her second scene, she exhibits measured gratitude and, possibly, a suggestion that she’s not yet beyond regaining a sense of her own value. It’s similar to what Harris accomplishes at the end of Nashville: answering tragedy by remaining alive.
Beatrice Straight in Network (1976)
Fans of trivia perhaps already know Beatrice Straight’s role in Network as the shortest on-screen time of an actor to ever win an Academy Award; she appears in only two scenes for a grand total of five minutes and two-seconds of the film’s two-hour and one-minute run time. What’s more, it’s really only the second of her two scenes that commands attention and earns the well-deserved accolades. Her performance differs from the two mentioned above in that it’s grounded in a profound connection with another character – her husband, played by William Holden. When he confesses, across their kitchen table, to a doomed dalliance with a younger woman, Beatrice’s Louise Schumacher processes the information through a series of remarkably distinct emotional responses. Anger blazing through to determination and, finally, settling into pity. Not self-pity, but pity for her husband who concedes the affair is fated to a hopeless outcome. The natural and fluid progress toward her eventual resolution proceeds almost logically in contrast to her at times extremely outward, justifiably feral voice and physicality. Her anger remains but it’s compassion that ultimately holds the front. It’s not a weak-willed “boys will be boys” forgiveness, though. There’s strength and power in her stance. It’s an understanding that this isn’t the end; it’s a solitary moment of crisis amongst the entirety of a shared history. In only a few minutes and within an apartment’s two rooms of, Straight conveys the weight of a multi-decade relationship in and out of every line.
Matt Olsen is a largely unemployed part-time writer and even more part-time commercial actor living once again in Seattle after escaping from Los Angeles like Kurt Russell in that movie about the guy who escapes from Los Angeles.