Carrie Snodgress gave frustrated, stoical women intelligence and feeling, with little fuss. We value her restraint, and wish Pale Rider had given her the space its mysterious stranger receives.
Fi1m perspective
In Pale Rider (1985), Carrie Snodgress's Sarah Wheeler is one of the people we want to know better while the film attends to Clint Eastwood's mysterious stranger. We were frustrated by how little room she gets, because the screenplay gives him attention that might have made her less familiar. This is a rewarding Western with a supporting character it ought to develop further. Snodgress gives us reason to notice the omission.
The earlier work gave her a larger part to develop. Playing Tina Balser in Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) brought her breakthrough, and the frustration and stoicism in that performance help explain her appeal. Her husky voice is distinctive, but the careful gradations of feeling matter more. She makes a woman enduring a constrained domestic life worth attending to without needing to overstate her unhappiness.
After a long pause, she returned to film in The Fury (1978), playing Hester. Her dramatic scenes there have feeling and credibility. The subsequent work was largely in supporting parts and television, rather than leads on the scale of Tina Balser. Those smaller roles deserve to be judged on what she was actually given to play.
Pale Rider makes the limitations particularly clear. Michael Moriarty's Hull Barret gives Eastwood's solemn certainty a useful counterweight, while Sydney Penny's Megan Wheeler brings feeling to scenes liable to settle for admiring the leading man. Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack's screenplay gives Snodgress less opportunity to make Sarah equally distinct. We still recommend the Western, but the supporting actors do enough to make us wish the writing had spent longer with the people asking for help.
The later credits include Blue Sky (1994) and Wild Things (1998), both supporting appearances. Those titles help trace a career, but they offer less obvious starting points than the substantial early lead. Start with Diary of a Mad Housewife if it is Snodgress you have come to see.
Biography
Carrie Snodgress (born Caroline Louise Snodgress) was an American actress. She was born on 27 October 1945 in Barrington, Illinois, and died on 1 April 2004. She is best remembered for her leading role in the film Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
Snodgress made her film debut with an uncredited appearance in Easy Rider (1969). Her other film credits include The Fury (1978), Pale Rider (1985) as Sarah Wheeler, Blue Sky (1994) and Wild Things (1998). She also appeared in numerous television series, including The X-Files, ER and The West Wing. From 1970 to 1975 she was married to musician Neil Young, with whom she had one son.
