Eleanor Parker could change her voice and appearance to suit a part, but we particularly value her restraint. Her Baroness in The Sound of Music makes us wish the screenplay trusted its actors a little more.
Fi1m perspective
When the adults in The Sound of Music (1965) start explaining their feelings, Eleanor Parker gives us something to watch besides the explanation. As the Baroness, she suggests more than Ernest Lehman's dialogue needs to spell out. We felt relief at her restraint because the romantic passages were beginning to repeat what the actors had already made clear. Robert Wise's musical is an easy recommendation, and Parker is one reason its considerable sentimentality does not wear us down.
She began with small and ingénue roles in the 1940s, before the substantial dramatic leads of the 1950s. Those include the prisoner Marie Allen in Caged (1950) and Marjorie Lawrence in Interrupted Melody (1955), with wigs, make-up and accents among the tools she used across her work. By the mid-1960s, her career was shifting towards supporting parts and television. That makes the Baroness a tempting shorthand for the later Parker, though it is a poor guide to everything that preceded her.
Her later casting often favoured sophisticated, chilly women, and she is more widely remembered for the Baroness than for those dramatic leads. A performer who changes her appearance and manner so readily can leave audiences with no fixed personality to recognise; Parker's reputation has suffered from that. We would be careful about calling it a shortcoming in the acting, since it tells us little about how well any individual part is played. The Baroness gives us something more specific to judge.
She is Maria's sophisticated rival, a part that could easily be played only for the obstruction she presents. Parker gives us room to consider her feelings without requiring another speech about them. She cannot cure the screenplay's tendency to prolong its adult conversations, and our praise should not pretend otherwise. Watch The Sound of Music for Andrews and the songs, certainly, but pay attention when Parker is there; then make Caged the next Parker film.
Biography
Eleanor Parker was an American actress. Born in Cedarville, Ohio, she trained at the Pasadena Playhouse and made her film debut in the early 1940s. She appeared in supporting roles before gaining prominence in the 1950s.
She received Academy Award nominations for Best Actress for her performances in Caged (1950), Detective Story (1951) and Interrupted Melody (1955), winning the Volpi Cup for Best Actress for the first of these. Other notable film roles include those in Of Human Bondage (1946), Scaramouche (1952), The Naked Jungle (1954) and The Man with the Golden Arm (1955).
Parker played the Baroness Elsa Schraeder in The Sound of Music (1965). She worked increasingly in television from the 1960s onwards, with appearances in series such as Murder, She Wrote and The Love Boat, and continued acting until the early 1990s.
