Elizabeth Wilson made respectable women worth watching by letting care and control sound much alike. We value her precise supporting work, particularly when a film gives her authority something more interesting to do than obstruct the plot.
Fi1m perspective
Watch the poise with which Elizabeth Wilson plays a woman accustomed to being obeyed. The diction stays measured; judgement arrives without much outward fuss, and it can be hard to tell how much care accompanies it. Her mothers and office figures make authority seem an everyday habit, which is why she can establish so much in a supporting part.
She attracted film notice in Patterns (1956), but the useful thread through the career is the recurrence of women entitled to an opinion about everybody else. Mike Nichols was a regular collaborator, directing her in seven films. As Mrs Braddock, Dustin Hoffman's mother in The Graduate (1967), she had the family to concern herself with; in 9 to 5 (1980), office busybody Roz Keith had colleagues. The change of setting gave her another use for that air of supervision.
In Barry Sonnenfeld's The Addams Family (1991), Abigail Craven gives that authority a villain's purpose. We laughed at the cast's habit of treating ghoulish jokes as ordinary family conversation, because the delivery makes the macabre sound so unremarkable. Larry Wilson and Caroline Thompson's screenplay spends too long arranging its complications, however, and Wilson's presence cannot make the plotting less laboured. The family affection works, but the comedy is safer than its subject promises, and we would have welcomed nastier jokes.
Robert Redford's Quiz Show (1994) gives her a better film to work within, as Dorothy Van Doren, mother to Ralph Fiennes' character. Its performances complicate easy judgement, and its attention to who gets believed makes her familiar air of respectability a good fit. The sharp writing makes television fraud absorbing, though the running time could use a trim. It also lets us see her in a drama concerned with the kind of authority she so often played. Start there; keep The Addams Family for an evening when the cast can be allowed to carry the script.
Biography
Elizabeth Wilson (1921–2015) was an American actress whose career in film, television and theatre spanned nearly seven decades. She trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and studied with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse.
She appeared in films including The Birds (1963), The Graduate (1967), 9 to 5 (1980), The Addams Family (1991) as Abigail Craven, and Quiz Show (1994) as Dorothy Van Doren. On stage she made her Broadway debut in Picnic (1953) and won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for Sticks and Bones (1972). She received Emmy and BAFTA nominations and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2006.
