Estelle Parsons goes at a part with the volume up and no thought for whether we like her, which made Blanche in Bonnie and Clyde hard to sit near and Calla in Rachel, Rachel quietly moving. Film mostly wanted the noise; the stage took the rest.
Fi1m perspective
Watch the getaway in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and the sound you remember is not the guns or the banjo but Estelle Parsons, screaming. Blanche Barrow, married to Gene Hackman's Buck, spends the film at full shriek, and Parsons never once lowers it to make herself easier company. Arthur Penn's film has decided Blanche is a fool so that Faye Dunaway's Bonnie looks cooler beside her, and it is a mean piece of writing from David Newman and Robert Benton. Parsons commits to it anyway. We flinched every time she opened her mouth, and by the end we had started to mind on her behalf, because nobody in the film gives Blanche a quiet minute in which to be a person.
A year later Paul Newman gave her the opposite job. In Rachel, Rachel (1968) she is Calla Mackie, the one friend Joanne Woodward's schoolteacher has, and she takes Rachel to a revival meeting where a young preacher works the congregation until strangers are weeping on each other. Parsons plays Calla as a woman whose feeling for Rachel is more than friendship, with the same force she brought to Blanche, held in rather than let out. The film treats her with a decency that was not common in 1968 and she is superb in it. It is the better performance of the two, and the one fewer people have seen.
Blanche followed her. The offers that came afterwards were for the hysterical woman, the neurotic, the one who dominates a room by refusing to leave it, and Parsons has said as much herself. She took some of them and went back to the stage for the rest, which is where most of her working life has been: Albee, Williams, Dario Fo, and Miss Margarida's Way (1977), which she played on Broadway and abroad for years. She directed on Broadway from the late 1970s and ran the Actors Studio from 1998 to 2003. In 2008 she took over Violet Weston in August: Osage County on Broadway and then on tour, in her eighties. Television gave her Beverly Harris, the meddlesome mother in Roseanne (1988 to 1997) and again in The Conners from 2018, the part most people now know her for.
What works is the refusal to protect herself. Parsons does not ask to be liked, and when a script gives her a person, as Newman's did, that refusal reads as honesty; when it gives her a type, as Penn's did, she plays the type at full strength and leaves the blame with the writers. What does not work is a career in film that kept asking for the type. She is still working in her late nineties. Start with Rachel, Rachel, where she is quiet, and then go back to Bonnie and Clyde and notice how much of Blanche's noise is Parsons doing exactly what she was told.
Biography
Estelle Parsons is an American actress. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, she studied law before working as a singer and as a contributor to the television programme Today. She made her stage debut in 1961 and established a career on Broadway during the 1960s.
Parsons received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Blanche Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde (1967). She was nominated for the same award the following year for Rachel, Rachel (1968). She has appeared in films including Dick Tracy (1990) and Boys on the Side (1995).
On television, Parsons is known for her role as Beverly Harris in Roseanne (1988). She has worked extensively in theatre, directed several Broadway productions and was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 2004.
