Kate Capshaw's screen reputation rests almost entirely on Willie Scott, a part written to scream, and she screamed it with more commitment than it deserved. What she might have done with a better one, the cinema never quite troubled to find out.
Fi1m perspective
The gold sequinned gown is the performance. Anthony Powell dresses Willie Scott in it for the nightclub at the start of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), and over the next two hours it is soaked, torn, muddied and singed, so that the dress has an arc and the woman inside it does not. Capshaw is asked to scream, complain and fall over, and she does all three as if her life depended on it. That is the trouble. The script gives her nothing else, and the harder she works at what she has been given, the more the film's goodwill drains away.
We felt for her, and we felt slightly cross, because the effort is visible in every frame. Douglas Slocombe lights her in torchlit orange and Steven Spielberg throws her across Elliot Scott's sets with the rest of the cast, and she takes it gamely, but Willie is written as an obstacle between a man and his job. Ke Huy Quan, playing a child, is handed a character; Capshaw, playing the female lead, is handed a volume control. Critics at the time, women critics especially, said so, and they were right.
It was one of four films she made that year, alongside Dreamscape (1984), after a soap-opera start and a first film role in 1982, and it should have been the beginning of something. Instead it became the thing she is remembered for. Through the late 1980s and 1990s she worked steadily, often as the glamorous or steady woman in a room full of men: Joyce in Ridley Scott's Black Rain (1989) opposite Michael Douglas, Laurie Armstrong in Just Cause (1995) with Sean Connery. We have not reviewed those films and will not pretend to weigh the performances here. The parts, on the face of them, were supporting ones, and the industry that had put her in a gold dress and told her to shriek did not seem in any hurry to find out what else she did.
Her last real move was to do it herself. She produced and starred in The Love Letter (1999), a romantic comedy, and then by the early 2000s she had largely stopped acting to paint. She has said that the best preparation for acting is life -- observing life and people and observing yourself. All that becomes your library. It is a sensible view, and it is a shame the screen gave her so few chances to open the book.
So the record is lopsided. If you want to know what Capshaw could do, Temple of Doom is the wrong place to look, and for most viewers it will remain the only place they do.
Biography
Kate Capshaw is an American actress and painter. Born Kathleen Sue Nail on 3 November 1953 in Fort Worth, Texas, she trained as a teacher of special education before moving to New York to pursue acting. She appeared in the soap opera The Edge of Night and made her film debut in the early 1980s.
Capshaw is best known for playing Willie Scott in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). She appeared in other films including Dreamscape (1984), Power (1986), SpaceCamp (1986), Black Rain (1989), Just Cause (1995) and How to Make an American Quilt (1995). Her acting career largely ended in the early 2000s; she has since worked as a painter.
She married film director Steven Spielberg in 1991.
