Kate Nelligan is a stage actor who arrived in Hollywood as a supporting player and has largely stayed one: exact, watchful and unsentimental, given in the films we have reviewed one good scene at a time and making each of them count.
Fi1m perspective
In The Prince of Tides (1991), Kate Nelligan plays Lila Wingo, a mother on a shrimp boat whose husband shouts and who smiles through it and keeps score. That is the performance in a phrase, and it is a good one. She does not raise her voice and she does not visibly suffer, and the family scenes tighten a little whenever she is in them. The film belongs to Nick Nolte, talking his way back through a childhood he has spent his adult life not mentioning. Nelligan is a large part of why the talking is necessary.
She came to film by a long road. Trained at the Bristol Old Vic in the early 1970s, she made her name in London on stage, above all as Susan Traherne in David Hare's Plenty in 1978, and Hare has remained the collaborator she returns to. She moved to the United States at the end of that decade and took leads in Dracula (1979) and Eye of the Needle (1981). By the 1990s she had settled into the kind of part Hollywood gives to actors it trusts with difficult mothers: Frankie and Johnny and The Prince of Tides, both 1991, and later The Cider House Rules (1999). After the mid-1990s she worked less, and her appearances since have been occasional.
The stage shows. She listens to a line before she answers it, and she lands the end of a sentence the way a person does who has had to make it carry to the back of a room. That precision suits hard women, and hard women are what she is mostly asked to play. In The Cider House Rules, as Olive Worthington, she gets one good scene, about running a farm with the men gone, and it is one of the few in the orchard hour that does not drift. Lasse Hallström wraps everything around it in autumn light and a warm piano; her scene stays dry.
We should be honest about where The Prince of Tides got to us. It was the three children slipping off the dock and holding hands under the water while their parents fight on the bank, and it moved us more than we expected. Nelligan is one of the parents. That is roughly her position in the cinema we have seen her in: the scene is about somebody else, and she is part of the reason it hurts.
"I get to do a lot of dark," she said in 2003, and that is about right. Watch The Prince of Tides for Nolte, as we said at the time, and then notice how much of what he cannot say was already said, in a smile, by his mother.
Biography
Kate Nelligan is a Canadian actress. Born Patricia Colleen Nelligan on 16 March 1950 in London, Ontario, she trained at Glendon College in Toronto and the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
She began her professional career in 1972 with the Bristol Old Vic and went on to work with the National Theatre in London. In the 1980s she moved to New York and received four Tony Award nominations for her Broadway performances. Her film roles include Lila Wingo Newbury in The Prince of Tides (1991), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, and Olive Worthington in The Cider House Rules (1999). She won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Frankie and Johnny (1991). Nelligan has also appeared in television productions and received Gemini Award nominations for her work in Canadian television.
