Katharine Ross spent the best part of a decade being looked at by men in films and playing what she herself called The Girl. She was poised, quick and likeable in every one of them, and only occasionally handed anything more to do.
Fi1m perspective
In The Graduate (1967) the camera does to Katharine Ross what films would keep doing to her for years: it looks at her and does not ask what she thinks. Elaine Robinson is the girl Benjamin is told to take out and then decides he cannot live without, and Ross plays her bright, quick and likeable, with a way of watching a man talk as if waiting for him to say the true thing. Mike Nichols gives her almost nothing to do with it. Elaine is mostly a face Ben looks at, and Ross is so good at being looked at that it took us a second viewing to notice how little she had been given.
She trained at the San Francisco Actors Workshop and came up through television westerns from 1962, with a film debut in Shenandoah (1965). After The Graduate the westerns had her back: Etta Place in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and Lola in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969). The 1970s made her a lead, in The Stepford Wives (1975) and Voyage of the Damned (1976). From the 1990s she largely stopped, turning up now and then, as Dr Lilian Thurman in Donnie Darko (2001) and in The Hero (2017).
She saw the pattern before anyone reviewed it. "I always play what I call The Girl. The nice straight character. Sincere. Usually the victim. I'm put upon. I suffer." That is a fair account of the parts and a slightly unfair one of the acting. What Ross does inside those parts is keep her intelligence in view while the plot treats her as furniture. The stillness reads as thought rather than blankness, and the reserve as a woman deciding how much of herself to spend on the men around her. It is not nothing. It is also not a great deal to build a career on, and some critics found her tentative in the larger roles, The Stepford Wives especially, where a lead is expected to bring a personality of her own and they felt she did not.
On our last viewing of The Graduate we found we were sorrier for Elaine than for Ben, which cannot have been the intention. That is Ross's doing. When Ben has finished explaining himself she is still in the frame, taking it in, and the film cuts away before she can answer. We wanted to know what she would have said.
Watch The Graduate for Anne Bancroft, as we have said before, and then watch Ross in the second half and count the lines she is given against the minutes she is on screen. Whether she would have done more with more is a question the films of the time never troubled to ask her.
Biography
Katharine Ross is an American actress. Born in Los Angeles, California, she trained at the Actor's Workshop and began her career with television appearances in the early 1960s and a film debut in Shenandoah (1965).
She received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Elaine Robinson in The Graduate (1967) and won a BAFTA Award for Best Actress for performances in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969). Other notable film roles include Joanna Eberhart in The Stepford Wives (1975) and Dr. Lilian Thurman in Donnie Darko (2001). She has also appeared in television series such as The Colbys and provided voice work for American Dad!.
