Maureen Stapleton did not do glamour and did not do tricks. She played plain, unfooled women in other people's films and made them look like people who had wandered in off the street. Our one review, Reds, is enough to show how.
Fi1m perspective
In Reds (1981) nearly everyone argues. Warren Beatty's John Reed cannot stop talking, Paul Sorvino's Louis Fraina argues at the top of his voice, and the committees outlast them all. Maureen Stapleton's Emma Goldman is gruff and unfooled, and she is the one character in the drama who talks the way the film's real old witnesses talk in the interviews between scenes: no speeches, no illusions, only what happened and what it cost. We relaxed whenever she appeared. For three and a quarter hours the film goes round in circles, and for her few minutes it stops and listens to somebody who has already been round them.
She came to films from the stage, and the stage kept most of her. She was on Broadway from 1946, in The Playboy of the Western World, and made her name as Serafina in Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo (1951), a part Williams had wanted for Anna Magnani; Neil Simon later wrote The Gingerbread Lady (1971) for her. The films fitted round that. Her first was Lonelyhearts (1958), as Fay Doyle; then Inez Guerrero in Airport (1970), Pearl in Woody Allen's Interiors (1978), Goldman for Beatty, and later Cocoon (1985) and Nuts (1987). She kept working until 2003.
What she did was make acting disappear. She had no vanity about the camera and no interest in being liked by it. She played plain women in other people's stories and gave each of them the same flat, exact truthfulness, so that you could not see where the person ended and the part began. That is also why she was rarely asked to carry a film. A character actress who is believed every time is the most useful thing a picture can have and the last thing a studio thinks of building one round. She knew it and did not mind: "I never had that problem. People looked at me on stage and said, 'Jesus, that broad better be able to act.'"
We have reviewed her only once, and that is a fair reflection of the career: a minute here, a scene there, in films that belong to somebody else. Start with Reds, and watch not for what she does but for how little she needs to do while the men around her work so hard.
Biography
Maureen Stapleton (also credited as Lois Maureen Stapleton) was an American actress. Born in Troy, New York, on 21 June 1925, she died on 13 March 2006. She made her Broadway debut in 1946 and won Tony Awards for The Rose Tattoo (1951) and The Gingerbread Lady (1971).
Stapleton received Academy Award nominations for Lonelyhearts (1958), Airport (1970) and Interiors (1978), winning for her role as Emma Goldman in Reds (1981). She also won a Golden Globe Award for Airport and a BAFTA Award for Reds, and is one of the few performers to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting with an Academy Award, two Tony Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award. Her other film credits include Cocoon (1985), The Money Pit (1986) and Johnny Dangerously (1984).
