Penelope Milford

A pupil is dead, a news crew has come to Westerburg High, and Pauline Fleming, the guidance counsellor in Heathers (1989), has the whole cafeteria holding hands. Penelope Milford plays it without a flicker of a wink. Fleming believes in what she is doing, and believes in it a little more once the camera is on her, and Milford lets us see both at once. We laughed out loud at the funeral that comes just before, and then this scene arrived and the laugh went sour, because she never lets Fleming become a monster. She is something more common and harder to forgive: a well-meaning adult who has found a use for a dead teenager.

That was the note Milford could hit better than most, the woman on the loose fringe of things who means well and is not quite trusted for it. She came out of the New York stage of the early 1970s, off-Broadway alongside Richard Gere, then Broadway in Lenny (1972) and Shenandoah (1975), where she originated Jenny Anderson. Film started small, an uncredited part in Maidstone (1970) and Man on a Swing (1974), and then came quickly: the silent-film star Lorna Sinclair opposite Rudolf Nureyev in Valentino (1977), and a year later Vi Munson in Hal Ashby's Coming Home. She was cast, again and again, as bohemian women in the middle of some upheaval, and she seems to have understood the type from the inside. Of Vi she said, "She's really not too concerned with being consistent. She's just on her own."

Coming Home is where to see what she could do. Vi is sharp and sad, a person who has not decided what she is for, and Milford gives her a restlessness that makes the people around her look posed. There is a scene, well into the film, in which Vi dances and comes apart, and it is the one stretch of the second hour with the charge of the veterans' ward in the first. We were sorry each time Ashby cut away from her, and he cuts away often. The film keeps forgetting she is there. That is its failing, not hers, and it is a failing the industry then repeated at greater length.

After Endless Love (1981), for Franco Zeffirelli, the film work thinned to occasional supporting parts and television, and Heathers was the last time a film she was in stayed in the memory. Her final screen work came in the mid-1990s; she went back to the stage once, in 2013. Two good supporting performances in two good films is not a large body of work, and we will not pretend otherwise. But both are films angrier at the grown-ups than at the young, and both needed an actor who could play the grown-up straight, with no plea for sympathy. Watch Coming Home for the first hour and then keep watching for her. Watch Heathers and notice who is holding the hands.