Susan Tyrrell

Susan Tyrrell's Oma is funny in Fat City (1972), and still difficult to spend time with. Tyrrell makes her humour sound necessary, as though giving it up would leave this woman with little protection. We laughed, then felt uneasy about laughing, because she lets the need behind Oma's defiance show. The performance never turns her into a harmless eccentric. We rate Tyrrell highly for sustaining that difficulty without making the character someone to dismiss.

There is skill in not easing off at the point where an audience expects a little warmth. A more charming Oma would give us a comfortable way to watch her troubles, and Tyrrell declines to supply one. John Huston's patience helps: she has room to be funny and remain someone we would find exhausting. The direction sometimes drifts, but she and Stacy Keach make the company worth keeping.

Her subsequent career took that hard-bitten presence through independent films, camp and exploitation, with fewer opportunities to escape the type. Andy Warhol's Bad (1977) helped establish the camp direction; Forbidden Zone (1980) cast her as the cigar-smoking Queen Doris of the Sixth Dimension. John Waters' Cry-Baby (1990) found another use for her as a rockabilly grandmother. These are fitting roles for an actor drawn to the grotesque, but their variety should not conceal the repeated demand for a woman who could be relied upon to behave outrageously.

The danger was that her husky voice and coarse manner could be treated as enough in themselves. The later material did not consistently offer the opportunities suggested by Fat City, and distinctiveness can get an actor hired while narrowing what she is allowed to do. We value Tyrrell most when there is time to notice why a woman talks and behaves this way, rather than simply waiting for the next provocation. Start with Oma, provided an evening with someone difficult is not what you are trying to escape.