Jill Clayburgh
Jill Clayburgh was an American actress known for her work in theater, television, and cinema. She received the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her breakthrough role in Paul Mazursky's comedy drama An Unmarried Woman. She received a second consecutive Academy Award nomination for Starting Over as well as four Golden Globe nominations for her film performances, and two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for her television work.
Early life
Clayburgh was born in New York City, the daughter of a Protestant mother and a Jewish father. Her mother, Julia Louise, was an actress and theatrical production secretary for producer David Merrick. Her father was Albert Henry "Bill" Clayburgh, a manufacturing executive. Her paternal grandmother was concert and opera singer Alma Lachenbruch Clayburgh. Her brother, Jim Clayburgh, is a scenic designer.Clayburgh reportedly never talked about her religious background and was not raised in the faith of either of her parents. Clayburgh never got along with her parents and began therapy at an early age: "I was very rebellious as a teenager, aside from having an unhappy, neurotic childhood. But I just can't go into it. I think I had a lot of energy and undirected need so I just kind of rebelled in a general fashion. I got myself in terrible, very personal trouble. Therapy has helped me a lot in my life."
As a child, Clayburgh was inspired to become an actress when she saw Jean Arthur as Peter Pan on Broadway in 1950. She was raised on Manhattan's Upper East Side, where she attended the all-girls Brearley School. She then attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied religion, philosophy and literature, but ultimately decided to be an actress. She received her acting training at HB Studio.
Career
Early career
Clayburgh began acting as a student in summer stock and, after graduating, joined the Charles Street Repertory Theater in Boston, where she met another up-and-coming actor and future Academy Award-winning star, Al Pacino, in 1967. They met after starring in Jean-Claude Van Itallie's play America, Hurrah. They had a five-year romance and moved back together to New York City.In 1968, Clayburgh debuted off-Broadway in the double bill of Israel Horovitz's The Indian Wants the Bronx and It's Called the Sugar Plum, also starring Pacino. Clayburgh and Pacino were cast in "Deadly Circle of Violence", an episode of the ABC television series NYPD, premiering November 12, 1968. Clayburgh at the time was also appearing on the soap opera Search for Tomorrow, playing the role of Grace Bolton. Her father would send the couple money each month to help with finances.
She eventually made her Broadway debut in 1968 in The Sudden and Accidental Re-Education of Horse Johnson, co-starring Jack Klugman, which ran for 5 performances. In 1969, she starred in an off-Broadway production of the Henry Bloomstein play Calling in Crazy, at the Andy Warhol-owned Fortune theatre. She was in a TV pilot that did not sell, The Choice and appeared off Broadway in The Nest.
In 1969, Clayburgh made her screen debut in The Wedding Party, written and directed by Brian De Palma. The Wedding Party was filmed in 1963 but not released until six years later. The film focuses on a soon-to-be groom and his interactions with various relatives of his fiancée and members of the wedding party; Clayburgh played the bride-to-be. Her co-stars included Robert De Niro, in one of his early film roles, and Jennifer Salt. In his review from The New York Times, Howard Thompson wrote, "As the harassed engaged couple, two newcomers, Charles Pfluger and Jill Clayburgh, are as appealing as they can be."
Broadway success
Clayburgh attracted attention when she appeared in the Broadway musical The Rothschilds which ran for 502 performances. She then went on to play Desdemona opposite James Earl Jones in the 1971 production of Othello in Los Angeles, and had another Broadway success with Pippin, which ran for 1,944 performances. Clive Barnes of The New York Times found Clayburgh to be "all sweet connivance as the widow out to get her man."During this time, Clayburgh had a string of brief character parts in film and television. Some of these include The Telephone Book, Portnoy's Complaint, The Thief Who Came to Dinner and The Terminal Man, opposite George Segal.
After guest-starring on an episode of The Snoop Sisters, Clayburgh played Ryan O'Neal's ex-wife in The Thief Who Came to Dinner and starred in a TV pilot that was not picked up, Going Places. She also guest starred on Medical Center, Maude, and The Rockford Files. She hosted Saturday Night Live on February 28, 1976 with musical guest, Leon Redbone. She later returned to Broadway for Tom Stoppard's Jumpers, which ran for 48 performances. Despite her success on Broadway, it was film acting that really excited Clayburgh: "One of the things I like about the movies is the adventure of it," she said. "I like going to different places and I like doing a different scene every day."
Clayburgh was praised for her performances in the TV movies Hustling, in which she played a prostitute, and The Art of Crime. Hustling was a departure for her: "Before I did Hustling I was always cast as a nice wife. I wasn't very good at it. Then with Hustling, it was a nice role and it was a departure. People saw a different dimension." Her performance in the TV film eventually earned her an Emmy nomination; she later said it revitalised her career. "It changed my career," Clayburgh said. "It was a part that I did well, and suddenly people wanted me. Sidney Furie saw me, and wanted me for Gable and Lombard."
''An Unmarried Woman'' and film stardom
Clayburgh was cast as Carole Lombard in the 1976 biopic Gable and Lombard with James Brolin as Clark Gable. Variety called it "a film with many major assets, not the least of which is the stunning and smashing performance of Clayburgh as Carole Lombard" and Time Out London felt she "produced a very modern version of the Lombard larkishness." Vincent Canby of The New York Times suggested that her performance "comes off better" than Brolin's Gable, as "she appears to be creating a character whenever the fearfully bad screenplay allows it." Despite this, he felt both actors were miscast as the famous couple, writing further, "Miss Clayburgh could be an interesting actress, but there are always problems when small performers try to portray the kind of giant legends that Gable and Lombard were. Because both Gable and Lombard are still very much alive in their films on television and in repertory theaters, there is difficulty in responding to Mr. Brolin and Miss Clayburgh in any serious way."She starred in the acclaimed TV movie Griffin and Phoenix co-starring with Peter Falk. It tells the story of two ill-fated middle-aged characters who both face a terminal cancer diagnosis and have months left to live. Notably, Clayburgh developed the same type of cancer her character had in this film, succumbing to it in 2010. Also in 1976, she had her first big box office success playing the love interest of Gene Wilder's character in the comedy-mystery Silver Streak, also starring Richard Pryor. Critics felt Clayburgh had little to do in Silver Streak, and The New York Times called her "an actress of too much intelligence to be able to fake identification with a role that is essentially that of a liberated ingenue."
In 1977, she had another hit with Semi-Tough, a comedy set in the world of American professional football, which also starred Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson. Clayburgh played Barbara Jane Bookman, who has a subtle love triangle relationship with both Reynolds and Kristofferson's characters. Vincent Canby liked her performance, writing, "Miss Clayburgh, who's been asked to play zany heroines in Gable and Lombard and Silver Streak by people who failed to provide her with material, has much better luck this time. She's charming," and The Washington Post enjoyed her chemistry with Reynolds: "Reynolds and Clayburgh look wonderful together. They seem to harmonize in a way that would only be more apparent - and make their eventual recognition of being in love seem more appropriate." Both Semi-Tough and Silver Streak earned her a reputation "as a popular modern stylist of screwball comedy" and The Guardian noted how Clayburgh "had the kind of warmth and witty sophistication barely seen in Hollywood since Carole Lombard and Jean Arthur".
Clayburgh's breakthrough came in 1978 when she received the first of her two Academy Award for Best Actress nominations for Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman. In what would be her career-defining role, Clayburgh was cast as Erica, the courageous abandoned wife who struggles with her new 'single' identity after her stockbroker husband leaves her for a younger woman. Upon release, An Unmarried Woman drew praise and was popular at the box office, briefly making Clayburgh, at 34, a star. Clayburgh's performance garnered some of the best reviews of her career: Roger Ebert called the film "a journey that Mazursky makes into one of the funniest, truest, sometimes most heartbreaking movies I've ever seen. And so much of what's best is because of Jill Clayburgh, whose performance is, quite simply, luminous. Clayburgh takes chances in this movie. She's out on an emotional limb. She's letting us see and experience things that many actresses simply couldn't reveal" while The New York Times wrote, "Miss Clayburgh is nothing less than extraordinary in what is the performance of the year to date. In her we see intelligence battling feelingreason backed against the wall by pushy needs."
Writing for The New Yorker, veteran critic Pauline Kael noted:
In addition to her Oscar nomination, Clayburgh also earned her first Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama and won the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival, which she and Isabelle Huppert shared.
During this time, she turned down the lead in Norma Rae, a film that earned Sally Field her first Oscar. Still, in 1979, Clayburgh had a career peak after starring in two movies that garnered her widespread acclaim. The first was Bernardo Bertolucci's La Luna, which she made in Italy. The film presents an incestuous relationship between a mother and her drug-addicted son, and was poorly received at the time. Clayburgh agreed to star in this film because she felt that "most great roles explore something that is socially taboo." Bertolucci was especially impressed with her work, having complimented her ability "to move from one extreme to the other in the same shot, be funny and dramatic within the same scene." Despite the film's controversy, Clayburgh's performance as a manipulative opera singer was generally praised: Critic Richard Brody called it "her most extravagant role" and a review in The New York Times felt she was "extraordinary under impossible circumstances." Also, in the London Review of Books, Angela Carter wrote, "Jill Clayburgh, seizing by the throat the opportunity of working with a great European director, gives a bravura performance: she is like the life force in person".
Her second and last film of 1979 was Alan J. Pakula's Starting Over, a romantic comedy with Burt Reynolds and Candice Bergen. Pakula hired her because, "the extraordinary thing is that she's so many people. In a Jill Clayburgh movie you don't know what you're going to get." As a nursery-school teacher who falls reluctantly in love with Reynolds's divorced character, her performance was lauded by The New York Times: "Miss Clayburgh delivers a particularly sharp characterization that's letter-perfect during the first part of the story and unconvincing in the second, through no fault of her own." Starting Over earned her a second Oscar and Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress. Also that year, she later returned to the stage with In the Boom Boom Room as a go-go dancer. She had wanted to play this role since 1972 when the play originally premiered on Broadway, but she lost the role to Madeline Kahn. Although she wasn't cast in David Rabe's play, she later married him in 1979.
Her back-to-back success with An Unmarried Woman and Starting Over led writer Mel Gussow to suggest that Clayburgh was one of the few "stars for the 80's, fresh, natural anti‐ingenues" alongside Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton, adding, "These are stage actresses who have become movie stars on their own terms, free of "glamour," ready to clown as well as to play heroines." In 1980, she was cast opposite Michael Douglas in a romantic comedy, It's My Turn, in which she teaches the proof of the snake lemma. Novelist Eleanor Bergstein, who had written the screenplay, was delighted with Clayburgh's casting. "To me," says Bergstein, "Jill is one of the few actresses who looks like she has imagined her life, made her life happen. I think that divides women in a way, women whose intelligence animates their faces. They have willed themselves to be beautiful, to be exactly who they are. Their minds inform their faces. I think Jill is like that. Lots of actresses are just the opposite." Clayburgh herself was attracted to the part because "Kate is the closest person to myself that I have ever played. People always say, 'Oh, An Unmarried Woman, that's you.' But really, of course, it's not." The following year, she was a conservative Supreme Court justice in First Monday in October, a comedy with Walter Matthau. Her performance was praised and earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical.