Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning., now 88, 2024 :《音樂之聲》女配角埃莉諾·帕克去世 2013 Eleanor Parker: More Than Just the Sound of Music Baroness
Joan Jonas in her studio with her dog Sappho, New York, 1972. Dogs have been featured prominently in her work.Credit...Babette Mangolte, via The Museum of Modern Art New York
Joan Jonas
How to be long-term luminous was the lesson taught by “Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning” at the Museum of Modern Art, a six-decade survey of the still intensely active career of one of our most inventive contemporary artists. Over the years, Jonas, now 88, has broken experimental ground in video, photography, performance, conceptual art and installation, giving everything she touches the warmth of a watchfully lived life. It’s evident from gallery to gallery at MoMA, and in a concurrent show of works on paper, “Joan Jonas: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral,” at the Drawing Center in SoHo. (Read our review of “Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning.”)
Joan Jonas is an American visual artist and a pioneer of video and performance art, "a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s". Jonas' projects and experiments were influential in the creation of video performance art as a medium. Wikipedia
帕克的仰慕者認為，她一直沒有大紅大紫是因為她扮演過各種角色。她有時扮演金髮女郎，有時扮演淺黑膚色的女人，經常以紅頭髮亮相。她給人留下了不可磨滅的印象，但是淹沒在各種各樣的角色中，從《士兵的驕傲》(Pride of the Marines, 1945)中戰爭英雄高尚的未婚妻，到翻拍電影《人性的枷鎖》(Of Human Bondage, 1946)中W·薩默賽特·毛姆(W. Somerset Maugham)筆下墮落的女服務員兼妓女。
埃莉諾·珍·帕克(Eleanor Jean
Parker)1922年6月26日出生在俄亥俄州錫達維爾市。父親是一名數學老師。她很小的時候就在校園話劇中出演角色，十幾歲時前往馬薩諸塞州瑪莎葡
萄園的賴斯夏季戲劇學校學習表演。後來她搬到加利福尼亞州，在帕薩迪納劇院學習。
但是她在銀幕上首次亮相的時間被延遲了。本來她要在埃羅爾·弗林(Errol Flynn)主演的西部片《馬革裹屍還》(They Died With Their Boots On, 1941)中亮相，但是她的戲被剪掉了。1942年，她在兩個宣傳戰事的短片中露面，並在亨弗萊·鮑嘉(Humphrey Bogart)的黑幫電影《大佬》(The Big Shot)中為一名電話接線員配音。那年年底，她在《巴士轟鳴》(Busses Roar)中扮演一名受驚的巴士乘客，這部黑白故事片講述的是戰爭時期的破壞分子。
帕克主演過很多電視電影，在20世紀六七十年代，還客串過幾部電視
劇。她在NBC頻道的電視劇《布拉肯的世界》(Bracken』s World,
1969-70)中扮演一位有影響力的電影業秘書，獲得了新的關注。她的最後一部院線電影是和法拉赫·福塞特(Farrah
Fawcett)主演的《晒傷》(Sunburn, 1979)，這部喜劇片反響不佳。她的最後一部電視電影是1991年和凱文·麥卡錫(Kevin McCarthy)主演的《裸露畸戀》(Dead on the Money)。
帕克的第一任丈夫是弗雷德·L·洛斯(Fred L. Losse)，他是一名海軍牙醫，他們是在親蘇影片《莫斯科使團》(Mission to Moscow)的片場相識的。他們於1943年結婚，21個月後離婚。1946年，她嫁給了電影製片人伯特·E·弗雷德羅伯(Bert E. Friedlob)。他們生了三個孩子，1953年離婚。
她的第三任丈夫是藝術家保羅·克萊門斯(Paul Clemens)，他們1954年結婚，1965年離婚。他們育有一子。1966年，她嫁給了芝加哥商人雷蒙德·N·赫希(Raymond N. Hirsch)。他2001年去世。暫時還沒有關於她在世親人的信息。
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / Getty Images
All the obituaries identified Eleanor Parker as the actress who played Elsa Elberfeld in The Sound of Music
— the Baroness who releases her fiancé Captain Von Trapp (Christopher
Plummer) from his vows so he can marry Julie Andrews’ singing
ex-nun. That’s a little like elegizing Paul Newman for his popcorn.
In Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1965 blockbuster movie musical, Parker
is the one of the few performers who doesn’t get to sing — though she
had a firm soprano with perfect pitch. Elsa’s one song in the 1959 show,
“How Can Love Survive?”, was cut for the movie (but restored for last
week’s live-TV production, in which Laura Benanti played and sang Elsa).
And really, who remembers the character or, for that matter, the
actress? Plummer does. After hearing of her December 9th death — at 91,
after a bout of pneumonia — he said, ”Eleanor Parker was and is one of
the most beautiful ladies I have ever known — both as a person and as a
beauty. I hardly believe the sad news for I was sure she was enchanted
and would live forever.” (READ: Laura Stampler on the Carrie Underwood Sound of Music)
So who was Eleanor Parker? A ravishing redhead whose beauty was not
her claim to celebrity but an ornament to her craft. Indeed, she shone
in roles for which her classic good looks — the warm mouth, perfect oval
face and eyebrows worthy of a Shakespearean sonnet — might be an
irrelevance or a disadvantage. So often, Hollywood said: We’ll take this
gorgeous girl and muss her up. Parker jumped at the chance and gave
some of the movie midcentury’s strongest performances.
In Caged (1950) she was sent to a woman’s prison stocked with predatresses. In the 1951 Detective Story
she must confess to her cop husband (Kirk Douglas) that she once had an
abortion. Four years later she played women in wheelchairs: the
Metropolitan Opera star Marjorie Lawrence, stricken with polio, in Interrupted Melody, and Frank Sinatra’s scheming wife in The Man With the Golden Arm.
For the first three films she earned Academy Award nominations for Best
Actress; the fourth is in the movie that cinephiles remember her for.
Born June 26, 1922 in Cedarville, Ohio, Eleanor Jean Parker began
acting in Cleveland theaters and, after moving to California as a
teenager, at the Pasadena Playhouse. She signed a contract with Warner
Bros. and worked up from B-movies that ran less than an hour (Busses Roar, The Mysterious Doctor, The Last Ride) to her first “A” picture, the 1944 Between Two Worlds, an Outward Bound-style postmortem fantasy. She upped her éclat with the role of John Garfield’s supportive wife in the 1945 Pride of the Marines,
nursing and nourishing her soldier-husband, who had been blinded in a
Guadalcanal battle, back to sanity with her unflinching love (READ: TIME’s review of Pride of the Marines by subscribing to TIME)
Parker got what might have been a big break when she was cast as the
Machiavellian Mildred in a 1946 remake of W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage.
Bette Davis, who had vaulted to stardom playing Mildred in a 1934 film,
sent Parker flowers and a note saying she hoped the showy slattern role
was as good to the young actress as it had been for her. In TIME, critic James Agee credited Parker for “a fine, shoulder-wriggling job.” But the movie tanked, as did another romantic drama from the same year, Never Say Goodbye. As Agee wrote,
pen in check, it’s “the one about a divorced husband (Errol Flynn) who
loves his ex-wife (Eleanor Parker), who loves him but
won’t-admit-it-even-to-herself, and their little girl (Patti Brady), who
loves, and is loved by, both of them, and will never let them hear the
last of it. … Those who made this version use all the known tricks, and
invent a few new ones, for depriving it of both humor and humanity.”
The Warner executives didn’t know what to do with their young star — of her pairing with Humphrey Bogart in Chain Lightning (1950), a TIME critic opined, “Much of the dialogue they speak does not deserve to travel at the speed of sound” — until they cast Parker in Caged.
She is Maria Allen, a newlywed who tries to save her husband after he
was injured in a heist. Instead, Maria is wrongly convicted and sent to
women’s prison, where the warden (Agnes Moorehead) may have progressive
ideas but the real boss is Hope Emerson’s ultra-butch giantess of a
lifer. “Let’s you and me get acquainted, honey,” she growls to Marie.
“You may be a number to others but not to me.” When Marie discovers
she’s pregnant, the infirmary nurse asks if the father can help pay the
bills. Marie says the father is her husband, and he’s dead. “Another
bill for the state!” the nurse snarls. “Get dressed.”
Gallows humor and acerbic aphorisms abound — “In this cage you get
tough or you get killed,” observes fellow inmate Betty Garde — in a
script co-written by Virginia Kellogg (who had worked on the ’40s crime
epics T-Men and White Heat). With John Cromwell as director, Caged
earned Oscar nominations for Parker, Emerson and the screenplay. The
star also took the Best Actress prize at the 1950 Venice Film Festival,
where her rivals included Ingrid Bergman in the Italian Stromboli directed by Bergman’s new beau, Roberto Rossellini. (READ: TIME’s review of Caged by subscribing to TIME)
Parker’s dramatic profile now in more visible relief, she was cast by
William Wyler in his film version of Sidney Kingsley’s 1949 Broadway
hit Detective Story. The action is almost totally confined to a
Manhattan precinct house, and a pretty young wife might seem a needless
intrusion. But it happens that Detective Jim McLeod is tracking an
abortionist, and that the dastard once operated on Mary McLeod (Parker).
Shocked, Jim tells her, “I’d give my soul to take out my brain, hold it
under the faucet and wash away the dirty pictures you put there
tonight.” Mary stands her rhetorical ground: “But when you wash away
what I may have put there, you’ll find you’ve a rotten spot in your
brain, Jim. And it’s growing. I know. I’ve watched it.” Yes, people in
movies used to speak in complete sentences, and Parker invests full
emotional force in this outburst from a sensitive, troubled woman who
finds righteous anger in her despair.
In 1955, the year that Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was introduced,
Parker starred as the Australian diva Marjorie Lawrence, an opera star
for a decade until she contracted the disease, then fought it for two
years until she was able to perform Isolde, seated, at the Met. Future
Met soprano Eileen Farrell did the off-camera singing for Interrupted Melody, but Parker trained for weeks to learn the arias and during the shoot sang fortissima
instead of lip-synching to make the breathing and phrasing more
plausible. The film, which has its soapy and starchy moments, zaps to
life when Marjorie’s doctor-husband (Glenn Ford) plays a recording of
her singing “My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice,” and Marjorie crawls across
the floor to kick the machine and end the sonic torture. Parker put a
world of flailing fury into that impressive scene. (READ: TIME’s 1943 tribute to Marjorie Lawrence by subscribing to TIME)
In The Man with the Golden Arm, Otto Preminger’s chilling
version of Nelson Algren’s scalding novel about a card dealer’s drug
addiction — this is the movie whose plot TIME synopsized as “the hero gets his heroin”
— Sinatra touched the depths of desperation and the acme of his acting
art as Frankie Machine, with the young Kim Novak as his luscious
guardian angel. (Novak would later star in the third Of Human Bondage screen
version; so no degrees of Kevin Bacon for any of the three Hollywood
Mildreds.) Parker’s role as Frankie’s wife Zosch is small but indelible.
She lays guilt like wet cement around Frankie’s dreams to get free of
the junk, and uses her wheelchair as the cage he’s supposed to share
with her. (SPOILER ALERT: The witch can walk.)
No question this is the peak work for Sinatra, who virtually stole
the assignment from Marlon Brando, and for Preminger; it might also be
the all-time-harrowing junkie film. Screenwriter Walter Newman thought
Shelley Winters, so familiar with playing braying losers in A Place in the Sun and The Night of the Hunter,
should have been cast as Zosch. But Parker, still lovely at 33 under
that no-makeup makeup look, initially wins a little sympathy for the
character. She suggests that Zosch might have every right to feel
wronged, her beauty-queen destiny derailed by her downward-spiraling
husband and her invalid status. She is the Machine with an unshakable
addiction: her malice against Frankie, which she means to be a life
sentence of confinement for them both. (READ: reviews of The Man With the Golden Armnovel and movie by subscribing to TIME)
Just below the top rung of stars, Parker often played what we may
call the Neglected Female Lead. She fretted while Robert Taylor built
the plane that carried the first A-bomb in Above and Beyond (1952); tagged along across Egypt with archaeologist Taylor in Valley of the Kings (1954); played a rare comedy role as a Calamity Jane type pursuing Taylor in Many Rivers to Cross (1955). She got rejected by Stewart Granger in favor of the lower-billed, but fabulously fetching, Janet Leigh in Scaramouche (1952); diverted Civil War Northerner William Holden with her Confederate wiles in Escape from Fort Bravo (1953); supported Charlton Heston as he fights an invading army of South American soldier ants in The Naked Jungle (1954); and served as Sinatra’s wavering romantic interest in Frank Capra’s A Hole in the Head (1959).
Showcases for their male stars, these films allowed Parker to be the
decorative helpmate or coquette, little more. She did get to give some
lip to Clark Gable in the 1956 A King and Four Queens, where,
in the role of Sabina McDade (a wonderful name for a feisty floozy), she
tells him, “I wouldn’t trust you with a snow-blower in a blizzard.” But
1950s Hollywood was awash in manly Westerns and past its gynocentric
prime; it would never make a movie called A Queen and Four Kings. Parker’s last starring role in a “major” Hollywood movie was Return to Peyton Place, the 1962 sequel in which she replaced Real Star Lana Turner as Constance Mackenzie Rossi, the dirty town’s doyenne. (FIND: “The Lana Turner Affair” in Howard Chua-Eoan’s must-read Top 25 Crimes of the Century; no subscription required!)
When she could, Parker moved from the salad bar to red-meat roles in melodramas that earn the adjective “lurid.” In the 1957 Lizzie, based on Shirley Jackson’s novel The Bird’s Nest,
and directed by B-minus movie auteur Hugo Haas, she plays Elizabeth, a
librarian who receives threatening letters from a creature named Lizzie.
Released a few months before the similarly-themed The Three Faces of Eve,
which earned an Oscar for the young Joanne Woodward, this low-budget
psychological thriller unleashed Parker on a trio of personalities, each
of which she over- or underplayed to spooky precision. She also got
some solid screen time in Vincent Minnelli’s Home from the Hill
(1960), as the neglected wife of Texas philanderer Robert Mitchum. The
movie is two-and-a-half hours of domestic recriminations, with Parker’s
Hannah freezing out Mitchum’s Wade and raising their son Theron (George
Peppard) on her own. It is a marital battle who hostilities can cease
only at the grave.
20th Century Fox / Getty Images
The year after lending her stately grace to the Baroness in The Sound of Music, Parker got one last terrific role, though in a crappy movie. An American Dream,
based on Norman Mailer’s fourth and possibly worst novel, was a species
of detritus from Hollywood in the mid-’60s, when the avatars of the
town’s Golden Age that knew Europe was making all the cool films, and
they didn’t know how to imitate them profitably. Young directors, like
this movie’s Robert Gist, from TV, were allowed to try something dark
and weird; and Mailer’s novel, about an ex-Congressman talk-show host
accused of his wife’s murder, would do as a springboard. That the
novelist had stabbed and nearly killed his own wife a few years earlier
gave the project a frisson of sick fever. (READ: Richard Lacayo on the life and work of Norman Mailer)
So what’s Eleanor Parker doing in this dreck? Great work! As Deborah,
wealthy wife of the protagonist Stephen Rojack (Stuart Whitman), Parker
spectacularly struts and taunts her contempt; her every phrase wields
the scalpel of emasculation. Deborah’s wild sexual exploits disgust her
husband — a Mailer hero as prude? — and drive him to demand a divorce.
Hearing that, she sneers the immortal line: “From the daughter of the
eighth richest man in the whole U.S.? Bitch I am but rich I am.” Twenty
minutes into this Virginia Woolf spray of venom, Deborah falls to her death off the penthouse terrace balcony, and takes the movie with her.
Parker kept acting in TV shows, starring in the short-lived inside-Hollwood series Bracken’s World (1969), for which she gleaned a Golden Globe nomination, and doing guest spots on The Love Boat, Fantasy Island and Murder She Wrote
— the aging actor’s equivalent of shuffleboard and rest-home Bingo. In
1991, just before her 70th birthday, Parker retired. She lived quietly
in Palm Springs with the memories of the four husbands she had divorced
or outlived and the fondness of her four children, all born between 1948
and 1958, the decade of her early stardom. She could look back proudly
on a career of swank and subtle achievement, for she had proved that
this lady could play the tramp. Baroness she might be, but bitch she
was.
The year after lending her stately grace to the Baroness in The Sound of Music, Parker got one last terrific role, though in a crappy movie. An American Dream,
based on Norman Mailer’s fourth and possibly worst novel, was a species
of detritus from Hollywood in the mid-’60s, when the avatars of the
town’s Golden Age that knew Europe was making all the cool films, and
they didn’t know how to imitate them profitably. Young directors, like
this movie’s Robert Gist, from TV, were allowed to try something dark
and weird; and Mailer’s novel, about an ex-Congressman talk-show host
accused of his wife’s murder, would do as a springboard. That the
novelist had stabbed and nearly killed his own wife a few years earlier
gave the project a frisson of sick fever.
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