Jill Clayburgh
Jill Clayburgh is an actor, born 1944.
Theatre trained her and film took its time noticing. Clayburgh worked through the first half of the 1970s in supporting parts, and when the leads arrived they arrived all at once. An Unmarried Woman cast her as Erica Benton, a Manhattan woman whose husband leaves her, and brought an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Starting Over, the year after, brought a second consecutive nomination. There is a Cannes best actress prize on her record from the same stretch.
The thing she could do that few others were doing was play a woman thinking. Erica is not a lesson about independence, she is somebody working out in real time whether she wants what is being offered to her, and Clayburgh lets the calculation show without turning it into a speech. Four Golden Globe nominations and two Primetime Emmy nominations across her film and television work suggest the industry understood what it had, at least for a while.
The 1980s were thinner. Hanna K. and Shy People are the serious, director-driven films an actress takes when the studios stop writing leads, and Whispers in the Dark is a thriller that needed her more than she needed it. She kept working in supporting parts to the end: Nan Whitman in Fools Rush In, Agnes Finch in Running with Scissors, Nancy Randall in Love & Other Drugs, and Annie's mother in Bridesmaids, which reached cinemas the year after her death in 2010.
Movies (14)
TV (2)
Where to start with Jill Clayburgh
Begin with An Unmarried Woman, which is the whole argument for her in one film and still one of the best American films about a woman rebuilding on her own terms. Starting Over is the companion piece and plays better than its reputation, largely because she performs the awkwardness instead of smoothing it over.
For the comic register, Silver Streak and Semi-Tough show what the studios thought she was for in the mid-1970s, which is not what Mazursky thought. Luna is the difficult one and divides people; attempt it only if you want her at her most exposed. Of the late supporting parts, Running with Scissors gives her the most to do, and Bridesmaids gives her the least while being the film most people have seen.