Jo Van Fleet
Van Fleet came out of the theatre and never entirely left it. She won a Tony in 1954 for the Broadway production of The Trip to Bountiful, and the year after that an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for East of Eden, in a year that also brought The Rose Tattoo and I'll Cry Tomorrow. Very few careers front-load like that.
The thing she became known for is that she played old. Across four decades of work she was repeatedly cast as women considerably older than she was, and she did it without the usual apparatus of shuffling and quavering. Kate in East of Eden is hard and businesslike, a mother who has priced her own children accurately. Ella Garth in Wild River will not leave her land, and Van Fleet plays that as clear-eyed stubbornness rather than pathos. Arletta in Cool Hand Luke gets one short scene, played mostly lying down in the back of a truck, and it is the emotional engine of the entire film.
She worked sparingly. The Westerns gave her Kate Fisher in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and Ma McDade in The King and Four Queens; there is a wicked stepmother in Cinderella and a comic mother in I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!; and in 1976 Polanski used her as a watchful neighbour in The Tenant. The screen filmography is small for a reputation that size, which tells you how much of the real job stayed on stage.
Movies (10)
TV (1)
Where to start with Jo Van Fleet
Begin at the top, with East of Eden. The Oscar was not a courtesy: Kate is a woman who walked out, and Van Fleet plays her with a flat, unapologetic hardness the film keeps trying and failing to soften.
Cool Hand Luke next, for the opposite reason: she appears briefly, plays most of it flat on her back, and takes the film with her. Then Wild River, where she anchors an entire story about progress against one old woman who will not move. The Rose Tattoo and I'll Cry Tomorrow round out the extraordinary 1955 she had. Save The Tenant for last, a strange late appearance in a film with nothing else in common with her work, and she is very good in it.