Joan Copeland
Joan Copeland is an actor, born 1922.
Joan Copeland was Arthur Miller's younger sister and did not work under his surname, which tells you something about how she wanted the career to go. She started in New York theatre in the mid-1940s, was an early member of the Actors Studio, and the stage remained her actual home: a 1977 Broadway revival of Pal Joey, a much-praised performance in The American Clock in 1981.
Screen work was the sideline, and its shape is instructive. The 1950s gave her small parts in serious pictures, The Goddess in 1958 and Middle of the Night in 1959, both written by Paddy Chayefsky. Then came decades of daytime television, Search for Tomorrow and One Life to Live, the sort of steady employment that lets a theatre actor stay in New York and keep saying yes to plays.
Her late film credits are the most visible ones, and they are variations on the same theme: authority delivered in a small dose. A senator in The Peacemaker. Madame Reynolds in The Object of My Affection. A mother in A Little Sex. Mrs. Prelot in Jungle 2 Jungle. She could establish an entire social position in one line reading, which is a character actor's most valuable trick and the hardest to teach. The best known of all is a voice: Tanana in Brother Bear in 2003, a village elder who carries the film's spiritual register.
She was born in 1922 and died in 2022, with screen credits here running into her late eighties.
Movies (10)
TV (4)
Where to start with Joan Copeland
Brother Bear is the easiest place to hear her and, oddly, one of the best uses anyone made of her. Tanana is the film's moral centre and Copeland gives her a dryness that keeps the whole thing from turning solemn.
For the actress rather than the voice, Middle of the Night and The Goddess are the pair, two late-1950s dramas written by Paddy Chayefsky, both interested in loneliness and neither afraid of a long scene. Her parts are small; the films reward the time regardless.
The 1990s comedies show her as a professional scene-setter. The Peacemaker hands her a senator, Jungle 2 Jungle a bit of comic starch, Her Alibi a supporting turn in a Tom Selleck vehicle nobody has ever defended. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is the graceful late one, a small part played by somebody with nothing left to prove.