Two of a kind
Saying goodbye to two very singular screen presences: Gena Rowlands and Shelley Duvall
I find it wistfully charming that my initial introduction to two of our most singular onscreen performers was through an episode of a children’s fantasy television program. I spent a good portion of my childhood going to the library every week where I’d inevitably check out two or three VHS tapes of Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre, a program she dreamed up while filming Popeye in Malta with Robert Altman and Robin Williams (who agreed to star in the first episode as the Frog Prince). Faerie Tale Theatre became a kind of Hollywood playground for Duvall’s famous actor and director friends who would show up to work on an episode or two, relishing the chance to ham it up in silly wigs and masks for the sake of children’s entertainment. Watching the episodes as an adult, I’m oddly moved by how committed everyone was to Shelley’s passion project and just how much fun they seemed to be having.
And then there is Gena Rowlands as the Witch to Shelley’s Rapunzel.
I don’t remember the first time I watched the Rapunzel episode of Faerie Tale Theatre, but knowing me, I’m sure I probably checked it out at least a couple times because I had long, blonde hair and loved the story. Probably informed by my lifelong love for Into the Woods (the original 1987 Broadway production, including Bernadette Peters’ performance as the Witch, simply had to be partially influenced by Faerie Tale Theatre and specifically the Rapunzel ep), the Witch is my favorite character in the Rapunzel story, and Gena’s performance finds different layers in a typically straightforward fairy tale stereotype.
Anyone familiar with Gena Rowlands’ uniformly excellent body of work should not find it surprising that she brought the same pathos, humor, and total devotion of craft to what many actresses her age would deem a throwaway, paycheck role. There is still a sense of fun and play and utter inventiveness—something she also brought to even her more difficult films like Opening Night and A Woman Under the Influence—but it is astonishing how easily she made every role, including a mean, fairy tale witch, feel completely lived-in. Gena didn’t need silly wigs or masks, she transformed herself from the inside out. Her Witch is at once funny and maternal and also violent and desperate; shades of other characters Gena played in her work with her husband John Cassavetes and others. Best of all, she plays the Witch with an unpredictability that makes her feel actually dangerous, a quality that is all too rare in children’s entertainment these days.
It’s interesting watching Shelley go toe-to-toe with Gena; they’re two very different performers, and yet, they’re also cut from a similar, fearless cloth. Where Gena is a force of nature, Shelley is otherworldly. With her huge doe eyes and idiosyncratic line delivery, Shelley makes a charmingly off-kilter Rapunzel to Gena’s formidable, wise-cracking Witch. What makes both women so beguiling onscreen is how unselfconscious they are, how willing to be totally vulnerable, embarrassing, or weird in pursuit of total honesty. Shelley’s lack of ego and vanity is what initially attracted Altman to her, who couldn’t help being charmed by her offbeat persona and big smile and used it to great, heartbreaking effect in their films together like Nashville and the dreamy, polarizing 3 Women (more on that film another time).
These two women gave us a roadmap for not just truthfulness and risk-taking onscreen but also generosity: of spirit, time, talent. It makes sense Shelley was able to bring so many creative people, including Gena, together for Faerie Tale Theatre, because she always gave so generously of herself to others that everyone wanted to give back to her and each other. You can feel the warmth, kindness, and lack of vanity in every episode: a testament to the woman behind the project.
It’s only later in life that I came to know Gena Rowlands and Shelley Duvall for their other, more prickly and adult work, and yet that first impression from a children’s show has had a bigger impact than I’ve realized until now when we’ve lost both of them. Both women were singular talents, but both had the seemingly effortless ability to make you feel as if someone had just turned a camera on and captured a real human being onscreen. There has never been anybody like either of them before, and given how homogenized and blandly corporate Hollywood has become, it feels deeply unlikely we’ll ever get anybody like them again.
And it’s everyone’s loss.
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