Remembering Geraldine Page on what would have been her 100th birthday
Geraldine Page found her calling at the age of 17 when she did her first play “Excuse My Dust” at her Chicago church youth group. “I always wanted to be good at something, to be somebody,” she wrote in the New Yorker. “The minute I got into my first play, which was called ‘Excuse My Dust,’ I knew that this was what I was looking for.” Read on as Gold Derby celebrates what would have been her 100th birthday.
Page, who was born on Nov. 22 a century ago in Kirksville, Mo. and grew up in Chicago, was more than good at acting. The influential, versatile actress won her Best Actress Oscar on her eighth and final nomination for 1985’s “The Trip to Bountiful,” and received four Tony nominations and two Emmy Awards. She once explained what makes a successful actor, saying, “The main thing is the ability to control your instrument, which in the actor, is yourself. Look the way you want the character to look. Sound the way you want the character to sound. Once you’ve trained the instrument to do what you want, you’re in control.”
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Not all the time.
The New York Times review of “The Trip to Bountiful” proclaimed that Page had never been in better form as Carrie Watts, the spirited elderly woman desperate to visit her childhood home, “nor in firm control of that complex, delicate mechanism that makes her one of our finest actresses, though one who occasionally finds herself whirling, wildly in the wrong orbit.”
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Page didn’t describe herself as great actress but more a “memorable” who knew she had many bad habits. “I think I’ve largely eradicated them,” she told the Christian Science Monitor in 1986. “I used to do something funny with my mouth. I had a funny way of turning my head. That’s why I always ask the director to see the film dallies.”
After she graduated from high school in 1942, the Method actress studied for three years at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre School and performed in some 500 stock shows in the Midwest before staking her claim in New York. She worked as a hat-check girl, a spool winder in thread factory and a negligee model while waiting for her big break. That came in 1952 in Tennessee Williams’ drama “Summer and Smoke” directed by Jose Quintero, which played off-Broadway at Circle in the Square. Page embodied Alma Winemiller, the neurotic spinster daughter of a minister. Over her decades long career, Page became best known for her interpretations of Williams’ troubled heroines including the diva, alcoholic actress Alexandra Del Lago in the playwright’s 1959 Broadway hit “Sweet Bird of Youth.”
Williams once described her as “the most disciplined and dedicated of actresses.” But she rejected the idea that her acting was best suited for neurotic roles. “It’s a myth based on nothing,” she once said. “A lot of people say I always play neurotic women. Well, who doesn’t play neurotic women.”
Standing 5’ 8”, Page described her memorable voice as “a bunch of feathers in my throat.” She was also a true eccentric in her private life. “My mind is in the clouds; I don’t think about practical things,” she noted in the Christian Science Monitor. “My family is very tolerant of my inabilities, and we have such a good time.”
Page made her film debut in the 1953 John Wayne 3-D western “Hondo” as a resilient wife and mother abandoned by her husband during an attack by the Apache; Wayne plays as weary Indian fighter who tries to take them to safety. Page earned her first Oscar nomination for supporting actress for “Hondo,” but lost the award to Donna Reed in “From Here to Eternity.”
She couldn’t take advantage of her Oscar nomination because Page fell victim to the Hollywood blacklist. She didn’t make another film until the 1961 adaptation of “Summer and Smoke,” for which she received her first Best Actress nomination. Though she couldn’t work on film or television during that time, Page thrived in the theater appearing in 1954’s “The Immoralist” and “The Rainmaker,” 1956’s “Separate Tables,” and 1959’s “Sweet Bird of Youth.” She appeared in both the stage and 1962 film version of “Sweet Bird of Youth” (for which she received a Best Actress Oscar nod) alongside Rip Torn, who would become her third husband in 1963. The couple, who remained married until her death in 1987, had three children.
Perhaps two of her greatest performances were in “ABC Stage 67,” the 1966 adaptation of Truman Capote’s short story “A Christmas Memory,” and 1968’s “A Thanksgiving Visitor,” which also aired on ABC. She is haunting and poignant as Sook, an elderly eccentric relative of a young boy. Capote adapted “A Christmas Memory,” which revolves around Sook and Buddy making fruit cake for the holidays. And in 1967’s “A Thanksgiving Visitor,” Sook invites the bully making Buddy’s life miserable over for Thanksgiving. Page won Emmys for both TV specials.
“I have played old ladies since I was 17 years old and very convincingly,” she told the Christian Science Monitor. “I’ve always looked funny and was too tall to play leads and so had to play the grandmothers.” She believed her success was due to her “longtime commitment to character roles.”
Page added, “They did cast me as an ingénue once, and the novelty was nice. But I said, ‘There is nothing here to play! I really like to get to the meat of the role.'”
Page maintained that Carrie Watts in “The Trip to Bountiful” was her most demanding part. “See, it’s such a huge role, it was impossible to do it all correctly. But I’m proud of it. The reason I like the role so much is the way it was written — all those complexities squished in.”
She taught acting twice a week and was an artist-in-residence at New York’s Mirror Repertory Company. In 1985 and ’86 alone, she appeared in five off-Broadway productions including Sam Shepard’s “A Lie of the Mind.” Page received her final Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Play at the age of 62 for the 1987 revival of “Blithe Spirit” as the quirky medium and clairvoyant Madame Arcati. But Page didn’t show up for either the June 13 matinee or evening performance. After the evening performance, the play’s producer Karl Allison announced that she had died of a heart attack. He told the New York Times that the cast was “devastated” by the news. “She was such a wonderfully sweet person, on top of being an extraordinary actress.”
“She was not a gal who worried about the fashion of times,” noted Horton Foote, a longtime friend of Page who wrote the screenplay for “The Trip to Bountiful.” “She had enormous individuality. She just wasn’t a theater provincial, and her work reflected it.”
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