Best Actress Ranking - Update

Here is a new update. The newly added performance is highlighted in bold.

If five performances from the same year are included, the winning performance is higlighted in red.

1. Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind (1939)
2. Luise Rainer in The Good Earth (1937)
3. Jessica Lange in Frances (1982)
4. Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950)
5. Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress (1949)
6. Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)
7. Anne Bancroft in The Graduate (1967)
8. Janet Gaynor in Seventh Heaven (1927-1928)   
9. Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman (1978)
10. Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons (1988)

11. Geraldine Page in The Trip to Bountiful (1985)
12. Susan Sarandon in Thelma & Louise (1991)
13. Katharine Hepburn in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
14. Edith Evans in The Whisperers (1967)
15. Norma Shearer in Marie Antoinette (1938)
16. Greta Garbo in Ninotchka (1939)
17. Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
18. Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby (2004)
19. Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth (1998)
20. Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge! (2001)

21. Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
22. Simone Signoret in Room at the Top (1959)
23. Bette Davis in The Little Foxes (1941)
24. Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (1965)
25. Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame (1958)
26. Glenda Jackson in Women in Love (1970)
27. Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve (1957)
28. Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
29. Renée Zellweger in Bridget Jones's Diary (2001)
30. Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire (1941)

31. Sissy Spacek in In the Bedroom (2001)
32. Halle Berry in Monster's Ball (2001)
33. Lee Remick in Days of Wine and Roses (1962)
34. Annette Bening in American Beauty (1999)

35. Diane Lane in Unfaithful (2002)
36. Emily Watson in Hilary and Jackie (1998)
37. Judi Dench in Iris (2001)
38. Julie Christie in Away from Her (2007)
39. Shelley Winters in A Place in the Sun (1951)
40. Audrey Hepburn in Wait until Dark (1967)

41. Meryl Streep in The Devil wears Prada (2006)
42. Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945)
43. Julie Walters in Educating Rita (1983)
44. Anne Baxter in All about Eve (1950)
45. Judi Dench in Mrs. Brown (1997)
46. Helen Hayes in The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1932)
47. May Robson in Lady for a Day (1933)
48. Jane Fonda in Coming Home (1978)
49. Greer Garson in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)
50. Doris Day in Pillow Talk (1959)

51. Meryl Streep in One True Thing (1998)
52. Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear (1952)
53. Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity (1953)
54. Katharine Hepburn in Guess who’s coming to dinner (1967)
55. Marsha Mason in Chapter Two (1979)
56. Jane Wyman in The Yearling (1946)
57. Melissa Leo in Frozen River (2008)
58. Martha Scott in Our Town (1940)
59. Teresa Wright in The Pride of the Yankees (1942) 
60. Jennifer Jones in Love Letters (1945)

61. Ellen Burstyn in Same Time, Next Year (1978)
62. Susan Hayward in My Foolish Heart (1949)
63. Jeanne Crain in Pinky (1949)
64. Eleanor Parker in Detective Story (1951)
65. Vanessa Redgrave in Mary, Queen of Scots (1971)
66. Diane Keaton in Marvin's Room (1996)
67. Louise Dresser in A Ship comes in (1927-1928)
68. Dorothy McGuire in Gentleman's Agreement (1947)
69. Loretta Young in Come to the Stable (1949)  
70. Mary Pickford in Coquette (1928-29)

71. Leslie Caron in Lili (1953)
72. Sissy Spacek in The River (1984)
73. Shirley MacLaine in The Turning Point (1977)
74. Irene Dunne in Cimarron (1930-1931)
75. Ruth Chatterton in Madame X (1928-29)
76. Diana Wynyard in Cavalcade (1932-1933)
77. Bette Davis in The Star (1952)

Leslie Caron as Lili Daurier in Lili

When I reviewed Leslie Caron’s Oscar-nominated performance for the first time, I was not overly impressed with her work but still found enough to like to be generous in my overall grade. As you can see from my ranking now, my opinion on her work has definitely lessened now which is why I will write a few words in this case. 

The main problem of Leslie Caron’s performance and the reason why I downgraded her work mostly to be found in the character she is playing and the movie she is in. Obviously, I always separate the work of an actress from her surroundings if she is able to overcome them or work effectively within them - which is something that Leslie Caron actually does but there are limits to what an actress can achieve if the task she is given is so ridiculous from the start that there is simply no way to save the material she is given in any way. Or rather, to raise it to a level that I would expect from an Oscar-nominated performance.

What surprised me extremely when reading about Lili on the Internet is how many people seem to love this movie and how even usually cynical Oscar bloggers write how it is one of the most lovely surprises in their Oscar journey. But to be fair, even I became a victim to Lili’s easy likability when I watched it for the first time, calling the movie charming, innocent and harmless. And even now I can understand why I had that opinion and why so many others have it - if you watch the movie without thinking too much, it is very easy to get lost in it. It follows its story with serious dedication and presents every character and plot very straight-forward despite being an almost fairy-tale like situation and even now I occasionally crack a smile when I see Leslie Caron and the puppets sing the catchy tune “Hi-Lili, Hi Lo”. But re-watching it now and thinking more deeply about the story and its central character, everything immediately falls apart for me. And no matter how dedicated Leslie Caron is in her role, she cannot save the unsavable task of making sense of Lili the movie or Lili the character. 

The major problem with Lili as a character is that the movie needed a female role who was young enough to believe that hand puppets are actually talking to her but also old enough to decide that she wants to enter a toxic relationship of verbal and physical abuse for the obligatory “happy ending”. The screenwriters seemed to think that 16 is the ideal age in that case and so we have 22-year old Leslie Caron playing a 16-year-old with what appears to be the intellect of a 4-year-old. To be fair, Leslie Caron actually managed to be convincing as a 16-year-old and whatever she has to do in her role, she does it with complete earnestness but also the necessary light charm, might it be following a man she hardly knows around town or talking to the puppets about her private thoughts. But still, how could any actress make sense of all of it? Again, if you only watch Lili for being charmed, then it succeeds and you will leave the movie marveling about Leslie Caron but when you think about it on an Oscar-level and begin to ask what Leslie Caron really did here, then you are lost. 

The story of Lili, despite its childish atmosphere, is actually very dark - Lili suffers from the death of her father and the man she hoped who would help her, is almost abused by the first man she meets, contemplates suicide and is constantly verbally and phyisically abused by the man who controls the puppets that she loves so much. And there is probably a lot to interpret in the story, finding a young woman’s sexual awakening and coming-of-age, people who are only able to communicate via puppets and without seeing each other but again - underlying themes become basically meaningless if the message is brought across so ridiculously.

Leslie Caron’s character is the kind that would nicely be described as “naive” or “helpless” but watching her scream in the middle of the street when she sees an acrobat and follow basically everyone around who talks to her makes you wonder how she even managed to survive one day after the death of her father and how she rather resembles a child of 4 in the body of a young woman. It’s not enough that she earnestly interacts with the puppets and seems to believe all the time that they are real - even after she is hired at the circus as part of the puppet act and she knows that a man (who is constantly angry at her as a way to hide his feelings of love for this girl of 16) is controlling them and people are watching her, she still interacts totally seriously with them, constantly “forgetting” that they are not real. And even at the end, when she wants to leave the circus (claiming that she has grown up and is wiser now), she still says goodbye to them as if they are real people. Again, Leslie Caron gives all of this the most possible amount of dignity but there is no way she can make any sense of any of it or give any depth or complexity to Lili as a character. She has absolutely zero chemistry with Mel Ferrer and for some reason the movie makers want us to cheer the fact that she ends up running into his arms even though they never shared a single loving moment and he only attacked and even slapped her during the movie. More than that, how comfortable can a love story be when the man in question knows that the woman he loves is basically a little girl who talks to hand puppets and buys candy and dolls when she has a little money? And even if we forget Lili’s “naivety”, she still remains a 16-year-old girl, so her ending the movie with the obligatory kissing moment still feels wrong for basically every reason. 

Again, all of these are complaints about the movie and the screenplay (that somehow won a Golden Globe and a WGA award) but it just underlines how Leslie Caron has nothing to work with. I understand that Lili seems to have been a big deal back then, scoring various major Oscar nominations and also winning Leslie Caron a BAFTA - I suppose the whole concept of an actress talking to hand puppets and making it believable was for some reason new and artistically exciting. And I want to be fair to Leslie Caron and say that more than anything, this is a misdirected performance for me rather than an actress not being up to the task she was given - but even this statement is a bit contradictory because at the end of day, Leslie Caron did exactly what she had to do to make Lili a success: being a charming presence and making Lili as a person believable in the context of the story. And this is what she did, bringing the fairy-tale aspect of the story to live, but this fairy-tale did not allow her to go deeper in any way. Again, I applaud her for being so serious in her role and as I said before, if you only want to be charmed, then she succeeded in her role. But thinking closer about her character, there is simply nothing to build on or to use and at the end of the day, all she has are a few scenes talking to puppets, crying or being sad (and not even her obligatory two dancing scenes impress in any way). She is quite touching when she drops the watch of her father and has a moving moment when she asks Marcus "What shall I do now?" after losing her job as a waitress but the effect of such a scene is ruined when you remember that the only reason why she lost her job was her not working and only starring at Marcus, another moment when the movie wants us to present Lili's strange behavior as "charming naivety". On the other hand, she never evokes any true emotions outside of scenes that ask her to and even then she sometimes fail - she tells the story of her father's death without any visible feelings, despite the fact that his death is the reason for all her troubles and noting bad that happens to her seems to have any effect on her character. The truth is that even the most talented actress could not combine the different aspects of Lili (believing in puppets, falling in love with an abusive man, beginning to understand the world around her) into one coherent character and so Leslie Caron is never able to explain Lili as a human being, why she behaves the way she does, what she thinks and wants, why she would fall in love with Paul and she never explores (or isn't allowed to explore) the darker tones of the story (while Mel Ferrer on the other hand goes too far in exploring them, making his performance unnecessarily dark and unlikable, making it even harder for Leslie Caron in the process of make her affections believable) and as an actress seems just as lost as Lili is as a character.

YOUR Best Actress of 1963

Here are the results of the poll:

1. Patricia Neal - Hud (40 votes)

2. Leslie Caron - The L-Shaped Room (14 votes)

3. Natalie Wood - Love with the Proper Stranger (11 votes)

4. Rachel Roberts - This Sporting Life (6 vote)

5. Shirley MacLaine - Irma La Douce (4 votes)

Thanks to everyone for voting!

Best Actress 1963 - The resolution

After having watched and reviewed all five nominated performances, it's time to pick the winner!

5. Shirley MacLaine in Irma La Douce

Shirley MacLaine both saves and harms her movie as she often feels out of place but her no-nonsense approach to this part is also a welcome change of pace and helped to craft an entertaining, sometimes touching, sometimes amusing but never stupid character.

4. Natalie Wood in Love with the Proper Stranger

                     

Natalie Wood gives a performance that never goes beyond the surface but still works surprisingly well because her charm, her ability to handle comedy and drama and her clear display of Angie’s journey are still so intriguing, entertaining, poignant, funny and provoking.

3. Leslie Caron in The L-Shaped Room

In this very emotional performance, Leslie Caron gives a quiet and subtle piece of work that may be limited by the way her character was written but is also much more memorable than any exaggerated overacting would have been.

2. Patricia Neal in Hud

Patricia Neal’s performance is a beautiful example of a dedicated realism on the screen but also of an actress taking an underwritten and thin part and filling it with life thanks to her own acting, her own personality and her ability to use her material to craft the idea of a whole world beyond the written word.

1. Rachel Roberts in This Sporting Life

Rachel Roberts lingers like a ghost over every moment of her movie and she mixed moments of pure intensity with shocking and heartbreaking images and that way gave an incredibly effective turn that leaves a lasting and hunting impression.

 

Best Actress 1963: Leslie Caron in "The L-Shaped Room"

Leslie Caron had quite an impressive career start in the 50s – her first movie role was opposite Gene Kelly in the Best Picture winner An American in Paris and only 2 years later she would receive an Oscar nomination for Best Actress as a young, depressive girl who forms a strange relationship to a puppeteer in the musical drama Lili. After this, critical success became rather slim although she did star in another Best Picture winner, the musical Gigi. In this movie, just like in Lili, she played a young, inexperienced girl who needs a man to fulfill her own happiness. Finally, in 1963, Leslie Caron left her child-like image behind and starred as a young, unmarried and pregnant woman in the Black-and-White drama The L-Shaped Room. This controversial role is certainly as far removed as possible from the colorful, entertaining and sing-along world she had been mostly known for up to this point. And this time, critics were fully convinced and a win at the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs must have made her a strong competitor for the Oscar statuette. Today, Leslie Caron does not necessarily hold a reputation as a strong dramatic actress – not only is she mostly remembered for her musical roles because these movies still have a lasting appeal while movies like The L-Shaped Room are largely forgotten but it seems that people want to remember her for her parts as Nina, Lili or Gigi, as if the innocence and sweetness she portrayed in these roles are the only aspects of her personality and her abilities as an actress that are worth cherishing. Leslie Caron may not have the same irresistible screen presence as another actress who started her career in the 50s, Audrey Hepburn, and she also was not really able to turn these roles into showcases for her talent and dedication like Audrey did, but she did possess a certain charisma that helped her to pull of such rather empty and thin characters because these characters mostly needed charisma to become alive. In her most famous parts, Leslie Caron may never be outstanding in any way and a more skilled actress might have realized these roles with more depth but Leslie Caron also never disappointed and gave performances that were satisfying enough to either carry the picture or become an enjoyable part of it.

In The L-Shaped Room, Leslie Caron did not have her usual advantages – being sweet or innocent would neither help her in a Black-and-White drama nor would it be believable in this kind of role. Furthermore, she could only use her acting talents in this case – the movie itself did not help her by surrounding her with entertaining situations that would enable her to show her charm and appeal, may it be by singing a song with four puppets or dancing through her apartment with a bottle of Champagne. No, The L-Shaped Room completely depended on her ability to communicate her character’s fears and worries while showing how her interactions with various inhabitants of an old English house, in which her character rents an l-shaped room to live in during her pregnancy, slowly changes and strengthens her character without either exaggerating or downplaying this transformation. In her role, Leslie Caron had to find new ways to use her usual screen personality while redefining it at the same time. And while Leslie Caron may not be the greatest actress in movie history, she was always able to portray her character’s inner feelings and emotions with a surprisingly subtle facial work that could easily build a connection between her and the audience without making it appear as if she was acting for the audience. Leslie Caron could easily portray likeable heroines that become an easy object of affection for her male co-star or the viewer. This aspect certainly helped her to find the necessary appeal in Jane because even though the character may not resemble her usual parts, it still benefited from her way of appearing so naïve and child-like but also so practical, grown-up and experienced.

In the 1963 Best Actress line-up, Leslie Caron is the only nominee who truly had to carry her picture. Both Patricia Neal and Rachel Roberts faced slightly limited parts and also played second fiddle to their powerful male co-stars who were the real centre of Hud and This Sporting Life. Shirley MacLaine’s role in Irma La Douce was considerable longer but Billy Wilder’s direction made it very clear that he was only interested in providing a showcase for Jack Lemmon’s comedic talents and considered Shirley MacLaine as an obligatory necessity. And Natalie Wood played the female lead in a romantic comedy with serious undertones but a movie like this obviously also featured an equally important male lead. In this case, Leslie Caron’s performance stands out among the nominees this year but at the same it’s surprising that hers is by far the most ‘passive’ and reactive part out of the five contenders – Jane is a character that mostly reacts and listens, one who is influenced by her own journey of thoughts and experiences. Because of this, Leslie Caron needed to craft Jane with even more dedication because the character could easily have gotten lost in a movie that is actually about her. And Leslie Caron achieved this goal beautifully by presenting Jane as an ever-developing character – she did not present her with any clear ideas or thoughts of how Jane should behave or what she expects. Instead, she showed that Jane is a woman who has no idea about her future, about her life and her present – she is still developing her own feelings and thoughts about both her current situation and her life when her child will be born. In this way, she used her usual screen presence as a woman who is wondering about what life will bring her while denying the audience her usual sugar-coated approach to this material. Usually, Leslie Caron’s presence was mostly needed for some more emotional, maybe even superficial moments – even in her own star-vehicle Lili, the more dramatic depth was given to her co-star Mel Ferrer. But in The L-Shaped Room, it fell upon Leslie Caron to provide the dramatic arc of the story while her male co-star Tom Bell was the one to provide charm and sweetness.

In her role, Leslie Caron benefited the most from the fact that her movie takes such an unspectacular look at her personal situation – The L-Shaped Room never feels like a cheap attempt to ‘shock’ the audience of 1963 with an unmarried, pregnant woman nor like a voyeuristic look into the exciting life of a ‘girl in technical difficulties’, as Gregory Peck called it the Oscar ceremony that year. Instead, The L-Shaped Room is as subtle, quiet and straight-forward as possible (even though it does feature some occasional melodramatic moments) – it takes a completely ordinary approach at this extraordinary story, treating Jane with a welcoming distance that allows her to develop as an independent creation while also letting Leslie Caron’s performance work in beautiful harmony with this unspectacular style. Her simplicity in a part that could have been an over-the-top portrayal of worries, grief, regret, hope, love and desperation is beautiful to watch and by playing her role just as unspectacularly as the screenplay writes it, she creates an atmosphere that is neither overly tense nor tired but moves the picture along smoothly, with a touching quietness and captivation. Sadly, there are moments when Leslie Caron tends to become that cute, little girl again, may it be Gigi or Lili, who only wants to be loved by a man, especially when the screenplays asks her to show a more desperate side or when she is worrying about the whereabouts of Toby. In these moments, the effect of her work becomes somewhat less satisfying but Leslie Caron finds enough positive moments in her work as a compensation. Her big, dramatic speech to Toby at the top of the stairs is played with just the right mix of over-the-top and honest reality and her tears never feel forced and her voice never appears to be trying too hard. Overall, her chemistry with Tom Bell is one of the strongest aspects of The L-Shaped Room, no matter if the characters are fighting or lying in bed together. Unfortunately, the role of a man in Jane’s life is often too overemphasized in a movie that is actually about a woman trying to organize her life alone – an obligatory love story was probably wanted but not truly needed. Still, Leslie Caron did her best by never insisting that Jane is actually looking for a man. Instead, she seems to enjoy Toby’s presence and certainly feels an attraction towards him but she never truly wanted this relationship to develop the way it did – Jane likes the idea of being loved but sees herself alone. This way, Leslie Caron avoided to turn Jane into ‘the woman’ even though she does sometimes exaggerate her needs for affection.

But apart from Tom Bell, Leslie Caron also works well with the other players of The L-Shaped Room. Since the journey of Jane is influenced so much by the other characters she meets in the little house, Leslie Caron always has to step back a little while those characters and actors get their little moment in the sunlight but Leslie Caron did her best to show that Jane is not only listening to their words but is actually also touched and influenced by them. This way, the journey of Jane turned into the journey of a woman who finds new ideas for her life but who also remains the same person she was before. During her stay, Jane accepts certain ideas while remaining strong about her own. She may have used this little, l-shaped room to retreat from the world but she used it to develop and face this world again. Leslie Caron shows Jane as a woman who tries to hide her fears and who does not have any illusions about her live but who is still a little puzzled by it. When she decides to keep the baby or shows Jane’s happiness when she realizes that she did not lose it, Leslie Caron never portrays these worries as grander than they really are – her Jane never tries to become a symbol of lost hopes or regret of the past. In this way, Leslie Caron succeeded the same way Patricia Neal succeeded in Hud – by focusing on the character instead of trying to go for more. And especially in the scenes opposite the father of her unborn child, Leslie Caron crafts Jane with a refreshing individualism – Jane neither wants to apologize for her behavior nor does she expect any support in this moment, from the father or the audience. Instead, she is very honest as a woman expecting nothing.

In this very emotional performance, Leslie Caron gives a quiet and subtle piece of work that may be limited by the way her character was written but is also much more memorable than any exaggerated overacting would have been. What the character of Jane may miss in mystery, depth or really captivating qualities, Leslie Caron makes up by finding beauty in the ordinary. For all of this, she receives

Best Actress 1963

The next year will be 1963 and the nominees were

Leslie Caron in The L-Shaped Room

Shirley MacLaine in Irma La Douce

Patricia Neal in Hud

Rachel Roberts in This Sporting Life

Natalie Wood in Love with the Proper Stranger

YOUR Best Actress of 1953

Here are the results of the poll:

1. Audrey Hepburn - Roman Holiday (23 votes)

2. Leslie Caron - Lili & Deborah Kerr - From Here to Eternity (4 votes)

3. Ava Gardener - Mogambo (3 votes)

4. Maggie McNamara - The Moon is Blue (2 votes)

Thanks to everyone for voting!

Best Actress 1953 - The resolution

After having watched and reviewed all five nominated performances, it's time to pick the winner!

5. Ava Gardener in Mogambo

Ava Gardener makes her Eloise very earthy and immediately likeable and she basically meets all the challenges of the script but it can’t be denied that these challenges are set very low. Ava Gardener’s personality fits the part just right but this soap opera never demands of her to stretch her talents but always seems like a warm-up for more to come.

4. Leslie Caron in Lili

                     

Leslie Caron effectively portrays the sweetness and naivety of the character and is that way much more believable than expected but if the highlight of a performance are the scenes when the character is talking to four puppets, then it becomes clear that this is a role that, even with a serious and dedicated performance, doesn’t offer a real challenge and makes it hard to be taken fully seriously.

3. Maggie McNamara in The Moon is Blue

It’s an overall very unsatisfying movie and leading character – Maggie McNamara tries her best but unfortunately both her performance and her part don’t develop and that way loses the interest of the viewer very soon. Still, it’s a charming and interesting piece of work that unfortunately couldn’t really rise above the material but the lively presence of Maggie McNamara is still the only reason that The Moon is Blue doesn’t fail completely.

2. Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity

Deborah Kerr had wonderful material and an intriguing character to work with but it seems that in her performance, she relied too much on the strength of this material and let the writing dominate her performance. Still, her Karen is a strong creation, a woman who is as common as mysterious and as repellent as appealing.

1. Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday

More than anything, this is a case of excellent casting rather than brilliant acting. Audrey Hepburn may succeed in this part, but there was actually nothing she could do wrong – both because the writing is too undemanding and the part of Princess Ann fitted her so completely that even with a bad performance, her charming personality would still have been satisfying enough. Still, in this weak line-up, her winning combination of talent and charm seems like the most logical choice for the gold.

 

 

Best Actress 1953: Leslie Caron in "Lili"

Leslie Caron began her acting career quite impressively. After having been discovered by Gene Kelly who was looking for a ballet dancer for the female lead in what would become the Best Picture Winner An American in Paris, she received her first Oscar nomination only two years later at the age of 22 for her performance in the musical comedy Lili.

Just like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, Leslie Caron has to handle extremely light material while also filling it with some darker and more emotional moments. And also like Audrey Hepburn, Leslie Caron bases most parts of her performance on her own personality, her freshness and vibrant youth, combined with her delicateness and seemingly naivety that soon disappears to show a young woman who is only looking for love and happiness.

Lili is a charming, innocent and harmless story that surprisingly never turns into pure kitsch or laughableness. It tells about Lili, a 16-year old, naïve girl from the country whose father died and who wants to find an old friend of his in a provincial town to help her – only to find out that he died, too. She meets an artist from a touring circus and falls in love with him but he shows no interest in her and after she lost her job as a waitress, Lili decides to kill herself but she is rescued in a rather surprising manner – by four puppets, controlled by Paul, the circus’s puppeteer. Through these puppets he talks to Lili, and she, apparently not realising that they are controlled by a man behind a curtain, begins to talk to them, too. The interaction between Lili and the puppets soon becomes a major attraction in the circus but the relationship between Lili and Paul, who is a bitter and frustrated man, wounded in World War II and not able to perform as a dancer anymore, is marked by rejection and disputes whenever he is not hiding behind that curtain.

As mentioned, the plot of Lili certainly sounds like a light and slight story which it definitely is but there are also some more serious and dark moments that never seem out of place or forced into the story but instead create an effective and engaging movie that is certainly not to be taken too seriously but also shouldn’t be dismissed too quickly. Especially Mel Ferrer’s performance as Paul provides the movie’s most effective and interesting moments while Leslie Caron finds herself in a role that asks her to combine naivety, sweetness and a growing maturity in a cynical and often dark surrounding.

Her biggest challenge that would also provide Leslie Caron with her biggest success in this part is the naivety of the character. If a young girl earnestly talking to four dolls about her life, her love and her inner thoughts didn’t stretch credibility in 1953, it certainly does today. But there is something so innocent and so sweet about Leslie Caron’s performance that feels to completely realistic and believable that even the viewer seems to forget reality at this moment. These scenes are the heart and soul of the picture, they define the relationship between Paul and Lili, they tell each other the things they couldn’t say face to face and, after all, the puppets prevent Lili from killing herself – if all these scenes would have been appeared fake, laughable and silly, the whole movie would have collapsed under its own premises but Leslie Caron found the exact right tone of seriousness mixed with light comedy to make it captivating but not overly dramatic, amusing but not stupid. The set-up may be too contrived for its own good but Leslie Caron knows how to sell it.

When she begins to sing the catchy “Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo” with Mel Ferrer and his puppets, one can even forget how underdeveloped and, sadly, forgettable Leslie Caron’s Lili actually is. Even more like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, Leslie Caron suffers from the thin writing and the fact that her character is, too, more like a plot device without real dimension. But Leslie Caron also suffers from the fact that she, unlike Audrey Hepburn, doesn’t possess enough charm and star quality to completely carry the picture. Her sweetness and freshness does provide enough merit to make Lili work, but she is constantly overshadowed by Mel Ferrer in a much more complex (well, as complex as the structure of Lili allows) and demanding part. Mel Ferrer has to act. Leslie Caron has to be sweet. While this sweetness shouldn’t be brushed aside as undemanding too quickly (it is certainly demanding to make the naivety of Lili believable) her character still lacks too many things to become an outstanding piece of acting. Audrey Hepburn was, despite all obstacles, able to make her Princess Ann unforgettable. Leslie Caron wasn’t able to do the same which is probably also the fault of Lili itself which never reaches the quality of Roman Holiday or provides Leslie Caron with the same possibilities.

But thankfully, Leslie Caron is also able to make her more serious scenes believable without denying the core of the character. Especially at the beginning of the story, Lili who seems so impossibly unaware and helpless could have appeared exaggerated but again, Leslie Caron plays the scenes with the right amount of seriousness and lightness to find an appealing balance. Her fear of a local merchant who is too obviously trying to take advantage of her and her flight out of his shop create an absorbing introduction of Lili’s characteristics and Leslie Caron isn’t afraid to show her as a character who is active in her passiveness – she actively tries to find a life where somebody may take care of her and help her. She shows her neediness when she follows a group of men to the circus in hope that they may help her but again, it all works very well in the context of the story’s overall mood – light and charming, a bit serious, but never really dramatic.

Besides succeeding in showing Lili’s naivety, Leslie Caron’s performance also works very well in showing how this naivety slowly begins to change and makes room for more realistic views – Lili, after all only 16 years old, begins to grow and develops a sense of self-awareness, of reflection and an ability to think in larger terms outside of her own views. Leslie Caron interestingly doesn’t overdo this but keeps the character of Lili intact – she shows that this growth in character doesn’t concern Lili as a whole but rather her life at the circus, she begins to realize what she should do and how to act in relation to Paul but this doesn’t mean that Lili stopped being a naïve 16-year old girl. Leslie Caron doesn’t forget that Lili shows only a part of Lili and not her whole life and so she focused on the development in context of the story and not of Lili’s complete character.

Leslie Caron’s chemistry with Mel Ferrer is the most interesting point of the story as they both seem to work best together when they don’t share the screen and instead communicate over the four little puppets but there is also a captivating intensity in their ‘normal’ moments. His frustration and bitterness, which he uses to hide his true feelings of helplessness and fear, work very well with Leslie Caron, whose Lili possesses exact the same feelings of helplessness and fear, only she is more open and honest about them until she finally is able to change and stand up to Paul. Leslie Caron and Mel Ferrer can’t express the romantic aspects of their relationship openly and instead only have the puppet scenes to create them, when they are separated by a black curtain. And both are up to the difficulty of these scenes surprisingly well. Later, Leslie Caron uses her emotional scenes effectively to build a stark contrast to the lost girl she portrayed at the beginning.

Of course, since Lili is a musical comedy starring Leslie Caron who impressed with her dancing talents in An American in Paris, the movie also includes some dream sequences that allow her to impress again. Unfortunately, these scenes are the only ones in the movie that feel out-of-place and don’t work in the context of the story. On top of that, Leslie Caron lacks the fascination in these scenes to make them truly work. Her dancing is nice to look at but the execution of the scenes is done too poorly.

In the end, Lili is more than a children’s story but at the same time wants to be too much at the same time and even the more serious moments of the story can’t hide the banality and sentimentality of the characters, especially the title character. Unlike Audrey Hepburn, who could so easily dominate the screen and turn her material into gold, Leslie Caron never manages to hide the simplicity of her part and the banality of the story behind her performance – instead, she even rather emphasises it. She also doesn’t achieve the same level as Audrey Hepburn when it comes to being flawless in a flawed part. She doesn’t provoke the feeling of being irreplaceable or even of being particularly memorable. Leslie Caron effectively portrays the sweetness and naivety of the character and is that way much more believable than expected but if the highlight of a performance are the scenes when the character is talking to four puppets, then it becomes clear that this is a role that, even with a serious and dedicated performance, doesn’t offer a real challenge and makes it hard to be taken fully seriously. In the end, the combination of sweetness, seriousness, dedication in Leslie Caron’s performance and the shallowness of the part receive

Best Actress 1953

The next year will be 1953 and the nominees were

Leslie Caron in Lili

Ava Gardener in Mogambo

Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday

Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity

Maggie McNamara in The Moon is Blue