Best Actress Ranking - Update

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

My winning performances are higlighted in red.

1. Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind (1939)
2. Jessica Lange in Frances (1982)
3. Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950)
4. Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress (1949)
5. Anne Bancroft in The Graduate (1967)
6. Janet Gaynor in Seventh Heaven (1927-1928)   
7. Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
8. Geraldine Page in The Trip to Bountiful (1985)
9. Susan Sarandon in Thelma & Louise (1991)
10. Edith Evans in The Whisperers (1967)

11. Norma Shearer in Marie Antoinette (1938)
12. Greta Garbo in Ninotchka (1939)
13. Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
14. Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth (1998)
15. Bette Davis in The Little Foxes (1941)
16. Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (1965)
17. Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame (1958)
18. Glenda Jackson in Women in Love (1970)
19. Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve (1957)
20. Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

21. Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire (1941)
22. Julie Christie in Away from Her (2007)
23. Shelley Winters in A Place in the Sun (1951)
24. Audrey Hepburn in Wait until Dark (1967)
25. Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945)
26. Judi Dench in Mrs. Brown (1997)
27. Jane Fonda in Coming Home (1978)
28. Greer Garson in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)
29. Doris Day in Pillow Talk (1959)
30. Meryl Streep in One True Thing (1998)

31. Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity (1953)
32. Katharine Hepburn in Guess who’s coming to dinner (1967)
33. Marsha Mason in Chapter Two (1979)
34. Jane Wyman in The Yearling (1946)
35. Teresa Wright in The Pride of the Yankees (1942) 
36. Jennifer Jones in Love Letters (1945)
37. Ellen Burstyn in Same Time, Next Year (1978)
38. Susan Hayward in My Foolish Heart (1949)
39. Vanessa Redgrave in Mary, Queen of Scots (1971)
40. Diane Keaton in Marvin's Room (1996)

41. Loretta Young in Come to the Stable (1949)  
42. Mary Pickford in Coquette (1928-29)
43. Sissy Spacek in The River (1984)
44. Shirley MacLaine in The Turning Point (1977)
45. Irene Dunne in Cimarron (1930-1931)
46. Diana Wynyard in Cavalcade (1932-1933)

Jane Wyman as Orry Baxter in The Yearling

My ranking of Jane Wyman’s first Oscar-nominated performance probably suggests that I like her less than I actually do. Her position my seem pretty low at the moment but this does not mean that I do not appreciate her work overall. In fact, her performance is one of the most confusing that is included in this ranking so far – because I think that Jane Wyman is actually the best thing about her movie. Well, this can easily be explained by saying that The Yearling is then clearly not a very good movie. After all, I often praise performances for being the best aspect of their picture because it happens quite often that you can find a tour de force in a movie that doesn’t seem worth it – from Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice to Charlize Theron in Monster, many pictures don’t have much to offer besides the performance at its center. But in the case of The Yearling, this is actually not true – even though a movie about a little boy and its fawn sounds like cinematic poison to me, the finished product is actually a rather harmless and sometimes even engaging movie with beautiful images and a central child performance that is as confusing to me as the work of Jane Wyman. One the one hand, the dramatic scenes of the boy at the end are truly laughable but on the other hand he shows such dedication and earnestness in his work that I end up actually liking him and caring about him. So, it seems that Jane Wyman is the best part of a rather good movie and yet I still don’t seem to truly admire her work. Let me try to explain… 

The first thing that always catches my attention about Jane Wyman’s work is how it completely defies everything you would expect in a movie such as this. The first image you see of her is standing in front of her house, calling out for her son who is spending time in the woods, playing with some animals. It’s the kind of instruction that makes you think about the story of two loving parents and their little boy but we soon learn that this is only half the truth. Because Jane Wyman’s Orry is the complete opposite of the usual movie mothers of these days – she is neither kind nor loving nor understanding and instead keeps a stern, unloving face for almost the entire movie, always talking to her son in a bitter tone and showing no signs of maternal affection. This alone, in my opinion, is already the major reason why she is the best aspect of the movie simply because everything about her is so unexpected and there is something strangely engaging about her characterization that makes me want to find out more about her. 

But: at the same time I feel that the reason why Jane Wyman is for me the best part of her movie is what her character represents instead of her actual performance. This also leads me to my major criticism: while I think that her character is the most interesting part of her movie, I don’t think that her work really fits into the movie. Even when a certain performance exceeds the quality of its movie (like the most recent example of Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve), the performance still serves the movie and exists inside it – the movie might be not worth it, but it still creates the surroundings for the performance to come to life. In the case of Jane Wyman, I think that this does not happen. 

Director Clarence Brown is mainly remembered today for two movies that put children and animals at their center – The Yearling and National Velvet. And both movies also feature a mother and a father who shape the character of the child with their own personalities. And both movies also feature a mother who is rather stern and not very emotional. In the case of National Velvet, the mother was played by Anne Revere who was an expert for playing understanding and supportive mothers and won an Oscar for her efforts. But while both mothers were not the overly emotional type, Anne Revere’s mother was still different from Jane Wyman’s creation because there was no doubt that Anne Revere’s Mrs. Brown was very loving and very fond of her daughter and simply expressed these emotions in a different way. In that way, she still served the purpose of the movie and added to its overall sentiment. 

Of course, it doesn’t make really sense to compare the performances of Anne Revere and Jane Wyman because even though there might be some similarities, they are still completely different people. Mrs. Brown is supposed to be loving and understanding while Orry Baxter is neither of these things – or rather, chose to be neither of these things. The Yearling explains early on that Orry used to be the kind of typical movie mother, loving and full of joy, but after the death of her three previous children, she couldn’t suffer anymore and chose to block all emotions and to not build any further close connections to anyone. In this aspect, Jane Wyman’s work is very intriguing and she does many things right. But there are two ways to look at this performance – how Jane Wyman acts her character and how Jane Wyman acts her character within the movie. 

The first aspect is the interesting one. Mostly because there is nothing about Jane Wyman’s work that asks either the audience or anyone else to like or to appreciate her. I fully appreciate the way she uses her voice and her body language to craft her part and how she is able, despite her limited screentime, to create a lasting impression. Mostly, she keeps her disapproving façade for most of the running time of the movie, ordering silence with a single look, berating her son for wanting a pet, showing her disappointment in her husband with a calm quietness or lashing out at him during a thunderstorm that ruins most of their crops with an angry “That’s right, find the good in it” when he tries to cheer them up. Only occasionally, she shows another side, mostly in regards to her hope that she will have her own well one day. And the script also offers her some scenes that show that she actually does care about her family but she keeps pushing these feelings away. 

Yes, all these contradictions make Orry Baxter a very intriguing creation – but I think that this creation was wrong for the movie. Of course, Jane Wyman did not herself choose to play Orry Baxter this way as the character is supposed to be this stern and strict but I just wish that Jane Wyman had found more variations in her work. As it is, I could easily see Orry Baxter as a wonderful character in a movie about a young widow who is not interested in any more romance and finds herself unexpectedly courted by Gregory Peck, a widower with a young son – this kind of movie, you know. But I don’t think that her characterization works within The Yearling. And this brings me back to the beginning – as a standalone performance, Jane Wyman does provide the best moments of the story and hers is the character I want to know more about the most. But taken within the movie, I feel that her work feels too out-of-place and often even harms the story. 

Most of all, I wish that Jane Wyman had found more layers in her character. She obviously offers the typical “see, she is actually not that bad” scenes and the end of the movie makes sure that we see another kind of Orry, one who can finally love her son, but Jane Wyman never finds these layers outside of specially written scenes. Most of the time, her anger and disapproval almost interrupt the movie. I don’t mean that Jane Wyman has to fit everything about her work to the sentiment of the story – but the problem is that everyone else does. I think therefore that the blame lies not entirely with her but also the other actors and the moviemakers around her. Nothing suggests that Orry fits in any way into her own family – Gregory Peck and Claude Jarman Jr. create a loving father-son relationship while Orry doesn’t create a relationship with anyone. This seems to be the point of the character but after 11 years of living with her son, I would expect some kind of growth and some kind of depth. As it is, Jane Wyman plays her role in a way that not only suggests that she doesn’t love her son but that she doesn’t really give a s**t about him, neither talking to him or anything else, opening a conversation already in a tone of voice that expresses the most dislike and disinterest. Therefore, I just don’t believe in the family shown on the screen. Most of all, Jane Wyman has zero chemistry with Gregory Peck and both seem to act in different movies – mostly because Jane Wyman possesses the same kind of disinterest she shows to her son in her relation to her husband as well. Scenes that show them alone together don’t feature any kind of believable marriage and I just can’t imagine a person like Ezra Baxter putting up with this kind of behavior for eleven years. Jane Wyman’s performance therefore works well within the guidelines of the script but she fails to establish a relationship to anything around her and I believe that many moments of her performance could have been played with more depth and understanding. The comic tone of a scene when Jody and Ezra return from the city with bruises on their faces totally escapes her work and she is rather confusing when she refuses to greet people in the city by insisting that they won’t remember her – it’s another scene that is played far too sullen and could have used a little self-doubt and hesitation instead. And the aforementioned scene when Orry shouts at her husband “That’s right, find the good in it” is another example where I find the character both interesting and irritating – and again it seems too out-of-pace for Jane Wyman to set Orry up against everyone and everything, making her and outsider in her own family. 

Of course, I don’t want to judge Jane Wyman negatively for playing a part as written but I think that all of her scenes would have allowed for a more varied character. Orry Baxter could have been a much more interesting and colorful person, possessing many shades and sides – as it is, she is still an intriguing presence but I don’t think that The Yearling is really the movie to highlight this enough. Anne Revere was certainly too old to play the mother in this case but I still think that her personality and ability to portray a whole life with single glances and to find a three-dimensional personality behind a stern mask would have resulted in the kind of performance that combined the strict nature of Orry with the sentiment of the story and the acting of her co-stars. Jane Wyman unfortunately only solved one aspect of this task. 

And a hint to the next performance that will be ranked:

YOUR Best Actress of 1951

Here are the results of the poll:

1. Vivien Leigh - A Streetcar named Desire (43 votes)

2. Katharine Hepburn - The African Queen (6 votes)

3. Shelley Winters - A Place in the Sun (2 votes)

4. Eleanor Parker - Detective Story (1 vote)

5. Jane Wyman - The Blue Veil (0 votes)

Thanks to everyone for voting!

Best Actress 1951: The resolution

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

5. Eleanor Parker in Detective Story

It’s easy to imagine that this whole performance could have been much more satisfying and actually overcome the limitations of the writing if Eleanor Parker had actually dared to leave her own comfort zone and invest all the possibilities the character offered despite these obvious limitations – but she unfortunately played it too easy overall and reduced her character to a variety of different teary-eyed reaction shots.

4. Shelley Winters in A Place in the Sun

                     

Shelley Winters does suffer from the sheer fact that she simply could not turn Alice Tripp into more than what George Stevens would allow her (and this is rather little) and often Alice also does feel too one-dimensional in her attempts to get George to marry her, but if Alice is a plot device, then Shelley Winters made sure that she would at least be a beautifully realized one.

3. Jane Wyman in The Blue Veil

Jane Wyman suffered from her weak material and very often limits her performance to two different facial expressions but within these limitations she crafted a touching piece of work that is saved by her decision to remain realistic while highlighting the sentimentality of the story and her strong final moments.

2. Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen

Katharine Hepburn has seldom been so deliciously entertaining, so wonderfully amusing and so dramatically heartbreaking in one movie. Rose Sayer is certainly not a very deep or complex character but there is still something almost magical about watching Katharine Hepburn bring her to such splendid life.

1. Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar named Desire

Vivien Leigh gave a performance that dug so deeply in this character’s mind and portrayed such unforgettable moments that it is one of a few movie performances that can truly be called a work of art, that serves the movie it is set in while also existing in its own universe, proofing once and for all the greatness of her talent and standing as a symbol for movie acting at its finest.

Best Actress 1951: Jane Wyman in "The Blue Veil"

There can be a lot of reasons why one wants to watch a certain performance. A legendary reputation, a horrible reputation, a general affection for the actor or the actress and many, many more. My personal interest for Jane Wyman’s performance in The Blue Veil was based on the fact that she won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama over Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar named Desire. Of course, I do not see this as a puzzling decision – I always say that voters in 1951 surely didn’t know which performance will gain a reputation for being one of the greatest of all time and which one will be forgotten in a couple of years. And let’s not forget that the Hollywood Foreign Press did obviously not care very much for A Streetcar named Desire – Kim Hunter may have won the award as Best Supporting Actress but Marlon Brando and Karl Malden were not even nominated. So, I was very interested to see Jane Wyman’s work which not only resulted in her win at the Golden Globes but also her third Oscar nomination, having won the award three years earlier for her performance as a mute rape victim in Johnny Belinda. Of course, Jane Wyman also won a Golden Globe in 1948 so the Hollywood Foreign Press clearly enjoyed her work.

The Blue Veil is a rather typical tear-jerker that resembles countless other movies that feature a self-sacrificing female character in its center – movies like Stella Dallas, The Sin of Madelon Claudet, White Banners, Mildred Pierce or To Each his Own come to my mind. All these movies have various things in common – they feature either an Oscar-winning or Oscar-nominated performance and characters that are either the self-sacrificing mother or the self-sacrificing secret mother (of course, in different shades – Mildred Pierce also wants to do everything for her child, too, but there are limits to her selflessness). The first fact shows that these kinds of roles are true award-magnets – how could Academy members resist such a teary display of motherly love and selfless suffering? The second fact is a bit tricky – it is both a difference and a similarity to The Blue Veil. Because Jane Wyman does not play a selfless mother in this movie – instead, she is a selfless nursemaid, a nanny who takes care of various children during the course of her life after she lost her own child when it was a baby. But even though Jane Wyman’s LouLou is not the real mother of all these children, the role actually gives her even more sentimental value because it offers her the opportunity to be the ‘secret mother’ and a ‘stranger’ at once: she is the one taking care of the children, she is the one who watches them grow up, helps them, shares their worries and their happiness – until one day she suddenly has to leave them again. Like Mary Poppins, she comes and goes but she does not go because she is not needed anymore – her reasons for not staying are always rather personal and more sentimental. Because of all this, The Blue Veil gave Jane Wyman a part that is guaranteed to win the audience’s affection, offers her plenty of touching (of would a better word be manipulative?) moments and even allows her to age gracefully from a young maid to an old woman. Sound like a juicy part – and it is. In some parts. But at the same time, the sentimentality and simplicity of the story also prevent Jane Wyman from making her character truly interesting. Everything about LouLou is played safe – she is lovely and nice, never complaints, suffers quietly and nobly. But a lack of life in both the movie and Jane Wyman’s performance leaves an undeniable impression that everything could have been more intriguing than it really is.

There are different approaches that can be used to play such a sentimental character. The actress can either completely surrender to the sappiness of the story and give a performance that only rests on the material she is given, hoping that the tears from the audience will come anyway and this way help her to appear more moving than she really is. The complete opposite of this approach would be to avoid any sentimentality in the performance and contradict the script by trying to find more shades and unexpected depth in these usually underwritten characters. This second attempt is always much more exciting than any schmaltzy emphasizing of the character’s misery. But, of course, there are many more approaches that can work – Helen Hayes in The Sin of Madelon Claudet emphasized the pain of her character to the maximum but she did it with so much life and energy while always keeping her character believable that the final result was a heartbreaking and surprisingly satisfying performance. Jane Wyman’s work in The Blue Veil can be found somewhere in the middle of all this. She neither wallows in LouLous’s constant desperation to leave yet another child behind but she also does not add anything to the character that isn’t written in the screenplay – considering that The Blue Veil basically follows LouLous’s whole life, it is a bit disappointing that everything the viewers know about her in the end is the same as they knew in the beginning: she likes children. So, Jane Wyman can be accused of going a too easy route in her performance but simultaneously she can also be applauded for adding real human emotions to her part instead of disappearing completely under the sugar-coated story. Within her work, she knew how to use the sentimental tone of the story to her advantage and make the material watchable while also suffering from the overall too weak material.

The tone of The Blue Veil is obvious right from the start – when LouLou lies in a hospital bed in a big room with many other women and a nurse brings in a cart full of babies (this may sound strange but this is actually what is happening) only to tell LouLou that her baby is not here and a doctor will talk to her in a few moments, it’s already clear that Jane Wyman’s major task in this part is to grief with as much dignity as possible. The plot of The Blue Veil overall certainly doesn’t do Jane Wyman any favors – the movie is basically a succession of the same scenes over and over again: LouLou finds work, she is happy and takes care of a child (or children) with gentle love and grand understanding until she has to leave again and her heart is broken. LouLou either must leave because a new woman has arrived in the house who wants to take care of the child herself or because she realizes that the child became too attached to her and she must leave for the sake of the real mother – all this gives Jane Wyman the chance to display the expected amount of different emotions. But even though Jane Wyman’s performance constantly follows this expected formula, she still does it on a high level – her performance does not surprise but it does impress. She perfectly understands her material and is able to combine the sweetness of the story with the actual suffering of her character with touching effect. In some ways, Jane Wyman is a rather limited actress despite the range of characters she played – her face mostly knew two different expressions, happiness or sorrow but she knew how to use these limitations. LouLou may not be a very interesting character overall (everything about her fate is so trivial; it never really seems to matter what happens to her or what will become or her simply because the structure of The Blue Veil is so uninterested in all of this. LouLou’s short affair with a man whom she almost marries is another example for this – the love between them comes and goes and never touches the core of LouLou’s personality.) but Jane Wyman is still able to give her substance. A movie like The Blue Veil certainly evokes a lot of different reactions – cynics will probably roll their eyes while others may reach for a handkerchief more than once. But Jane Wyman cannot be blamed for the weakness of the story – she can be blamed for not fighting harder against it but it was her decision to play LouLou with the sentimentality that was expected of her. I may not appreciate this decision but I can appreciate the performance that resulted from it.

Jane Wyman’s wisest decision in her role was to underplay LouLou as much as possible. Like Fay Bainter in White Banners, Jane Wyman crafts her character with quiet dignity and subtle emotions but unlike Fay Bainter, she is given a truly central part that completely carries the picture. The way LouLou was written could easily have turned The Blue Veil into an uninteresting and exaggerated experience – but Jane Wyman’s calmness and beautiful facial expressions kept everything going smoothly. This also helped her to achieve the most important task of her performance – plausibility. When LouLou worries about one her children or her heart quietly breaks when she has to leave, Jane Wyman always stays believable – it would be easy to dismiss her character because of the overly schmaltzy sentiment behind it but in the hands of Jane Wyman, LouLou always wins the respect of the audience. Especially in the scene when LouLou wants to fight for one of her children in front of a judge after she ran away with the boy because his mother had spent her whole life away from him anyway, shows Jane Wyman’s ability to find a true inner life in LouLou – in this scene, Jane Wyman lets LouLou truly fight for the first time as she openly rejects the boy’s real mother and insists on the fact that she is now the boy’s mother after having taken care of him for so many years. It’s a strong scene in which Jane Wyman again balances between cheap sentimentality and honest feelings – and she again does it by underlining this sentimentality while adding a shade of touching realism.

Jane Wyman also handles the aging of her character with grace and beauty. Neither exaggerating her scenes as an old woman nor completely keeping the same acting style, she shows a woman with a lively spirit – even though her age has taken a lot of her strength by now. Mostly, Jane Wyman succeeds in her final scenes – when she meets all ‘her’ children again and is overwhelmed by their love and support. It’s a scene that really shouldn’t work as well as it does because it’s so impossibly sugar-coated but Jane Wyman’s quiet joy makes the viewer feel to actually know LouLou for the first time in this movie. It’s a very satisfying final moment to a performance that offers a lot of touching scenes but also lacked these overall satisfying moments too many times before. As mentioned in the beginning, Jane Wyman suffered from her weak material and very often limits her performance to two different facial expressions but within these limitations she crafted a touching piece of work that is saved by her decision to remain realistic while highlighting the sentimentality of the story and her strong final moments. Overall, the unsatisfying moments that dominate a lot of her work are too strong for a higher grade, but her ability to be moving without annoying and strangely captivating without alienating is still enough for a strong




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Best Actress 1951

The next year will be 1951 and the nominees were

Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen

Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar named Desire

Eleanor Parker in Detective Story

Shelley Winters in A Place in the Sun

Jane Wyman in The Blue Veil

YOUR Best Actress of 1954

Here are the results of the poll:

1. Judy Garland - A Star is Born (33 votes)

2. Dorothy Dandridge - Carmen Jones (21 votes)

3. Grace Kelly - The Country Girl (16 votes)

4. Jane Wyman - Magnificent Obsession (7 votes)

5. Audrey Hepburn - Sabrina (4 votes)

Thanks to everyone for voting!

Best Actress 1954 - The resolution

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

5. Jane Wyman in Magnificent Obsession

Jane Wyman is believable in an almost unbelievable part and she thankfully avoided any over-the-top moments but at the same time the script and her character don’t allow her to give a performance that ever goes beyond the surface of Douglas Sirk’s kitschy images. The greater truth in Helen Philips is too often sacrificed for the sake of the melodrama and what remains overall is a performance that is both able to make you roll your eyes and break your heart.

4. Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones

                     

Dorothy Dandridge sometimes may feel too forced in her attempts to appear un-forced but she also finds a lot of naturalism in everything she is doing. She fulfils the purpose of the character with ease and more often than once burns up the screen with fiery passion. She’s not as fascinating as the story suggests she is but it’s still a remarkable and passionate performance of a remarkable and passionate character.

3. Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina

Audrey Hepburn is her usual winning self and gives her part a strength and effectiveness other actress might have missed but the role still doesn’t allow her to explore her talents as other roles later in her career did. Sabrina only exists in her search for Mr. Right. This allows Audrey Hepburn to give her signature sparkle, wear beautiful dresses and show some tears but she’s not able to really leave the one-dimensionality that Sabrina represents behind.

2. Grace Kelly in The Country Girl

Georgie Elgin is a role that could be played and interpreted in many ways and Grace Kelly risked a lot by not going the easy route by showing Georgie as a helpless victim of her husband’s addiction – instead, she was not afraid to demonstrate how sick she seems to be of the man she shares a little flat with. It’s a very strong performance that realized all of the part’s possibilities and successfully showed new facets of Grace Kelly’s talents and personality.

1. Judy Garland in A Star is Born

Judy Garland tells the story of great success and personal tragedy in a larger-than-life way while putting her heart and soul into every scene she appears in. Esther Blodgett seems to be so easy for her while appearing as an incredible challenge at the same time – she was re-written and re-created from 1937 to give Judy Garland the chance to use every bit of her talents in the way that is most comfortable for her and allows her to demonstrate various dramatic and musical heights without ever having to struggle to reach them.

Best Actress 1954: Jane Wyman in "Magnificent Obsession"

The movies by Douglas Sirk and the performances in them mostly tend to evoke one of two reactions – they are either called among the worst or the best of all time. And even compliments are still rather malicious and often sound like ‚so bad it’s good’. His stylized, colorful, larger-than-life or over-the-top and melodramatic movies seem so unlike anything else on the screen – even other contemporary melodramas don’t seem to be able to appear so trashy and yet so fascinating at the same time. It takes a lot of love and also understanding for his style and the style of his performers to really appreciate his overall body of work – and while I don’t dislike his style, I am not too fond of it, either. Maybe that’s because the first movie I had seen of him was Written on the Wind which, even among Sirk’s work, is so incredibly over-the-top and melodramatic that it feels hard to take it seriously. The actors from his movies are a little different – Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone from Written on the Wind clearly understood Sirk’s style and gave performances that perfectly fit their movie and I respect their work tremendously (even though I am not sure if I would consider it award-worthy). Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall on the other hand tried to add some quiet dignity and subtlety but neither of them had the necessary talent to adapt themselves into Sirk’s world completely. Two years before this saga about a wealthy Oil-family, Sirk had already used the good looks of Rock Hudson in his, comparatively, quiet drama Magnificent Obsession. This movie is less-known than his classic All that Heaven Allows which would reunite Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson one year later. But it was in 1954 that Jane Wyman received her fourth and final Oscar nomination for her role as newly widow Helen Philips who not only loses her husband but shortly after that her vision – and unknowingly falls in love with the man who is indirectly responsible for both. Sounds corny? You bet!

The biggest credit Jane Wyman can receive is that she clearly understood Sirk’s style and found a way to craft the character of Helen that works in perfect harmony with Sirk’s direction – Magnificent Obsession doesn’t demand the same kind of performances as Written on the Wind since the style of the melodrama is so different. Instead of going over-the-top, Jane Wyman is allowed to be rather subtle and free of any hysterics and unlike Lauren Bacall, she’s rather effective at it. Overall, her performance is actually very natural – considering the role she’s playing and the movie she’s starring in. When she returns home from a ride in her car and asks her maid “Now, what’s the matter?” when the viewer already knows that her husband died, she pronounces the line very real and nonchalant, without any melodrama that could have accompanied this moment. Also in the later course of the story, Jane Wyman keeps her performances very grounded – she is an actress who has the ability to appear free of any attempt to win the audience’s sympathy while doing exactly that at the same time. In Johnny Belinda, she managed to appear both strong and tender and found a way to avoid too much sentiment while somehow gaining the sentiment and sympathy of the audience. In Magnificent Obsession, she again was able to play her role seemingly without any corniness but she also laid the foundation for the sentimentality of the story. That way she managed to make her later scenes with Rock Hudson, her little dance with him at night or her teary breakdown, very moving and occasionally heartbreaking – what started as often embarrassing and laughable somehow turned into a quiet and moving story of two people who shouldn’t be together even if it makes sense in the world of Douglas Sirk. With her performance, Jane Wyman became both the active and the passive force in the story. Jane Wyman herself is active in defining the style and sentiment of the story while her character is mostly reduced to reacting to the actions of other people.

But Jane Wyman does not only succeed in this part – she may be able to often lift her material but at the same time this material constantly brings her down, too. By focusing on the subtle and quiet parts of Helen Philips, Jane Wyman frequently underplayed her too much, especially in the beginning. As been said, she works in harmony with the style of the picture but this often doesn’t allow her to develop a more interesting side in her performance. Jane Wyman seemed to have concentrated herself on the more quiet and accepting parts of Helen – like Hilary Swank’s Maggie Fitzgerald in Million Dollar Baby, she is a woman who appears too saintly for her own good. But while Hilary Swank found the strength and the realism to make this work, Jane Wyman often feels both underused and over-directed in her never-ending dignity. She clearly does what Sirk intended for the character but he doesn’t do Jane Wyman any favors because the character of Helen Philips lacks too much life, shades and depth. Neither the death of her husband nor the loss of her vision evokes any noticeable change in Helen Philips – Jane Wyman is beautiful to look at in her subtlety but sometimes she could have tried to move deeper into her character and find more beneath this constant acceptance of her tragic fate. The way she thanks her doctors makes clear that everything is done in the story to make her look as likeable as possible and she’s a woman who doesn’t parade her emotions, constantly apologizing to everyone for everything, but this way the banality of the story becomes only more obvious. The loss of her vision, clearly a tragic moment, is staged rather awkward and almost laughable by Douglas Sirk and Jane Wyman’s earnest and straight-forwardness in all her scenes makes it hard to fully appreciate the fate of the character. Jane Wyman works well with Sirk’s style, as mentioned before, but at the same time he doesn’t really seem to know what to do with Helen Philips. Not even the love story with Rock Hudson, which contains so many taboos and possibilities, displays any real life or sparkle. While All that Heaven Allows focused more on the different backgrounds and ages of its two protagonists, Magnificent Obsession finds the biggest problem in the relationship in Bob’s guilt – this unfortunately too often makes their relationship even more puzzling. Jane Wyman is beautiful too look at but she also often looks confusing and her age could be anything between 30 and 50. She gets some extra bonus for delivering the name “Robbie Robinson” without any irony but neither her performance, nor her character nor her overall story ever become truly interesting or captivating. It’s only in the later moments that she changes the tone of the story and successfully evokes some heartbreaking images out of all the problems she had in the beginning.

Even though Helen Philips lacks too many nuances and possibilities, Jane Wyman never fails to bring honesty and, most importantly, plausibility to the role. The character can be uninteresting or moving, scared or happy but Jane Wyman is always believable. Like Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones, Jane Wyman is doing the best she can with what she is given and what Douglas Sirk wants her to be – so it’s not really her fault that her performance never completely takes off. instead, she feels misguided too often. The only negative aspect of her work that feels to be her own fault can be found after Helen lost her vision. Jane Wyman is believable as a blind woman but she seems to lose her character in these moments. Elizabeth Hartman in A Patch of Blue and especially Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker also hid behind dark glasses in a lot of scenes but they were still able to communicate their characters. Jane Wyman on the other hand seems to disappear behind a wall whenever she puts on her glasses.

Like most performances in melodramas by Douglas Sirk, Jane Wyman’s work is hard to grade. She is believable in an almost unbelievable part and she thankfully avoided any over-the-top moments but at the same time the script and her character don’t allow her to give a performance that ever goes beyond the surface of Sirk’s kitschy images. The relationship between Helen and Bob may not work but her chemistry with Rock Hudson is still satisfying enough to overcome this obstacle. Actually, Jane Wyman overcomes a lot of obstacles in the role of Helen Philips – but she also becomes trapped by various others. She clearly knows what she is doing and avoids to get lost in Sirk’s own vision, but her role in the story is too thin and underdeveloped. The greater truth in Helen Philips is too often sacrificed for the sake of the melodrama. What remains overall is a performance that is both able to make you roll your eyes and break your heart. For this, Jane Wyman gets

Best Actress 1954

The next year will be 1954 and the nominees were

Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones

Judy Garland in A Star is Born

Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina

Grace Kelly in The Country Girl

Jane Wyman in Magnificent Obsession