In 1976, Faye Dunaway won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance in the film, Network. She was the forerunner to win that year and no one was surprised by her score. The winner for Best Supporting Actress that year was also in Network, a woman named Beatrice Straight, who’s win was much less expected than Dunaway’s. Straight was 62 years old and had spent most of her acting career on the New York stage. Before Network she had appeared in a handful of films and done a smattering of TV work. One can imagine she must have felt a little out of her element at the glitzy awards ceremony in Los Angeles, a very dark horse she was, indeed.
Straight’s performance in Network is of a peculiar achievement. At five minutes and forty seconds, it is the shortest performance ever to garner a win of the celebrated Oscar. Straight played the wife of a television executive, who has been thrown over for a younger woman after twenty-five years of marriage. Straight worked on the film for three days and aside from her critical scene when the affair is revealed to her, she only appears in a few, quiet shots waking up and starting her day before her husband.
As Louise (Straight’s character) listens to her husband calmly explain to her that he’s having an affair, it’s easy to see the sensibility that has pervaded through their twenty-five years of marriage. Straight is remarkable in how she conveys the character’s desperate rationality. Louise is white-knuckling her collectedness, asking questions like, “How long has it been going on?” and “Do you love her?” With each of her husband’s answers she loses a little more control of her practiced and balanced resolve. When he has repeated twice that he is “infatuated” with this younger woman, and then proceeds to say he is “obsessed,” Straight unleashes herself completely.
Most incredible about the woman’s hysterics is the intelligence of their temper. It’s never ridiculous or absurd, she realizes that this is no small indiscretion and she is livid about it. She’s livid that after twenty-five years, another woman will be reaping the benefit of what she’s sowed. Credit has to be given to screenwriter, Paddy Chayefsky, but Straight’s delivery is no slouch. She says to him, burning raw, “So this is your great, winter romance, isn’t it? Your last roar of passion before you settle into your emeritus years. Is that’s what’s left for me? Is that my share? She gets the winter passion and I get the dotage?”
The superior quality in Straight’s performance is how quickly and naturally she reels the character in. This intensity is not what their marriage has been. Perhaps it has been lacking in all out heat, but still, they have been warm companions. She gives up her rage and tells him simply, “I hurt.” They begin to talk and she listens as a best friend would to someone talking about their new love. At the end of Louise’s tour de force as a wife and Straight’s tour de force as an actress, she hugs him and says, “I won’t give you up easily...but I think perhaps it is better if you move out.” Within this startling range that Straight gives us in under three minutes is amazing conceivability.
As day broke over Hollywood on the morning after the 1976 Academy Awards, Faye Dunaway’s fiancee, photographer, Terry O’Neill, shot a fabulous image of her. In the photo, Dunaway lounges poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel, sleepless and hung over in a white silk bath robe and heels, with a cup of coffee and her Best Actress statuette next to her, newspapers filled with headlines of her victory scattered around her feet. Trying to imagine what Beatrice Straight’s morning after looked like, one can guess that it probably wasn’t quite so glamorous, nonetheless that same feeling of glorified achievement was just as richly deserved
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