Sunday, March 29, 2009

Betsy Blair

From Times Online:
"Betsy Blair created one of cinema’s greatest mousy women when she played the lonely, tongue-tied spinster who begins a hesitant relationship with Ernest Borgnine’s “mummy’s boy” butcher in the downbeat American drama Marty (1955).

It was an unexpected critical and commercial success, winning Academy Awards for best picture, actor, director and screenplay, and Blair received an Oscar nomination and won a British Academy Award.

She got the role of Clara Snyder in Marty despite having been caught up in the Hollywood anti-communist witch-hunts and put on the notorious blacklist. But her husband was Gene Kelly, who was threatening to walk out on MGM if its executives did not start pulling some strings.

She and Kelly split up not long after Marty and she moved to Europe, first to Paris and then London, and worked mainly in European films. She never had another role that came anywhere near to the significance of Clara. "


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