Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 10, 1992 TAG: 9201100435
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVISo
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
DEAD AT 93
THEATER buffs tend to cherish particular performances by actors and actresses. Mine include Cornelia Otis Skinner, bringing an entire bare stage to life with one of her inimitable monologues; Tallulah Bankhead in "The Little Foxes"; and Henry Fonda in the pre-Broadway tryout of "Mister Roberts."But nothing in a long experience of overheated theatergoing matches for me the performance Judith Anderson gave, a year or two after the war, in the Robinson Jeffers version of Euripides' "Medea."
I almost missed it, and indeed would have done so had it not been for a Jewish mother - not mine, who, though not Jewish, was a Jewish mother herself.
The particular Jewish mother who got me to "Medea" was the stepmother of a college friend. A whole crowd of us, her own sons' friends as well as her stepsons', were housepartying at her home in Mount Vernon, N.Y., a big place that held half a dozen college boys from Yale, Princeton and Johns Hopkins without collapsing.
Perhaps it was about to collapse by midday Saturday, for at that point she suddenly summoned us, informed us we were all going into New York to see "Medea" and offered a quick round of sandwiches first.
Her husband, my friend's father, was a big, burly orthopedic surgeon who had to go into the city anyway, she explained; and he drove. None of us knew much about "Medea," but I at least had been reading Robinson Jeffers, which was about the best anyone could hope for.
The theater, whose name I have now forgotten, was in midtown somewhere, and we all duly filed in. What followed astonished and transfixed me - the spectacle of a single actress so dominating the action that one forgot everything else, even John Gielgud, who as Jason obligingly gave his support.
The stage was nearly bare. All I really remember of it is a pair of columns on a pedestal several stairsteps up. What happened there is still vivid to me - heartbreak, the love of a mother for her children, her final determination to kill them because of her betrayal by Jason, the terrible screams of anguish when she did.
Anderson, until then only a movie actress to me, seemed literally to be consumed by her role. Her torment was so palpable across the footlights that half the audience was in tears. She dominated the action as I have never seen it dominated by anyone else.
I thought of that performance - which, as I say, I owe to the insistence of a friend's mother rather than to my own acumen - the other day when the news came that Judith Anderson had died.
She was by then rich in years - 93 of them - and had many triumphs besides her "Medea." A native of Australia, she'd come to the states to pursue an acting career in the 1920s. In Hollywood she made a few pictures, but no woman ever looked less like an ingenue, and her first steps were faltering.
Her features were regal, hooded, hawklike, with her great nose and head thrown back to hurl her contempt where she would. She went on to New York and the stage, scored decisively as Queen Gertrude in "Hamlet" and as Lady Macbeth in "Macbeth."
In Hollywood again she gave her most famous screen performance as the mysterious Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock's "Rebecca," the movie part for which she probably will be longest remembered. She was a perennial character player, often a heavy, in postwar Hollywood pictures.
Her stage work remained her higher priority, however, and it continued well into her old age all over the world. She became identified with classical roles - she did all the parts in "Hamlet" - and was a generous teacher and inspirer of the young.
But I shall always remember her "Medea," and be grateful for it. I cannot imagine anyone else even deigning to try the part.
Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.