When I think of Jill Clayburgh, who died last weekend at the age of 66 of complications from leukemia, I think of her puking.
Not sexy, I know, but that’s kind of the point. It’s what she famously did in 1978’s An Unmarried Woman’s famous scene, the one in which her whiney husband tearfully breaks up with her over dinner. She proceeds to leave the restaurant so she can hurl in the street.
The moment and the role itself is vintage Clayburgh – raw, vulnerable, incredibly real and it cemented her reputation as the female actor most capable of representing women’s experience in authentic and believable ways. It helped that in the late 70s, Hollywood was growing more open to feminist content.
Clayburgh continued to carry her reputation as standard bearer for likable women who deserve better, thanks to her role as a school teacher trying to compete with Candice Bergen for the affections of Burt Reynolds in Starting Over (1979).
She got an Oscar nomination for both roles.
Women could relate because Clayburgh didn’t have the drop dead good looks of a movie star. She had a nuanced grace, to be sure, but she could pull off “ordinary” spectacularly well and that made all the difference.
Not surprisingly for a female actor not known for her fabulous looks – or any female actor, actually – she was less visible during her middle years. Smart TV producers took advantage of Tinseltown’s tendency to dismiss its best middle-aged actresses and kept giving her strong roles.
As an older woman, Clayburgh got to play some hard-nosed, classic bitches – in Ally McBeal and The Practice, for example – which proved she wasn’t going to play nice all the time. As the matriarch of an impossibly wealthy family in the unfortunately short-lived Dirty Sexy Money, she matched Donald Sutherland’s cynicism and rapaciousness every step of the way.
Very few colleagues on the sets of her yet-to-be-released films Bridesmaids, due out in 2011, and Love And Other Drugs, coming out before the end of this year, even knew she was sick – typical of her toughness.
A class act.
