There are actors and there are actor’s actors – performers whom other actors love and admire. Brando would be the best know – others would include Montgomery Clift, Olivier. Apparently Kim Stanley was the 50s equivalent for women.
Kim Stanley is not that widely known today, at least in Australia. I got her confused with Kim Hunter. Unlike Barbara Bel Geddes she didn’t have a hit TV show late in her life, unlike Helen Hayes she never played a series of cute little old ladies, unlike Geraldine Page she didn’t get a great film role towards the end of her life, unlike Maureen Stapleton she didn’t appear a lot in movies.
You’d know the roles she created on Broadway, mainly from film versions in which the roles were played by other actors: The Chase (Jane Fonda), Picnic (Susan Strasberg), Bus Stop (Marilyn Monroe). She was also in a popular stage version of A Touch of the Poet, and the film Séance on a Wet Afternoon as well as the famous Actors Studio disaster, Three Sisters.
She drank like a fish, ate like a pig and rooted like a rabbit – while married to her second husband she had a child to her lover (Montgomery Clift’s brother). Adored by other actors and writers, many of whom she had sex with – Ben Gazzara, Lorenzo Semple Jnr, Cliff Robertson, J P Miller. Several writers also turned her into fictitious characters.
If Stanley had died around 1960 she would have been this great legend. As it is she got fat and boozy, lost her looks and figure, and she’s more of an underground figure today. Her great performances were mostly given on stage and live television – of course its impossible to recreate stage performances but there’s still a fair few live TV performances available, it’s just hard to see them. (Marketing idea for this book – re-release The Goddess on DVD and throw in a couple of Stanley’s best television performances.) Of course there is a tantalising quality about this, very susceptible to cultism eg “ah, if only you’d seen Kim Stanley, now there was an actor.”
Krampner has done a lot of admirable research, including a stack of reviews from many of her colleagues and friends, who talk about her with a mixture of exasperation and admiration. Everyone attests to her acting genius, though some argue it went a bit off the boil towards the end. He does a very good job – I enjoyed his little asides – although at times I felt if he was an actor himself perhaps he might have been better able to convey what Stanley was like as a performer. But this admittedly is a very difficult skill – off the top of my head Simon Callow is the only writer I can think of who can do this – and generally what Krampner does is fine. (Maybe also he could have gone into more detail about Stanley’s influence on other female actors.)
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