PARAMOURS LOST: JOHN SIMON ON ASSORTED ACTRESSES

LINDA BLAIR, not a very talented or prepossessing youngster then, is even less interesting now, though considerably more bovine; I doubt whether a post-pubertal acting style can be made out of mere chubbiness.

DYAN CANNON, as Julie [in Such Good Friends], exudes a stupidity that strikes me uncomfortably as the actress’s own contribution to the part; her one true talent is for bitchiness, a rather lowly gift.

DORIS DAY: The only . . . talent Miss Day possesses is that of being absolutely sanitary: her personality untouched by human emotions, her brow unclouded by human thought, her form unsmudged by the slightest evidence of femininity.

SANDY DENNIS: Pauline Kael has aptly observed that Miss Dennis “has made an acting style out of postnasal drip.” It should be added that she balanced her postnasal condition with something like prefrontal lobotomy, so that when she is not a walking catarrh she is a blithering imbecile.

SHELLY DUVALL is the worst and homeliest thing to hit the movies since Liza Minnelli.

JUDY GARLAND: Her figure resembles the giant economy-size tube of toothpaste in girls’ bathrooms: squeezed intemperately at all points, it acquires a shape that defies definition by the most resourceful solid geometrician.

KATHARINE HEPBURN: When you think of the great Marguerite Moreno, who created the role [of Aurelia in The Madwoman of Chaillot], and then look at this performance, exact replicas of which have already earned Miss Hepburn two ill-deserved Oscars, you may wish to forsake the auditorium for the vomitorium.

CAROL KANE: You have to have a stomach for ugliness to endure Carol Kane—to say nothing of the zombielike expressions she mistakes for acting.

ANGELA LANSBURY: God only knows where the notion that Miss Lansbury has class originated; perhaps her vestigial lower-middle-class English accent passes for that in our informed show-biz circles. She is, in fact, common; and her mugging, rattling-off or steam-rollering across her lines, and camping around merely make her into that most degraded thing an outré actress can decline into: a fag hag.

DIANE KEATON . . . is yet another of those non-actresses this country produces in such abundance—women who trade on the raw materials of their neuroses, which has nothing to do with acting.

Her work, if that is the word for it, always consists chiefly of a dithering, blithering, neurotic coming apart at the seams—an acting style that is really a nervous breakdown in slow-motion.

ALI MACGRAW: Miss MacGraw cannot act at all. At the screening [of The Getaway] I attended, people were laughing out loud at her delivery of lines—rather like a grade-school pupil asking to be excused to go to the bathroom.

MELINA MERCOURI: As for Miss Mercouri, her blackly mascaraed eye-sockets gape like twin craters, unfortunately extinct.

LIZA MINNELLI: That turnipy nose overhanging a forward-gaping mouth and hastily retreating chin, that bulbous cranium with eyes as big (and as inexpressive) as saucers; those are the appurtenances of a clown—a funny clown, not even a sad one . . . Miss Minnelli has only two things going for her: a father and a mother who got there in the first place, and tasteless reviewers and audiences who keep her there.

CHARLOTTE RAMPLING [is] a poor actress who mistakes creepiness for sensuality.

DIANA RIGG is built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses.

CYBILL SHEPHERD: If it weren’t for an asinine superciliousness radiating from her, Miss Shepherd would actually be pitiable, rather like a kid from an orphanage trying to play Noel Coward. In fact, she comes across like one of those inanimate objects, say, a cupboard or a grandfather clock, which is made in certain humorous shorts to act, through trick photography, like people.

BARBRA STREISAND: Miss Streisand looks like a cross between an aardvark and an albino rat surmounted by a platinum-coated horse bun. Though she has good eyes and a nice complexion, the rest of her is a veritable anthology of disaster areas. Her speaking voice seems to have graduated from the Brooklyn Conservatory of Yentaism, and her acting consists entirely of fishily thrusting out her lips, sounding like a cabbie bellyaching at breakneck speed, and throwing her weight around.

ELIZABETH TAYLOR: Miss Taylor . . . has grown so ample that it has become necessary to dress her almost exclusively in a variety of ambulatory tents. On the few occasions when she does reveal her bosom (or part thereof) [in The Sandpiper], one breast (or part thereof) proves sufficient to traverse an entire wide-screen frame—diagonally.

BRENDA VACCARO: With the exception of Sandy Dennis, there is no more irritatingly unfeminine actress around these days than Miss Vaccaro, a cube-shaped creature who comes across as a dikey Kewpie doll.