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Actress Cloris Leachman Visits UGA for Cloris!
03/22/2008 Teetering in high heels, the petite, 81-year-old Cloris Leachman took the stage at UGA's Hodgson Concert Hall to perform her one-woman show, Cloris! on Saturday afternoon. Though 20 minutes late in beginning - "My biggest offense has always been being late," she would later admit - Leachman delivered just under two hours of songs, stories, and clips from her more than 70 years in show business. This sharp and spunky octogenarian was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1926. Probably best known for her role as Phyllis on both The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the subsequent spin-off series Phyllis, Leachman has almost 70 film credits and over 300 television shows to her name. Leachman opened the show by announcing that in the past year, she has won her ninth Emmy award, the most Emmys ever awarded to an actor or actress, and she has become a great-grandmother. Both are astonishing feats: the first accomplishment reveals that at the age of 81, she can still compete with the 20-something actresses in the same category, and the latter that in addition to an acting career, she has a big and loving family. Following these announcements she tackled the issue of aging and entering her twilight years. Watching her standing in four-inch heels and a beautiful flowing gown that revealed a hint of the figure that won her the Miss Chicago competition in 1946, "twilight" is hardly the first word that came to mind. She went on to discuss the problem of estate planning. "Every time my business manager mentions estate planning," she said, "I can't focus." Leachman went on to describe the mental image conjured by these two words: she is in a horse-drawn carriage arriving at Tara, where Rett Butler stands with landscape architects. "Mammy!" Leachman exclaims, "We're goin' to do some estate plannin'!" After these comical discussions, appreciated by the older ladies that accounted for most of the audience (my bad knees, delicate wrists, and persistent slight confusion have long caused me to believe that I am a senior citizen in a college student's body), Leachman went back to her beginnings. She talked about her mother, who taught her to play piano with methods that later resulted in an eccentric habit of singing only harmonies and never learning melodies and words to songs. Despite this quirk, Leachman auditioned for Rogers and Hammerstein and was selected for the lead role in their Broadway hit South Pacific. Leachman was also a member of the original Actor's Studio, which brought to her mind a hilarious story of one actor's improv involving a banana. For every tale of success, there is a story of a mortifying experience. In 1950, Leachman played Celia opposite Katharine Hepburn's Rosalind in the Broadway production of Shakespeare's As You Like It, the longest-running production of the Bard's pastoral comedy. At one point during the show, Leachman had to exit the stage, run up the four flights of stairs to her dressing room, change her dress and wig, and be back on stage in time for her next entrance, which would find Rosalind alone on stage. Leachman spoke of her most horrifying experience: during one performance, she did not make it in time, leaving Hepburn alone and trying to improvise Shakespeare. Upon realizing that she was late, Leachman recalled running down the stairs only to find her path impeded by a horde of people looking for her. In order to get her on stage, all of the people in the stairwell, including Hepburn's little brother Dick (the stage manager), lifted Leachman over their heads and passed her down from person to person. Despite this unfortunate mishap, Leachman has fond memories of the show and parting amicably with Hepburn at the end of the show's run. After singing a song taught to her by her mother and a loving tune for her new great-grandson, Leachman sprinted through her acting career by performing lines from her most memorable roles and showing clips. The first role highlighted, and the role I grew up identifying with her, was that of Frau Blucher (cue horse whinny) from Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein. Accordingly, the next was her Nurse Diesel from another Brooks' comedy, High Anxiety. Next came a montage of the egotistical and self-involved Phyllis, accompanied by an interesting story about Ed Asner. She claimed that in response to his frequent flirtation with her on-set, Leachman said that she would sleep with him if he lost 32 pounds. Asner lost 29 pounds, but both parties were so horrified of the possible outcome that "his weight shot right back up!" She also included clips from the HBO production Mrs. Harris and her delightfully alcoholic grandmother in Spanglish. The closing clip was of her Oscar-winning role in Peter Bogdanovich's 1971The Last Picture Show. After nearly two hours, Leachman closed the show by saying that although one-woman shows typically end with a big number, she wanted to end hers with something more true to herself. For Leachman, the only way to do this was to hand out hugs. She moved to the door to the lobby and graciously spoke with nearly everyone in attendance. Much to my and my mother's joy, she was persuaded to reenter the Blucher persona long enough to ask my brother if he cared for some Ovaltine. I attended the matinee performance, and it was apparent that the show could have used one more rehearsal. The timing for lighting, sound, and media (the video clips) was off, but Leachman rolled with the punches, injecting humor into what could have made for a sloppy show. I'm sure (or at least I hope) all of the kinks were worked out for the evening performance. Cloris! directed by Leachman's former husband George Englund (director of The Ugly American, starring Marlon Brando), made for a most entertaining afternoon. The stories shared from such a long life in show business with no end in sight were amusing and inspiring. Acting, she stated early in the performance, "is a blood disease with no known cure." Lucky for audiences young and old, Leachman was infected at an early age. Leachman will next be seen in Mark David's American Cowslip, which will also star Ronnie Gene Blevins, Rip Torn, and Val Kilmer, and Diane English's remake of George Cukor's 1939 film The Women. The latter also stars Eva Mendes, Meg Ryan, Carrie Fisher, Jada Pinkett Smith, Annette Bening, Debra Messing, and Candice Bergen. Whew, that's a lot of women! Comments [post a comment]Comments are closed |
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Cloris Leachman George Englund Cloris! UGA Hodgson Concert Hall Phyllis One-woman Show Review