Passages

[PfR73]

Brian Johnson

Not the AC/DC singer.

[Feego]

Ann Blyth

[The Curious Sofa]

Ann Blyth

RIP, best worst daughter.

[domino harvey]

She held on a long time. One of the OG Hollywood Catholics and yes, she gave the single best bratty daughter perf in film history in Mildred Pierce

[Feego]

It’s interesting that in the novel Mildred Pierce, her character has ambitions of being an opera singer. Had they kept that in the film, Blyth still would have been ideal casting because she actually was a trained opera singer, showing off her chops in several musicals later.

[dwk]

Suzanne Desrocher-Romero

[Matt]

Some of Blyth's line deliveries ring in my head like they're on Memorex tape.

"My mother... a waitress," like she's spitting the last word out.

"With this money I can get away from you. From you and your chickens and your pies and your kitchens and everything that smells of grease. I can get away from this shack with its cheap furniture. And this town and its dollar days, and its women that wear uniforms and its men that wear overalls."

"You think just because you made a little money you can get a new hairdo and some expensive clothes and turn yourself into a lady. But you can't, because you'll never be anything but a common frump whose father lived over a grocery store and whose mother took in washing."


And, of course, the slap heard round the world.

I really like her in Our Very Own, which is a very strange movie that veers from almost sitcom-like comedy with a young Natalie Wood annoying the hell out of TV delivery man Farley Granger, to the high camp drama of Ann Dvorak chewing the scenery as the mother who gave Blyth up for adoption.

[hearthesilence]

Pains me to say this, but if you adjust the dialogue so that the mother and daughter are switched around, that would actually sound like something a poisonous relative of mine was prone to say.

[JSC]

Penelope Keith, best known for the television series The Good Life and To the Manor Born.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2ey1pjx0z9o

[flyonthewall2983]

Daveigh Chase (voice of Lilo, Samera from The Ring remake, and Donnie Darko's sister among a number of other things from that period), possibly from meningitis and a blood infection.

AIDS

[colinr0380]

Penelope Keith, best known for the television series The Good Life and To the Manor Born.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2ey1pjx0z9o

I always like the comment I read once that one of the most successful aspects of The Good Life is how it appeals to many different viewer bases, where a younger viewer watching the show would sympathise most with Tom and Barbara as the rebels against the system, deciding to appall their snobby neighbours by setting up a self-sufficient farm in their back garden; whilst older viewers might instead end up sympathising more with Jerry and particularly Margot as the long-suffering neighbours having to put up with the hare-brained schemes of the people next door!

Plus there is that classic Christmas episode where under the influence Margot gets to let her hair down and inhibitions to the wind and shows that she may have a Lady Chatterley's Lover or Wuthering Heights interest in Tom's swarthy, earthy prole!