Talking About Movies
With Frank Beaver
Betsy Blair, an actress perhaps best known for
her portrayal of the young schoolteacher Clara in Marty (1955),
has written her memoirs in a lively book titled The Memory of All
That: Love and Politics in New York, Hollywood and Paris (Borzoi
Books, 2003).
As a 16-year-old teenage actress/dancer in New
York Blair fell in love with the soon-to-be-star of screen musicals,
Gene Kelly, who was 12 years her senior. Two years later, in 1941,
they married. Their daughter Kerry, a long-time Ann Arbor resident,
was born the following year when Blair was just 17.
Blair, who will be 80 next month, paints a picture
of herself as a loving wife and mother, and also an increasingly
independent, determined and free-spirited young woman who held strong
liberal beliefs.
She took these beliefs with her when the family
moved to Hollywood, and they got her into trouble when Sen. Joseph
McCarthy’s House Un-American Activates Committee went to the
film capital to ferret out film people whose activities and allegiances
seemed to side with Communism.
Blair, an emerging screen actress in the early
1950s, suddenly found herself among the many blacklisted motion
picture artists in a terrified Hollywood. This dark moment in American
political history is recounted form a keenly observed personal perspective
that is both insightful and poignant.
After Blair’s divorce from Kelly in 1956,
which she describes as a further effort to establish her “adult”
self, the story shifts to Europe with a home base in Paris. Shortly
after departing Hollywood Blair was summoned by United Artists to
the 1955 Cannes Film Festival where Marty triumphed, and where she
and co-star Ernest Borgnine received unparalleled praise for their
touching, human performances.
In the 1950s and ’60s Blair appeared in
films made in Spain, France and Italy and also found theater work
in London’s West End. In England she was introduced to the
innovative British documentarists Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz
at the moment the two men were leading the revolutionary “Free
Cinema” movement. That movement, often using a gritty style
of storytelling popularly called “kitchen sink realism,”
was spurring new social awareness in British film.
Reisz, who died a year ago this month, directed
the early classic in this genre, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(1961), and in 1963 he became Blair’s second husband. Blair
resettled in London and has lived there ever since.
Betsy Blair’s memoirs provide a provocative
tale of someone who was cast into the world of filmmaking where
glamour, business, art and politics often intertwined in strange
ways. The anecdotes that shape her story flow nonstop, and include
just about all the principal players who made up 20th-Century motion
picture history. I was especially impressed by the introspective
honesty of Betsy Blair’s self-reflection. Her memoir is well
worth reading.
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