Word: burstyn
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Twice in a Lifetime would deserve respectful attention if all it did were redress that imbalance. But the story of how the 30-year marriage of Steelworker Harry Mackenzie (Hackman in another solid performance) and his wife Kate (Ellen Burstyn) sunders has another dimension. Scenarist Welland (who wrote Chariots of Fire with another kind of class consciousness) and Director Yorkin (who created All in the Family with Norman Lear) want to use the Mackenzies' disorder to explore sympathetically an entirely unfashionable layer of life...
Family dramas are always an invitation to fine ensemble acting, and these players are up to it. Hackman brings life to realism as effectively as he brings realism to fantasy in Target. Burstyn clarifies her character without oversimplifying. She finds both repose and luminosity in Kate. Madigan is not afraid to let the audience dislike her abrasiveness, while Sheedy uses patience and stillness as a counterpoise. Only Ann-Margret is somewhat shortchanged by the script: her motives are never made fully clear. Sometimes, too, the movie feels overly tidy and pleased with its own humanism. But it unashamedly keeps scratching...
DIED. DANIEL PETRIE, 83, prolific television director who also made such memorable motion pictures as A Raisin in the Sun (1961), starring Sidney Poitier, and Resurrection (1980), with Ellen Burstyn; in Los Angeles. The Canadian native and former Broadway actor made his mark in the 1960s directing such gritty TV series as The Defenders and East Side/West Side and then began making TV films, including Sybil, starring Sally Field. He won a 1976 Emmy for a TV mini-series about the Roosevelts, Eleanor and Franklin, and another the next year for Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years...
...DIED. DANIEL PETRIE, 83, prolific television director who also made such memorable motion pictures as A Raisin in the Sun (1961), starring Sidney Poitier, and Resurrection (1980), with Ellen Burstyn; in Los Angeles. The Canadian native and former Broadway actor made his mark in the 1960s directing such gritty TV series as The Defenders and East Side/West Side and then began making TV films, including Sybil, starring Sally Field. He won a 1976 Emmy for Eleanor and Franklin, a TV mini-series about the Roosevelts, and another the following year for Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years...
Even with more commercial works that play the regionals with one eye on the ultimate prize--Broadway--the audience participates in a more direct way. Last winter Ellen Burstyn played the title role in Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, a one-woman stage adaptation of Allan Gurganus' best-selling novel, which had its world premiere at San Diego's Old Globe Theater. She was still stumbling a bit (engagingly, catching herself with a casual "I mean ...") as she tried to master the demanding part, but audiences had the frisson of being present at the development of what may (when...