Word: matriarchal
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...necessary in every well-maided novel, there is a fierce, unfazed and unfaded old matriarch brimming with hard-won wisdom, and a willowy, willful girl sorely in need of it. The matriarch, in this case, has broken her hip and may never ride to the hounds again, so she has plenty of time to look back at her own willowy and willful stage. Should she have deserted her husband to run off with worthless Gerald? Should she have abandoned her illegitimate daughter to be brought up by a Belgian family? No, evidently, to the second question; the girl grew...
...movie reaches toward distinction in the performances of Ethel Waters as Dilsey and Jack Burden as the idiot. The stoic, yet feeling portrayal of the colored matriarch is entirely right in terms of the novel. Burden's Benjy is different from the novel's, of necessity. But he brings dignity to the role, and a face which, in one unchanging expression, somehow conveys confusion and understanding, love and anger, and an enormous sensitivity...
...captivating little lady with a face like a Leonardo drawing, Mrs. Walter B. Cannon is a very extraordinary person whom Harvard could proudly name its matriarch. She has been attached to the community for eighty-two years, as daughter of a Harvard alumnus, Radcliffe undergraduate, wife of a medical school professor, mother of five talented children (three daughters graduated from Radcliffe, one son from Harvard and Medical School), mother-in-law of Professors Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and John Kenneth Fairbank, grandmother of two Harvard freshmen, great-grandmother-to-be of a potential Harvard or Radcliffe student...
Judith Anderson plays the star role like a First Lady of the Stage, which for Miss Anderson is nothing new. Her Australian accent is comprehensible once you get used to it, and not inappropriate for the memory-ridden, shabby-genteel matriarch. She projects a genuine grandeur, a sense that no matter what Isabel Lawton does she is somehow worthy of admiration. In cold fact Isabel Lawton is worthy of very little admiration, and Miss Anderson makes her much better worth watching than Mr. Lamkin had any right to expect...
...when she trudged determinedly in George II's Coronation procession and "seized a drum from a drummer and blithely sat down on it [to rest]." Once, when the doctor whispered to an assistant, "She must be blistered or she will die," he heard the 80-year-old matriarch bellow back: "I won't be blistered...