Word: sloper
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...central figure of Washington Square is Catherine Sloper, a plain but earnest young heiress whose need for love is trampled by her family's cruel neglect and her fiance's own weak will...
...Austin Sloper (Albert Finney), the man whose residence we have entered, is more derailed by his wife's death than delighted by his daughter's birth. Named for her mother, and thus a constant reminder of Dr. Sloper's loss, Catherine (Leigh) grows up with little hope of connecting with her distant, resentful father. Worse, Austin's sister Lavinia (Maggie Smith) fancies herself a surrogate mother but is too uncouth and undisciplined to make of Catherine a sophisticated lady...
...this magnificent creature is my child," laments Dr. Sloper, beholding Catherine in a gaudy, ill-fitting gown before they and Lavinia leave for the requisite period-film Society Ball. Catherine may not be the sharpest needle on the tree, but she can (and does) feel the sad, punishing irony in her father's pronouncements...
...conscious of her lack of "magnificence" that she is instantly suspicious of the attentions of Morris Townsend (Ben Chaplin). Morris has no money and a shady past, but all of New York acknowledges his rare good looks and, even rarer, his lively charm and sense of adventure. Dr. Sloper is so impressed (or is it threatened?) by Morris that he can only explain the young suitor's attentions to Catherine as financial savvy. "He must think she has 80,000 a year," the Doctor says...
...current production opens stiffly (as though conversation had to be slower in the 19th century because contractions hadn't yet been invented), the actors soon zero in on their thrillingly cold target. As is often true in James, we witness a battle that can have no victors. Dr. Austin Sloper (Philip Bosco) is a wealthy widower whose earnest daughter Catherine (Cherry Jones) pales beside his resplendent memories of his wife (who, to make the comparison all the more pointed and painful, died giving birth to Catherine). Reared in an atmosphere of genteel censure, Catherine only gradually surmises that...