Word: woolf
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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DOWNHILL ALL THE WAY by Leonard Woolf. 259 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World...
...said that Miss Taylor intentionally gained weight to play Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? If so, she must have gone into this film too fast to trim it off. Huston wisely spends most of the time presenting Miss Taylor in unbuttoned blouses, but a full-length nude shot of her (or her stand-in) climbing a stair simply fails to justify the spying enlisted man's sudden fixation for her. Her performance is, on the other hand, quite thin, with Miss Taylor's most affecting scenes those with her horse...
Chopped Liver. In Virginia Woolf, Sandy played a drunken child bride with stomach-turning realism and cannily turned the part into that of an anemic ant asserting itself against dragons. "Sandy," Co-Star Elizabeth Taylor says overgraciously, "made chopped chicken out of me-or chopped chicken liver, which is even worse." In Up the Down Staircase, she persuasively demonstrates the importance of being earnest amid the cynicism and bureaucracy of big-city schools. In her most affecting scene, she reaches unreachable kids by getting them to relate their time to the opening lines of Dickens' Tale of Two Cities...
Nitty Belcher. At that point, shrewd old Jack Warner, sensing that Dennis was "going to be a very big star," foxed the trade by gambling on her in his $6,000,000 adaptation of the bile-black comedy Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Director Mike Nichols was frankly worried about Dennis' reputation for being obstreperous, but happily found her "just about the easiest actress to work with that I have ever met." And her co-stars agreed...
Turning philosophical, Sandy divides her world into "realities" and "unrealities." Her professional activities are the unrealities, her relationship with Mulligan and their possessions the realities. Not that Sandy has so crystalline a view of her own mind and goals. She had a miscarriage during the shooting of Virginia Woolf, and in speaking about it she says: "I don't want children, and I don't not want children, you know...