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Orange County Register (13/Sep/1994) - Hollywood finally started remembering 'Miss Jessica'

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Hollywood finally started remembering 'Miss Jessica'

It took Hollywood a long time to realize what a prize it had in Jessica Tandy, who took home the movie industry's biggest prize herself when she won the 1989 best actress Oscar for the title role in "Driving Miss Daisy."

By the time she won that honor — and received a supporting actress nomination two years later for "Fried Green Tomatoes" _ Tandy was undoubtedly turning down more parts than she was accepting. A far cry from the plight she found herself in back in the '40s, when she made her first foray to Hollywood.

Back then her second husband, Hume Cronyn, immediately found work as a character actor, landing major supporting roles in "Shadow of a Doubt," "Phantom of the Opera," "Lifeboat" and "The Postman Always Rings Twice." But though Cronyn managed to secure Tandy a reasonably good part as his character's wife — setting a pattern that would be repeated often in the future — in the World War II escape drama "The Seventh Cross," it led to nothing but decreasingly interesting and less prominent parts, often as a maid, as in "Forever Amber."

Even the Broadway success of "A Streetcar Named Desire" in 1947 had only a minimal impact on Hollywood casting executives. Famously, she was the only lead performer in the play not to be invited to appear in the film; Vivien Leigh got to play Blanche. And while Tandy landed decent roles in "September Affair" and "The Desert Fox," they were at best secondary parts.

So the stage got Tandy for most of her midcareer. A rare example of what was lost to film came when Alfred Hitchcock, who had used Cronyn in crucial early roles, cast Tandy to play the mother of Rod Taylor in "The Birds." She gave a wonderful performance in what was a crucially important supporting part.

But it was only after she and Cronyn had extraordinary success with their stage hit "The Gin Game" that Hollywood began to make the best use of her. At first, she and her husband were an easily importable bit of class, playing husband and wife in "The World According to Garp" and the two "Cocoon" movies. But at the same time, Tandy also was branching out, impersonating a 19th-century spinster in "The Bostonians."

But it was "Daisy," a wholly unexpected box-office smash and big-time prize winner that finally made her a first-rank star in her own right. Even though her part in "Fried Green Tomatoes" is a supporting one, for example, her character is the key to the movie's emotional punch.

To the end, Tandy displayed an ability nearly unique for an actress of such an advanced age to attract substantial parts. This fall, she will be seen supporting Paul Newman in "Nobody's Fool" and playing one final title role in "Camilla," about an elderly woman who enlists young friend Bridget Fonda in a search for long-lost love Cronyn.

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