Adrienne Barbeau has one of the most recognisable low voices in American genre film, and she has spent more than fifty years being cast as the woman who keeps her head while everyone else loses theirs. Not every film has known what to do with that.
Fi1m perspective
Listen for her before you look for her. Adrienne Barbeau has a low, dry voice that American genre cinema has used for decades without always putting her face to it: she is the uncredited computer in The Thing, Demolition Man and Judge Dredd, and she is Catwoman in Batman: The Animated Series (1992), where the purr does half the acting. When she does appear on camera the voice tends to arrive first, and it tells you this is a woman who is not going to panic.
That has been the pattern since the start. She came up on the New York stage, in Fiddler on the Roof and as the original Rizzo in Grease (1972), and spent six years as Carol Traynor on Maude (1972–78) before John Carpenter cast her in the television film Someone's Watching Me (1978). The Carpenter films that followed, The Fog (1980) as Stevie Wayne and Escape from New York (1981) as Maggie, fixed what she was for: the capable one, armed and awake. George A. Romero's Creepshow and Wes Craven's Swamp Thing (both 1982) kept her there. She has said Carpenter wrote "strong, assertive, take-no-prisoners types of women", and that she has always played them, on stage, on television and in films.
The same year as Escape from New York she made The Cannonball Run, and the two films side by side explain the complaint that has followed her. Hal Needham gives her Marcie, an introduction, a costume and a car, and then the film goes back to Burt Reynolds's ambulance; she and her co-driver are there to unzip their overalls at policemen. We laughed at some of it and felt grubby afterwards, and none of that is her fault. She is not playing a victim in it. She is playing scenery, which is worse, because there is plainly an actor in there with nothing to do.
Carnivàle (2003) is the better case for her. Daniel Knauf's carnival crossing the Dust Bowl is a series we rate for its patience and its faces, and Ruthie is one of those faces, a woman who has been on the road a long time and has stopped expecting it to end. The show does not build a set piece around her, and she fits it; she has always looked more at home in a company than on a poster.
The honest caveat is that the parts people name are the Carpenter ones, and most of what has come since has been smaller: guest television, voice booths, the odd return to the stage. If you want to know what she does, start with the voice. If you want to know what a film can waste, The Cannonball Run will show you in about ninety seconds.
Biography
Adrienne Barbeau is an American actress and author. She began her career on stage, making her Broadway debut in the original production of Fiddler on the Roof and originating the role of Rizzo in Grease (1972), for which she received a Tony Award nomination. She rose to prominence on television as Carol Traynor in the sitcom Maude (1972–1978).
In the early 1980s she appeared in horror and science fiction films including The Fog (1980), Escape from New York (1981), Creepshow (1982) and Swamp Thing (1982). She voiced Catwoman in Batman: The Animated Series (1992–1995) and played Ruthie in the HBO series Carnivàle (2003–2005). Barbeau has also written several books, including a memoir.
