Cloris Leachman made lonely women difficult to dismiss and overbearing ones funny without making them agreeable. We value her comic precision, but the embarrassed longing of The Last Picture Show stays with us longest.
Fi1m perspective
In The Last Picture Show (1971), Cloris Leachman's Ruth Popper seems embarrassed even to want affection. She plays a lonely coach's wife, and the difficulty comes before any question of whether we approve of her behaviour: she struggles to admit what she needs. We found her longing painful to watch because Leachman makes that hope feel so hard to allow herself. The performance gives embarrassment as much attention as desire. It asks us to notice how difficult wanting something can become when someone is unused to being wanted.
Peter Bogdanovich's film is patient with people behaving badly, and this is where that patience pays off. Leachman lets Ruth be awkward without making her ridiculous, and the performance benefits from the time the film gives it. Ben Johnson's Sam the Lion has his own disappointments; Ellen Burstyn's Lois Farrow still has appetites and an impatience that age has not cured. Among them, Ruth helps make the older generation worth watching for their own sake, rather than merely for what they can teach the young.
Her brief appearance as Christina Bailey in the opening of Kiss Me Deadly (1955) offers an earlier dramatic starting point. But the useful comparison with Ruth is the comedy she was making around the same period. As Phyllis Lindstrom in The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970), precise timing made an unsympathetic woman appealing. She did not need a character to be agreeable to make us interested in spending time with her.
Her work with director Mel Brooks allowed more exaggeration, particularly the accent and physical manner of Frau Blücher in Young Frankenstein (1974). Those conspicuous choices were another means of making a character immediately distinct. The later recurring grandmother role of Ida Welker in Malcolm in the Middle (2000) took her towards comic extremes again. Our reservation about those broader turns is that eccentricity can grow repetitive, leaving too little to discover once the mannerisms are familiar. Start with Ruth Popper; the broader comedy will still be there afterwards.
Biography
Cloris Leachman was an American actress whose career spanned more than seven decades. She was born on 30 April 1926 in Des Moines, Iowa, and died on 27 January 2021.
Leachman provided the voice of Mrs. Lynley Tensedge in the animated film The Iron Giant (1999). Among her other credited roles are appearances in the television series The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977), its spin-off Phyllis (1975–1977), Malcolm in the Middle (2000–2006), The Office (2005) and Two and a Half Men (2003), as well as the films The Last Picture Show (1971) and Young Frankenstein (1974). She also voiced characters in The Simpsons, Family Guy and the Croods films.
