Jo Van Fleet could change the way we saw a leading man with a few weary lines. Her small parts deserve attention; the repeated casting as severe older women gave us too few opportunities to see what else she could do.
Fi1m perspective
In Cool Hand Luke (1967), Jo Van Fleet makes Paul Newman’s defiance seem suddenly inadequate. Her Arletta speaks wearily, and the encounter briefly shifts the film’s attention away from the pleasures of watching him resist. We were moved by how little either performer needed to do to make that meeting hurt. Van Fleet suggests a life the film has no time to recount, without making us feel that a fuller explanation is missing.
Elia Kazan cast her as Kate opposite James Dean in her screen debut, East of Eden (1955). They worked together again on Wild River (1960), with Van Fleet playing Ella Garth, an elderly matriarch resisting change. Those parts drew on her ability to make a hard woman’s pain apparent without softening her. She was often cast as women much older than herself, and it is worth remembering that the age was something she acted. Steady film work through the late 1950s and into 1960 then gave way to more sporadic appearances.
The Rose Tattoo (1955) offers a more modest example of what she could contribute. Her Bessie and Florence Sundstrom’s Flora are customers collecting a blouse, bringing gossip about Serafina’s husband into the house. Daniel Mann leaves Anna Magnani at the centre, where she belongs, and we would not recommend the film for Van Fleet alone. Bessie gives Magnani something specific and painful to react to, which is a useful job even when someone else gets the scene.
The danger was that playing older, formidable women so convincingly would become a reason to offer her nothing else. Van Fleet expressed concern about being confined to tragic or harsh maternal roles, and we share that reservation about how she was used. In Cool Hand Luke, her restraint also makes Stuart Rosenberg’s heavy religious imagery seem unnecessary: the performers have already made suffering clear. Start there, allowing for a director less willing than his actors to leave something unsaid.
Biography
Jo Van Fleet was an American stage, film and television actress. Born Catherine Josephine Van Fleet in Oakland, California, she trained at the University of California, Berkeley, the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Actors Studio. She made her Broadway debut in 1946 and won a Tony Award in 1954 for her performance in The Trip to Bountiful.
Her film debut came in 1955 as Kate Trask in Elia Kazan's East of Eden, for which she received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. That same year she appeared as Bessie in The Rose Tattoo. Other notable film roles include Kate Fisher in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), Ella Garth in Wild River (1960) and Arletta in Cool Hand Luke (1967). She worked in television throughout her career and continued acting into the 1980s.
