Nancy Olson's gift was to sound as if nobody were directing her. In Sunset Boulevard (1950) she is the one person who talks like a person, and she spent the rest of a short, careful career being asked for that again.
Fi1m perspective
In Sunset Boulevard (1950) everyone is giving a performance, Norma Desmond most of all, and then a studio script reader called Betty Schaefer walks in and says what she thinks. Nancy Olson plays her with none of the polish on everybody else's lines. Billy Wilder had got to know her in conversation on the Paramount lot, decided he wanted her own speech and manner for the part, and let her wear her own clothes. We relax a little every time the film cuts back to her, and it took us a while to see why: she is the only person in it who wants something an ordinary person might want. That is the whole trick, and it is not a small one.
It did not happen twice. Paramount had signed her in 1948 after seeing her on stage at UCLA; her debut came on loan to Fox in Canadian Pacific (1949), opposite Randolph Scott. After Sunset Boulevard the studio put her with William Holden three more times, in Union Station (1950), Force of Arms (1951) and Submarine Command (1951), and none of them caught what the first one had. Then she asked to be released from her contract and more or less stopped. Her own account is blunt: she did not want to be a star, "a commodity to sell", and told herself she would be "thrown away someday just as Gloria Swanson was." Few actors have taken the lesson of their own breakthrough quite so literally.
She came back, when she came back, to Disney, where the wholesome, articulate quality that had been Betty's was now the job description. Pollyanna (1960), The Absent-Minded Professor (1961) and Son of Flubber (1963) wanted poise and good humour opposite Fred MacMurray, which by then was what she was known for. We have not reviewed those films and will not pretend to. What is fair to say is that the parts were fresh-faced ones and she was past thirty, and the films knew what they wanted from her better than they wanted to find anything out. Airport 1975 (1974) put her back in a cast with Gloria Swanson, which is the sort of joke the disaster cycle liked to make.
Her last appearance in anything we have reviewed is a cameo in the 1997 Flubber remake, as a secretary at Ford, in a film we found had a lively blob and no script. She is not the reason it scored 50, and could not have been.
Her memoir, published in 2022, is called A Front Row Seat, and the title is honest about the proportions of the life. She watched more than she played, and the one time it mattered she was the sanest person in Wilder's viciously funny picture of the place. Start there; she made sure there was nowhere else.
Biography
Nancy Olson is an American actress. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she was educated at the University of Wisconsin and UCLA. She made her film debut in Canadian Pacific (1949) and gained prominence as Betty Schaefer in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Olson appeared in several films with William Holden, including Union Station (1950), and later worked with Walt Disney Productions on Pollyanna (1960), The Absent-Minded Professor (1961) and Son of Flubber (1963). She also featured in Airport 1975 (1974). Her screen career spanned from the late 1940s until the mid-1980s, with occasional later appearances.
