Ronee Blakley is an actor who sings and a singer who acts, and in Altman's Nashville the two jobs became one performance: a woman held together by the song she is singing. Nothing on screen since has asked as much of her.
Fi1m perspective
Barbara Jean stands at a microphone and sings Dues, and the hurt in Ronee Blakley's voice does what no amount of dialogue could: it makes one woman in a film crowded with talkers feel like the only one worth listening to. We were moved by it, and we were moved because Blakley is not acting a singer. She is one. She wrote that song and others in the film, and she sings them without the wink actors usually bring to country music, so we can laugh at the hunger for applause around her and still understand why she wants to sing. Altman's camera can wander off to the next conversation and she is still in our ear when it comes back.
The career before that is a musician's. She had put out a self-titled album on Elektra in 1972 and a second, Welcome, in 1975, and had spent years singing in clubs when she came to Nashville (1975) through Richard Baskin, who arranged its music. By her own account the part was small on paper: "She only had one scene, one speaking scene, in the script that I got. That was the hospital scene." The rest she built herself, including the on-stage monologue she wrote the night before it was shot. Altman let her, and the film is better for it.
Few directors since have known what to do with that. Walter Hill cast her as the Connection in The Driver (1978), and she went on the road with Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, which is where the singer went when the screen stopped asking for one. By A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) she is Marge Thompson, Nancy's mother, in a Wes Craven horror film we admire a good deal and in which we barely registered her. Craven's attention is on the daughter and on sleep, and a mother in that film is furniture. It is a long way from Dues.
So she made her own films. I Played It for You (1985), which she directed, wrote and starred in, is a music docudrama; Of One Blood followed in 2012, and she appears in Scorsese's Rolling Thunder Revue (2019). We have not reviewed them and will not pretend to a view. What we can say is that a reputation resting on one film is no failing of the film. Barbara Jean is a performance we would send a stranger to, and the ache in that voice has not gone off. If you want to know what Blakley does that other actors do not, put Nashville on and wait for the song.
Biography
Ronee Blakley is an American actress, singer, songwriter, composer, producer and director. Born in Nampa, Idaho, she began performing as a singer-songwriter in clubs before her film debut.
She is best known for playing Barbara Jean in Robert Altman's Nashville (1975), a role for which she won a National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress and received an Academy Award nomination; she also contributed several songs to the film. Blakley later played Marge Thompson in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and appeared in The Driver (1978).
Her other credits include work in music documentaries and films such as Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019). She was briefly married to director Wim Wenders.
