Saturday, November 6, 2010

Jill Clayburgh

We've been losing so many greats lately. Today Jill Clayburgh passed away at the age of 66. Her most popular role was as Erica Benton in 1978's An Unmarried Woman, the movie that changed the face of women in movies. Today, and for many people my age, I guess the movie can feel a bit like a period piece. The affected ways of early movie dialogue and the guys with beards and 70s self helpish therapy is all there, but its also a movie caught in a time when old female cliche's were ending and new cliches had yet to be formed. The character of Erica Benton is not one of the old hollywood glamour-pussses and she also doesn't fall into the modern day cliches of being either a blockbuster Katherine Heigl or an indie matron like Helen Mirren. She's somewhere perfectly in between and yet more realistic and more human. An Unmarried Woman forged a lot of ground for all the feminist movies that came after and even a lot of guilty pleasures like Sex and The City.

No comments: