BEST ACTRESS: MY LINEUPS, 1970 - 1979 (A WORK IN PROGRESS)

By: Mayukh Sen

My personal nominees and winners for the lead actress category throughout the 70s – for now. I’m still fetching for some picks in 1972, 1975, and 1978.

1970

“Catherine Deneuve is beautiful, of course, but never before has her beauty seemed more precise and enigmatic, so that while, at the beginning, there is just the slightest hint of the erotic woman inside the school girl, there is, at the end, an awareness of the saint that once lived within the majestically deformed woman.” – Vincent Canby

Catherine Deneuve, Tristana
Barbara Hershey, The Baby Maker
Barbara Loden, Wanda
Dominique Sanda, Il giardino dei finzi-contini
Joanna Shimkus, The Virgin and the Gypsy

1971

“Jane Fonda’s motor runs a little fast. As an actress, she has a special kind of smartness that takes the form of speed; she’s always a little ahead of everybody, and this quicker beat—this quicker responsiveness—makes her more exciting to watch. This quality works to great advantage in her full-scale, definitive portrait of a call girl in Klute. It’s a good, big role for her, and she disappears into Bree, the call girl, so totally that her performance is very pure—unadorned by “acting.” As with her defiantly self-destructive Gloria in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, she never stands outside Bree, she gives herself over to the role, and yet she isn’t lost in it—she’s fully in control, and her means are extraordinarily economical. She has somehow got to a plane of acting at which even the closest closeup never reveals a false thought and, seen on the movie streets a block away, she’s Bree, not Jane Fonda, walking toward us. … there isn’t another young dramatic actress in American films who can touch her…." – Pauline Kael

Jenny Agutter, Walkabout
Julie Christie, McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Jane Fonda, Klute
Ruth Gordon, Harold and Maude
Kitty Winn, Panic in Needle Park

1972

“The film gains a good deal from its willingness to isolate its musical stage—even to observe it from behind the heads of a shadowy audience in the foreground—so that every time we return to the girls and their leering master (by now, a superbly refined caricature) we return, as it were, to a sense of theater. And when at certain moments that theater is occupied only by Liza Minnelli, working in a space defined only by her gestures and a few colored lights, it becomes by the simplest means an evocation of both the power and fragility of movie performance so beautiful that I can think of nothing to do but give thanks.” – Roger Greenspun

Liza Minnelli, Cabaret
Maria Schneider, Ultimo Tango a Parigi
Cybill Shepherd, The Heartbreak Kid
Kari Sylwan, Viskningar och rop
Liv Ullmann, Nybyggarna

1973

“An hourglass motif is visible in the Johan-Marianne relationship. The sands of power, all his at the film’s beginning, are all hers at the end. Women’s libbers will probably applaud, but Bergman is less concerned with the inequality of the sexes than with the inequity of the cosmos. He seems to see the love of men and women as a metaphysical surrogate for the absence of God and God’s love. It is clearly an incommensurable task. But who could better symbolize the desperate gallantry of the venture than Liv Ullmann, the orchid of the snows?” – TE Kalem

Jacqueline Bisset, La Nuit Americaine
Florinda Bolkan, Una Breve Vacanza
Geraldine Chaplin, Ana y los obos
Sissy Spacek, Badlands
Liv Ullmann, Scener ur ett äktenskap

1974

“Then in Chinatown…, she was the shifty heart of a film, far more so than Jack Nicholson. It is Dunaway who most effectively relates the worlds of the elegant Mrs. Evelyn Mulwray (a woman from a Lubitsch film, condescending to appear in a George Raft picture) and the glowing, mango-colored China doll who sleeps with Nicholson’s detective and has an ingrowing family tree. She looks like a cross between Joan Crawford and Sylvia Sidney until she turns her head to the light and her arched brows show the flawed iris nemesis of Chinatown.” – David Thomson

Diahann Carroll, Claudine
Blythe Danner, Lovin’ Molly
Faye Dunaway, Chinatown
Brigitte Mira, Angst essen seele auf
Charlotte Rampling, Il Portiere di Notte

(For the record, the brilliant Valerie Perrine gets my win in support for Lenny this year.)

1975

“The success of this rhythmless, mediocre piece of moviemaking may be in part attributable to its winsome heroine (Marie-Christine Barrault), who is sexy in a fleshy, smiling-nun way…” – Pauline Kael

Ann-Margret, Tommy
Marie-Christine Barrault, Cousin, Cousine
Stockard Channing, The Fortune
Maja Komorowska, Bilans kwartalny
Angela Winkler, Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum oder: Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie führen kann

1976

““… [F]inally … the most disquieting thing about this lurid, manipulative film [is] it works. De Palma …. knows we’ll respond like Pavlov’s dogs … In Sissy Spacek, he has found the perfect foil, a pale sinewy girl at once remote and endearing, beautiful and scary.” – Stephen Schiff

Sonia Braga, Dona Flor e seus dois maridos
Geraldine Chaplin, Cria cuervos…
Blythe Danner, Futureworld
Sissy Spacek, Carrie
Liv Ullmann, Ansikte mot Ansikte

1977

Shelley Duvall, 3 Women
Jane Fonda, Julia
Isabelle Huppert, La dentelliere
Diane Keaton, Annie Hall
Sophia Loren, Una giornata particolare

1978

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Shohreh Aghdashloo, Sooteh Delan
Ellen Burstyn, Same Time, Next Year
Jill Clayburgh, An Unmarried Woman
Tuesday Weld, Who’ll Stop the Rain
Liv Ullmann, Höstsonaten

1979

" Meryl Streep, on the other hand, has already surpassed Faye Dunaway as the archetypal blond shiksa, yet she is still so fresh for us that every smile or dip of the head feels like a revelation. It’s nice to see her as a tough, wily, aggressive woman; indeed, the flashes of avidity breaking through her southern-lady’s gaiety and charm in this role make one long for her to cast off niceness altogether. Schatzberg doesn’t release everything she’s got, but in one shot he gives her Garbo-like star treatment—a long, long close-up as she slowly extends her face toward Alda for their first adulterous kiss. Watching that sinuous swan neck, you hold your breath—the moment is like some romantic epiphany from a thirties classic." – David Denby

Jill Clayburgh, Starting Over
Blythe Danner, The Great Santini
Diane Keaton, Manhattan
Shirley MacLaine, Being There
Meryl Streep, The Seduction of Joe Tynan