LEE
REMICK
AN ELEGANT LADY
Patriot Ledger
July 13, 1991
Her basic value was modesty. Her image that of a blue-eyed Snow Maiden. And she was good, oh so good, as an actress with sensual courage. A quintessential beauty who specialized in portraying women in crisis.
Yes, Lee Remick was special. She was also unusual, a box-office success without an ego. A movie queen who never forgot her Quincy roots and who refused to let Hollywood turn her into another wasted blond.
To that, she once said, she owed her father, Frank Remick, the gentleman owner of the old Remick's Department Store in downtown Quincy. He, she said, gave her confidence, a strong work ethic and pride even though she was raised by her mother from age 7 following a divorce.
My father…felt that to accomplish something in a given day was important to yourself, to your sense of well-being,” the actress told Parade magazine in 1989. “That was the floor of my upbringing.”
Frank Remick died eight years ago. Now Lee Remick is also gone at the age of 55. She showed a great deal of real-life courage in battling cancer for two years. In her last public appearance on April 29, she walked slowly yet proudly with the aid of cane when a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame was dedicated to her.
No contemporary person has meant more to Quincy’s recognition in the entertainment world. She was a study in elegance.
Lee Remick called herself a "lucky lady" who was shy. "I can’t go out in front of a group and be myself with any ease," she told Connie Gorfinkle, our film critic, in an interview last year.
On screen and stage, she had no problem portraying others with ease and convincing verve, especially women dealing with life’s knocks. From her first movie role as a baton-twirling teenage vixen in A Face in the Crowd to her last TV film as a hard-luck lady tourist in Dark Holiday, she was charming and terrific.
Probably her best performance was that of an alcoholic wife in 1962’s Days of Wine and Roses with Jack Lemmon. She was nominated for an Oscar, along with Lemmon, and while neither won, her magnetic quality burst into full blossom.
And it served her well for another three decades, including her unforgettable 1976 performance as the flamboyant mother of Winston Churchill in the British TV drama Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill.
She chose her roles with care. “After Anatomy of a Murder, in which I played a kind of tramp, for instance, I could have followed up with more of the same,” she told an interviewer. “Reinforcing my ‘image’ by becoming a sex symbol would have been one way to be more strongly identified as a star, but I had no interest in doing that. I can’t be something I’m not.”
Remick took her roles seriously, attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous for her work in Days of Wine and Roses and spending a month of blindfolded mornings at New York’s Lighthouse for the Blind before starring in Wait Until Dark.
“I’m really a housewife who is incidentally an actress,” she once said. On another occasion she said: “People tell me that I have a special quality in films, but if I do I take no intellectual credit for it. It’s pure instinct. I think I’ve held on to certain qualities within myself which have been strong.”
Last year, during an awards ceremony in Boston, Jack Lemmon was asked to describe what it was like to work with Lee Remick. His touching reply says more than anything about this actress daughter of Quincy.
“I’ve worked with a lot of leading ladies,” Lemmon said, “But no light shines brighter than yours."
