REMICK’S
SENSUAL AS EVER
By Dan Yakir
New York Post
January 09, 1981
Twenty years ago on the set of Sanctuary, Yves Montand had to kiss Lee Remick on the lips but, with Gallic insouciance, allowed his lips to wander across her neck. Hollywood’s hottest young actress couldn’t help herself and laughed in his face.
Today, the same directness and common sense are still apparent in Lee Remick both on screen and off, but they certainly don’t sum her up. In two recent movies, The Competition and Tribute, she has smaller roles than she deserves, but she manages to imbue them with her habitual, tantalizing complexity.
“In The Competition, I play a very strong woman with a passion, namely, not to waste artistic genius for the sake of a love affair which may or may not be of lasting importance for her student. For her, everything about life has to do with achieving--before it’s too late, which is clearly what might have happened to her. She’s a rich character--funny, sharp and tough. She’s vital, a woman I’d love to meet.”
If in this movie her character seems sexually repressed, Remick herself exudes a sensuality that is at once innocent and humorous, exactly the way she did two decades ago when the Boston-born, New York raised debutante was touted as “American’s response to Brigitte Bardot.”
“People have always asked me why a nicely brought up girl who went to private schools like myself was chosen to play all those sluts,” she says referring to a long list of triumphs--from her first screen appearance as a “tacky little sexpot” of a drum majorette in the 1957 A Face in the Crowd; Anatomy of a Murder, where she replaced Lana Turner in the role of a woman who’s “wonderfully aware of her sexuality, yet innocent of the degree of its effect on other people;” Sanctuary, where she played a prostitute who, according to the publicity copy, was “seared by the fires of her desperate desires,” to The Detective, where she played Frank Sinatra’s nymphomaniac wife.
Directors as different as Elia Kazan and Otto Preminger clearly found the dichotomy between her All-American joie de vivre and level-headedness, her reserve and drive, her freshly-scrubbed face and saucy manner, intriguing. For the same reason, she was cast as an alcoholic in Days of Wine and Roses, along side her Tribute co-star Jack Lemmon. This, her greatest triumph, brought her an Academy Award nomination in 1963.
Her quick rise to stardom was somewhat interrupted by her move to England in 1969 (she married British producer Kip Gowans), but the actress has few tears of regret to shed: “I haven’t stopped working, and here I am, still bouncing up like a bad penny.... Anyway, I never really thought of myself as a star,” she declares.
In the past few years, she has often appeared on TV (Haywire, Ike, The Women's Room). There’s little doubt she’ll keep surprising us.
