Geraldine Page, who was born in Missouri in 1924, was an original and ferocious actress—some thought the greatest of her generation—whose sense of the gothic was profound. She played everything from Alexandra Del Lago in Tennessee Williams’s “Sweet Bird of Youth” to the disturbed head of a school for young women in Clint Eastwood’s early film “The Beguiled.” In role after role, Page pierced the skin of a character’s more disconcerting qualities, illustrating the psychic disturbances and the hidden joys of being human, of feeling strange in a strange land.
Page had her first big success in the 1952 revival of Williams’s “Summer and Smoke.” Reflecting on her work in that show, the revolutionary director José Quintero said that no actress used props the way Page did: she made them more real, somehow. (Page was nominated for an Oscar for her starring role in the 1961 screen adaptation.) She won an Emmy each time she played Miss Sook, Truman Capote’s Alabama-born cousin, in television adaptations of Capote’s classic short stories “A Christmas Memory” and “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” and the writer marvelled at Page’s ability to inhabit so accurately a woman she had never met. In 1959, James Baldwin was working as a kind of apprentice on Elia Kazan’s production of “Sweet Bird,” and he later wrote that at first he felt sort of sorry for Page—how could that girl with the open Midwestern face become a fading movie star, a gargoyle of need? But she did it, going on to star, too, in the director Richard Brooks’s 1962 film adaptation of the project, which also starred Paul Newman. In the movie you notice not Newman but Page, whose outrageously stylized performance is meant to match the high drama inherent in Williams’s words.
Indeed, Page very much admired the American authors whose work she gave voice to through her imagination. When she finally won the Best Actress Oscar, in 1986, for portraying Carrie Watts in Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful,” a year before her death, she spent a great deal of her acceptance speech thanking Foote.
Now her daughter, the stellar actress Angelica Page, is paying homage to this monumental artist in her stage piece “Turning Page” (at Dixon Place, beginning previews Feb. 10). The fifty-two-year-old actress, Page’s only daughter, with her second husband, the actor Rip Torn, plays herself and her mother in a self-penned monologue that goes to the heart of all sorts of complications. In the piece, the younger Page, who was outstanding in “Edge,” a one-woman show about Sylvia Plath, in 2003, tells funny anecdotes about the eccentric older Page. (Capote said she had legs that were the equal of Marlene Dietrich’s but chose to hide behind eccentric costumes; she was also a famously bad housekeeper.) By telling her mother’s story, Angelica Page is, of course, telling her own story, and not just that of a daughter yearning for a mother’s love. She’s telling how one artist inspired another to get out there night after night and express the inexpressible: that tremendous, sometimes heartbreaking, but ultimately fulfilling desire to display body and soul, all in an effort to call them one’s own. ♦
