The burden of fame’s legacy
Actress Anne Enright W.W. Norton
Anne Enright writes so well that she just might ruin you for anyone else. Her deceptively casual prose belies its craft and a profound intelligence.
Actress explores a mother-daughter relationship burdened by fame. The narrator is Norah, recalling the tumultuous life of Katherine O’dell, a late, great star of stage and screen. Enright weaves this fictional celebrity deep into the history of 20th-century entertainment. As “the globe-trotting muse of writers as various as Samuel Beckett and Arthur Kopit,” she captured the hearts of a generation. Reviewing her performance as a nun, Pauline Kael praised “the twinkle in the wimple.” Her flaming red hair was iconic. A line from her dairy commercial — “Sure, ’tis only butter” — became a national catchphrase.
But Norah knows her story from the inside. “My mother was a great fake,” she says. “She was never happy.” That’s not entirely true — or it’s not the only truth as this narrative winds through grief and remorse, amazement and delight.
Actress is a thoughtful, sometimes wrenching consideration of what Norah preparing to write a book about her mother would entail. Enright has created the illusion of free-flowing association as Norah tries to extract her mother’s life from wellworn anecdotes, legends and deceptions. She could be a woman of disciplined graciousness and extreme passions. She fraternized with members of the IRA. She once shot a producer in the foot, an act of madness that wrenched the forgotten actress back into the news, got her committed to an asylum and marked her eventual demise.
For Norah growing up, this drama onstage and off was frequently embarrassing, sometimes exasperating. Only now, looking back as a mother herself, is she mature enough to consider the full spectrum of her own mother’s character. O’dell was an object of fantasy for millions but also a single woman contending with the demands of public adoration while facing the inevitable curse of age. “I began to see how she was, in the world,” Norah says, which is the last thing most of us can ever see about our mothers.