Gillian follows Bette Davis in a REAL star turn
FASTeN your seatbelts: Gillian Anderson is in talks to play Margo Channing in a stage adaptation of All About eve, taking on a role made famous by Bette Davis. Directed and written by Belgian experimental artist Ivo van Hove, it is based on the withering satire of Broadway that won Joseph L. Mankiewicz Academy Awards for screenplay and directing (the film took six Oscars, including Best Picture). Margo Channing is larger- thanlife; and Davis played her at full throttle, with an innate understanding that Margo has no illusions about herself. She knows she’s an ageing actress in a business preoccupied with youth. And this was 1950! So things have changed . . . or have they? Davis’s career was in a hole and she correctly saw All About eve as a lifeline. Last April, this column revealed that Van Hove was going to revisualise the film on stage, with two- time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett playing Margo. But Ms Blanchett later withdrew because of scheduling conflicts.
Anderson has met Van Hove, whose take on Paddy Chayefsky’s Network (Broadway bound at some point) is packing them in at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton, and is eager to work with him — though no binding deal has been signed yet with producers Sonia Friedman and Fox Stage Productions, and she hasn’t read Van Hove’s script.
While Anderson is famous for playing Dana Scully in The X-Files, it’s her performances as Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson in The Fall and Lady Dedlock in Bleak House that hold more power for me. And she treads the boards with aplomb.
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turn as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Young Vic, which garnered her the London evening Standard’s best actress award, was unforgettable.
All About eve concerns the devious eve Harrington (played by Anne Baxter in 1950), who executes a series of Machiavellian moves to usurp Margo.
In her ruthless climb to the top, eve tries to outwit Addison DeWitt: a theatre columnist who sees everything with deep cynicism. At one point DeWitt ( played by George Sanders onscreen) warns eve: ‘ Is it possible, even conceivable, that you’ve confused me with that gang of backward children you play tricks on? That you have the same contempt for me as you have for them? I am nobody’s fool . . . least of all yours.’
But really, despite the name, the story’s all about Margo. As Mel Gussow once noted in The New York Times, the film’s ‘ a salute to the indomitability of actresses like Bette Davis’.
It’s true. Recently, I’ve rewatched it a couple of times (thanks, Delta) and it’s Davis you stay with. When she delivers the landmark line: ‘Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night’, you know she means it.
Mankiewicz observed that when Davis uttered it, dressed in an edith Head creation trimmed with sable, ‘it was like hoisting storm warnings’.
I hope Van Hove’s adaptation retains Margo’s parting shot: ‘Nice speech, eve. But I wouldn’t worry too much about your heart. You can always put that award where your heart ought to be.’
No theatre has been set; and no other casting. The main roles will be Margo’s friend Karen, wife of fictional playwright Lloyd Richards (Celeste Holm and Hugh Marlowe onscreen); Birdie, Margo’s wardrobe assistant (Thelma Ritter) and beau Bill Simpson (Gary Merrill) plus a starlet called Miss Casswell, whom DeWitt announces as a ‘graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art’.
She was played to perfection by an up-and- comer named Marilyn Monroe. Now who’s going to play her?