Home scary home
Barbara Hershey minds her ‘Manor’ in Blumhouse horror flick
For Barbara Hershey, the Blumhouse horror entry “The Manor,” now streaming on Amazon Prime, only seems as if it was written specifically for her. Judith, a retired ballerina turning 70, gives Hershey the chance to echo her work in the Oscarwinning “Black Swan.”
Judith has survived a small stroke and been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, so she “makes the worst mistake” and checks herself into the Manor, a retirement home where once you’re in you most likely won’t come out.
“This resonated in a truthful way. That’s what I’m always going for,” Hershey, 73, reflected in a Zoom interview. “Because she has the beginning of Parkinson’s, her vanity and her concern over her family makes her want to not lay it on them.
“She puts herself in this place but pretty quickly it becomes a nightmare to end it.”
A definite plus in “Manor” is its depiction of Judith and her grandson (Nicholas Alexander), a rare instance of grandmother-grandson bonding.
“I love to show that. Because Judith is just not a typical 70-yearold. She’s very playful and useful, vital and funny. She swears. You know she is a whole human being and I think they relate on that level.
“Age is not a factor in their relationship and I just thought that was really unusual. I hadn’t seen that on film very much at all.”
The other man in Judith’s life is courtly nursing home resident Roland (Bruce Davison, “Mozart in the Jungle”), who is eager to add Judith to his nursing home “harem.”
Davison, 75, co-starred with Hershey in the seminal 1969, Oscar-nominated hit movie “Last Summer.” A disturbing portrait of teenage malevolence and rape, “Summer” became notorious when Hershey, then a self-described hippie, controversially changed her name to Barbara Seagull.
“The seagull had died by accident in the film and it shattered me. I guess that’s how I dealt with my guilt. But when you’re 19 and you’re in the public eye, it’s inevitable that you’re growing up publicly,” she reflected.
“In terms of the press I was not seasoned in any way or cautious. I was just living my life — and things get misinterpreted very easily.”
With Davison, “We’d actually never seen each other since then. The last time we saw each other we were 19. So it was amazing to see someone at 19 and now with a whole lifetime in-between.
“It was interesting to talk about it in a way that we couldn’t really talk about when we were teenagers.”
“The Manor” is streaming on Amazon Prime.