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For a generation weaned on sitcoms of the 21st century, the deaths this week of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/george-segal-dead/2021/03/24/291c5fa8-8ca2-11eb-a6bd-0eb91c03305a_story.html">George Segal</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/jessica-walter-dead/2021/03/25/6d157f2e-8d9b-11eb-a730-1b4ed9656258_story.html">Jessica Walter</a> conjured images of the actors playing two of America’s most lovably eccentric grandparents: Segal as “Pops” Solomon on “The Goldbergs” and Walter as Lucille Bluth on “Arrested Development,” where simply by raising a martini and fixing a withering glance at her husband or one of her children, she launched a thousand memes lacerating anyone who ever said anything stupid on the Internet.

But for filmgoers who came of age in the 1970s, Segal, who died Tuesday at 87, and Walter, who died one day later at 80, epitomized a time when the movies grew up — when recognizably adult lives, even at their most highly pitched, could still be viable fodder for high-quality mainstream cinema. In other words, a time when audiences hadn’t yet been infantilized into a steady diet of comic-book escapism and supernatural fantasy.

Long before I wrote about movies professionally, Walter had seared herself into my consciousness, thanks to a performance that would prove formative in developing her superbly controlled screen persona. In the 1971 film “Play Misty for Me,” best known as Clint Eastwood’s stylish and assured directorial debut, Walter portrayed Evelyn, a woman who falls in love with a disc jockey played by Eastwood, insinuating herself into his life as a perky, prototypical “cool girl” who appreciates jazz, can cook a good steak and has embraced the libidinal benefits of the sexual revolution.

Let’s just say the relationship ends badly. In addition to proving that Eastwood was a gifted director, “Play Misty for Me” spawned a line of psycho-thrillers centered on neurotically obsessed single women and their hapless (mostly male) victims, of which “Fatal Attraction” was the most notorious. Like “Misty,” that film was animated by a palpable undercurrent of anti-feminist animus. Walter’s Evelyn was supposed to be the crazy one, but it was Eastwood’s character who was clearly hysterical.

Biting, embittered and seriously boop-shooby, Evelyn was a juicy role but also a thankless one. She personified the postwar generation’s apprehension about the mid-century women’s movement, especially when it came to sexual agency. A woman with the self-possession to identify what she wants — and the nerve to go after it — was seemingly most easily understood as a function of derangement, annihilating narcissism or both.

But Walter resisted the reflex to play Evelyn as a B-movie banshee, or a pathetic patsy of the feminist movement the film caricatures so floridly. Eastwood might have cast her as the monster in his horror show, but Walter subverted that impulse to deliver a performance touched by vulnerability and the sympathetic spark of mutual understanding.


<i>[The film industry is in crisis. It can learn a lot from the 1970s.]</i>


Segal and Walter worked together three times, in the largely forgotten 1968 Sidney Lumet comedy “Bye Bye Braverman,” on an episode of the sitcom “Just Shoot Me!” and on the TV Land series “Retired at 35.” Of course, Segal was best known for his utterly fearless portrayal of a young college professor out of his depth in the screen adaptation of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and fleet-footed rom-coms such as “The Owl and the Pussycat.” But my favorite Segal performance was in a movie that was never similarly canonized, although it deserved to be: In “Loving,” which came out in 1970, Segal plays Brooks Wilson, a commercial illustrator who works in Manhattan and lives in the suburbs with his wife, Selma (Eva Marie Saint), and their two daughters.

Everett Collection

Brooks is an avatar for the classic “midlife crisis,” a term that had been coined just five years earlier. He’s having an affair with a much younger woman. He’s anxious about his work and his professional ambitions. He’s happy but bored at home. The film’s climactic scene occurs at a WASPy Connecticut cocktail party, where Brooks seduces a friend’s wife and their liaison is captured on a closed-circuit security camera for all the revelers to see.

“Loving” engaged with some of the same themes as “Play Misty for Me,” including jittery sexual anxiety and the treacherous tectonics of shifting gender roles. But “Loving” lacked “Misty’s” hateful sting. Fans of the film have long pointed out the DNA Brooks shares with the antiheroes of John Cheever, John Updike and Jules Feiffer; that culminating party, with its archetypes of louche ’70s licentiousness, anticipated Ang Lee’s “Ice Storm” by 25 years.

In his adaptation of J.M. Ryan’s novel “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000QLJBKI?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=thewaspos09-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;linkCode=xm2&amp;creativeASIN=B000QLJBKI" title="www.amazon.com">Brooks Wilson Ltd.</a>,” director Irvin Kershner observed the strutting and fretting of his protagonist with heart, wit and sophistication. Segal could have played Brooks in any number of ways that would have made him out to be selfish, superficial, creepy and downright predatory. Instead, he allowed Brooks to be a classic antihero — a man whose worst impulses weren’t an expression of inherent evil but of the same frailties everyone in the audience could relate to.

Interestingly enough, both “Play Misty for Me” and “Loving” were ostensibly about men. But each wound up being about women, if only obliquely. One of Segal’s most subtle and generous gestures in “Loving” is to allow Saint’s Selma to quietly come into her own as the wise, watchful heroine of her own story: She personified the woman Betty Friedan had written about seven years earlier in “<a href="https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B007R9CH3U&amp;preview=newtab&amp;linkCode=kpe&amp;ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_51KNAR4SAT2YPNXWHDCY&amp;tag=thewaspos09-20" title="read.amazon.com">The Feminine Mystique</a>,” in which she identified “the problem that has no name,” i.e. women’s creeping sense of dissatisfaction with their roles as wives, mothers and little else. In “Play Misty for Me,” Evelyn arguably symbolized America’s most deep-seated societal fears about what Selma might become if she read that book and took it to heart.

It’s been said that every movie eventually becomes a documentary, if only to show succeeding generations the ways their forebears behaved, what they valued and how they thought about life. That’s true of “Play Misty for Me” and “Loving,” although they’re most valuable as showcases for actors who took an unflattering role and turned it into something human, even humane: Walter by infusing Evelyn with pathos, Segal by infusing Brooks with wry self-awareness. If acting is 90 percent listening, here were two consummate pros, exquisitely attuned to what surrounded them, from their co-stars to their zeitgeist. Their characters might have been harbingers of an oncoming apocalypse, but their comprehension and compassion allowed them to emerge unscathed.

<i>Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of times and in which projects George Segal and Jessica Walter worked together. The story has been updated.</i>


Actors in documentaries used to be taboo. Now they’re the stars.



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Smith College, BA in government

Ann Hornaday is The Washington Post's chief film critic. She is the author of "Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies." She joined The Post in 2002. 

Ann Hornaday

The Washington Post

Jessica Walter and George Segal personified a time when movies grew up

PLAY MISTY FOR ME, 1971
Jessica Walter

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