The news just kept coming over the past weeks—the sad news about iconic women who have passed. It’s astonishing to think that these women who were fixtures in our minds and our culture are now gone. We want to pay tribute to each one here.
Loretta Lynn
Loretta Lynn never described herself as a feminist. As we know, she humbly referred to herself as a coal miner’s daughter and once said she didn’t think much of “Women’s Lib.” Still, her steadfast pursuit of her passion for singing and her songs about enduring through hardship (not to mention her song, “The Pill,” which was about the freedom birth control provides) set an example of strength that was inspiring, surely even to women who didn’t embrace a political label like feminism.
She sang about women’s struggles while masterfully projecting the image of an uncorrupted country girl.
“That she sang about women’s struggles while masterfully projecting the image of an uncorrupted country girl made her all the more convincing as an artist,” wrote Amanda Marie Martinez, in an NPR appreciation piece.
She impacted the way women thought about their power, and we can honor that, even though we wish she could have been more forceful in her support of politics that helped women.
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Angela Lansbury
We first remember Angela Lansbury as the complicity maid in Gaslight. Then she wowed us as the truly evil, highly manipulative mother in The Manchurian Candidate. (In another case of sexist casting, she played Laurence Harvey’s mother when in fact she was only three years older than him.) She had another dark star turn as the canabalistic meat-pie maker in Steven Sondheim’s classic Sweeney Todd on Broadway (and in a filmed version of the play).
We will miss her calming, good-humored presence, and are grateful that she will live on forever in re-run land.
But it is as Jessica Fletcher, the mystery writer and amateur detective who always got her man (or woman) in the long-running TV series Murder She Wrote that she became a household name. The series proved a ratings hit during its broadcast, becoming a staple of CBS Sunday night TV schedule for around a decade, while achieving distinction as one of the most successful and longest-running television shows in history, averaging more than 30 million viewers per week in its prime.
We will miss her calming, good-humored presence, and are grateful that she will live on forever in re-run land.
Louise Fletcher
According to the American Film Institute, Nurse Ratched, the character played by Louise Fletcher in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, is the fifth-greatest villain in film history—and second-greatest villainess, behind only the Wicked Witch of the West. So powerful was her performance that the term “Nurse Ratched” is a instantly recognizable synonym for overly authoritative and humorless.
So powerful was her performance that the term “Nurse Ratched” is part of the lexicon now.
She rightly won an Oscar for her performance, but the role defined her in an unhelpful way; she was for years typecast as stern, malevolent characters. In a 2003 reappraisal of “Cuckoo’s Nest,” Roger Ebert declared that despite the Oscar, Fletcher’s performance “is not enough appreciated. This may be because her Nurse Ratched is so thoroughly contemptible, and because she embodies so completely the qualities we all (men and women) have been taught to fear in a certain kind of female authority figure — a woman who has subsumed sexuality and humanity into duty and righteousness.”
It’s a shame that we didn’t get to see the full scope of her talents, but it’s not nothing to create a role that becomes part of the English lexicon.
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