Barbara Loden

Barbara Loden
Loden pada tahun 1964
Lahir	Barbara Ann Loden (1932-07-08)8 Juli 1932 Asheville, North Carolina, Amerika Serikat
Meninggal	5 September 1980(1980-09-05) (umur 48) Kota New York City, Amerika Serikat
Pekerjaan	Aktris sutradara
Tahun aktif	1957–1980
Suami/istri	Laurence Joachim (m. 1954; bercerai) Elia Kazan ​ (m. 1967)​
Anak	2
Penghargaan (1964) Theatre World Award (1964) Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play (en)

Barbara Ann Loden (8 Juli 1932 – 5 September 1980) adalah seorang aktris dan sutradara film dan teater Amerika Serikat. Richard Brody dari The New Yorker menggambarkan Loden sebagai "perempuan pasangan dari John Cassavetes".

Lahir dan dibesarkan di Carolina Utara, Loden memulai kariernya pada usia dini di New York City sebagai model iklan dan penari paduan suara. Loden menjadi sahabat karib tetap di Acara Televisi Ernie Kovacs pada pertengahan 1950-an dan merupakan anggota seumur hidup dari Actors Studio yang terkenal. Dia muncul dalam beberapa proyek yang disutradarai oleh suami keduanya, Elia Kazan, termasuk Splendor in the Grass (1961). Penampilan berikutnya dalam produksi Broadway tahun 1964 After the Fall (1964) membuatnya meraih Penghargaan Tony untuk Aktris Unggulan Terbaik.

Pada tahun 1970, Loden menulis, menyutradarai, dan membintangi Wanda, sebuah film independen inovatif yang memenangkan Penghargaan Kritikus Internasional di Festival Film Venesia 1970. Sepanjang tahun 1970-an, ia terus bekerja menyutradarai produksi teater Off-Broadway dan teater regional, serta menyutradarai dua film pendek. Pada tahun 1978, Loden didiagnosa menderita kanker payudara, dimana ia meninggal dua tahun kemudian, pada usia 48 tahun.

Kehidupan dan karier

1932–1954: Masa kecil dan tahun awal

Loden lahir pada tanggal 8 Juli 1932 di Asheville, Carolina Utara. Ayahnya adalah seorang tukang cukur, dan dia menggambarkan dirinya sebagai putri Hillbilly." Setelah perceraian orang tuanya pada masa kanak-kanaknya, Loden dibesarkan oleh kakek dan nenek dari pihak ibu yang religius di Pegunungan Appalachian di pedesaan Marion, Carolina Utara. Dia menggambarkan masa kecilnya sebagai masa yang miskin secara emosional. Loden digambarkan sebagai seorang penyendiri yang pemalu, rendah hati, kaku, dan bersuara lembut. Pada usia 16 tahun, ia pindah ke New York City, di mana ia mulai bekerja sebagai model untuk majalah detektif dan roman. Loden menemukan kesuksesan kecil sebagai gadis pin-up, model, dan penari di Copacabana (klub malam) sebelum belajar di Actors Studio, berniat untuk menjadi seorang aktris. Pada saat itu, ia mengaku membenci film, dengan mengatakan, "Orang-orang di layar sangat sempurna dan membuat saya merasa rendah diri."

1955–1959: Early theater and television work

Loden made her New York theater debut in 1957 in Compulsion and also appeared on stage in The Highest Tree with Robert Redford as well as Night Circus with Ben Gazzara. She joined the cast of The Ernie Kovacs Show as a "scantily clad" sidekick to Kovacs, a job that her first husband, television producer and film distributor Larry Joachim, helped her obtain. She said she owed a lot to Kovacs, as another producer on the show had initially vetoed Kovacs's decision to hire her. In interviews, Loden said, "Ernie felt sorry for me" and gave her another job as a stunt sidekick, rolling around in a rug or getting hit in the face with a pie.

1960–1966: Film; marriage to Elia Kazan

Loden in Splendor in the Grass (1961)

In 1960, Loden appeared in Elia Kazan's film Wild River as Montgomery Clift's secretary. She was perhaps better known for her role in Splendor in the Grass (1961), in which she played Warren Beatty's sister.

She famously portrayed Maggie, a fictionalized version of Marilyn Monroe, in Kazan's Lincoln Center Repertory Company stage production of After the Fall (1964), which was written by Monroe's former husband, playwright Arthur Miller. Loden received a Tony award for best actress for her performance in After the Fall as well as an annual award of the Outer Circle, an organization of writers who covered Broadway for national magazines. After the Fall reviews called Loden the "new Jean Harlow" and a "blonde bombshell." Loden recalled in 1980 that she was drawn to the part because the script reflected her own life experiences.

Loden married her first husband, film and television producer and film distributor Larry Joachim, in the 1950s, and they had a son, Marco. After an affair while they were both married to other people, Loden married film director Elia Kazan, who was 23 years her senior, in 1966. She had another son, Leo, with Kazan, and though estranged and considering divorce, they were still married at the time of her death from breast cancer at the age of 48.

Kazan could be contemptuous when describing his relationship with Loden. In his autobiography, Elia Kazan: A Life, he revealed his desire and inability to control her. Kazan wrote about Loden "with a mix of affection and patronization, emphasizing her sexuality and her backcountry feistiness." In a "condescending" way, Kazan bemoaned that Loden had depended on her "sexual appeal" to get ahead and that he was afraid of "losing her." But Kazan was also, in his words, "protective" of Loden. In turn, Loden felt inferior to Kazan.

Her acting career on film had a troubled history. Her first major film role was to be in the Frank Perry-directed The Swimmer starring Burt Lancaster, but during post-production there was a dispute about the scene between producer Sam Spiegel and the film's writer-director team, the Perrys. According to notes by screenwriter Eleanor Perry, Spiegel began showing the troubled rough cut of the film around Hollywood, polling several of his famous film director friends about what he should do with it. Kazan was a major film director who had great influence. He had also secretly been shown a private screening of the film by his friend and producer Spiegel (producer of Kazan's On the Waterfront) and had reportedly interfered with the final cut. Perry was ultimately fired from the film. Several of the film's scenes were recast and reshot by Sydney Pollack, who was hired to replace Perry, with Lancaster reportedly paying for some of the reshoots himself. Among the scenes that were entirely recast and reshot was the notorious Loden scene, with Broadway stage actress Janice Rule replacing Loden. Neither Loden nor Pollack was credited on the film. All that remains of the lost scene are still photos taken on set, which appear in Chris Innis's 2014 documentary The Story of The Swimmer.

1967–1980: Film and theater directing

Loden in 1975

At some point during her acting career, Loden came across a newspaper article about a woman who, when on trial for accomplice to bank robbery, thanked the judge for her own sentencing. Intrigued by this story, she eventually wrote the screenplay for Wanda, an existential rumination on a poverty-stricken woman adrift in Pennsylvania coal country who becomes embroiled in a similar plot. After sending the script to a number of potential directors, Loden felt that they "didn't seem to understand what this woman was about." Fortuitously, her friend Harry Schuster had offered Loden financing for the film, so she directed it herself in collaboration with cinematographer and editor Nicholas T. Proferes on a meager budget of $115,000.

Wanda is a semi-autobiographical portrait of a "passive, disconnected coal miner's wife who attaches herself to a petty crook." Innovative in its cinéma vérité and improvisational style, it was one of the few American films directed by a woman to be theatrically released at that time. Film critic David Thomson wrote, "Wanda is full of unexpected moments and raw atmosphere, never settling for cliché in situation or character." The film was the only American film accepted by the Venice Film Festival in 1970, where it won the International Critics' Prize, and the only American film presented at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival. In 2010, with support from Gucci, the film was restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and screened at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

Although Wanda never received proper distribution, screening briefly in New York and at universities but never nationally on the theater circuit, it was noted for its groundbreaking anti-Hollywood view of a woman adrift in the American underworld. Loden said of her title character, "She's trying to get out of this very ugly type of existence, but she doesn't have the equipment"—an independent-minded idea for a cinematic heroine at the time, making Wanda an anti-heroine. In 2017, Wanda was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

While Loden never made another feature film, she directed two educational short films for the Learning Corporation of America. The first one, The Frontier Experience, was released in 1975. It depicts a widowed pioneer woman, played by Loden, in Kansas attempting to survive the harsh winter with her children. Described as a "political prequel" to Wanda, the short explores similar themes. The second, The Boy Who Liked Deer, was released in 1978. It is a cautionary tale about vandalism, in which two boys accidentally poison a deer.

Four months before her death, Loden was interviewed in Katja Raganelli's 1980 documentary I Am Wanda. The film documents Loden's final months, when she taught acting classes.

Karya yang dikutip

• Acker, Ally (1991). Reel Women - Pioneers of the Cinema, 1896 to the Present. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company. ISBN 978-0-826-40499-2. 
• Commire, Anne; Klezmer, Deborah (1999). Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia. 9. Waterford, Connecticut: Yorkin. ISBN 978-0-787-64068-2. 
• Garfield, David (1980). A Player's Place: The Story of the Actors Studio. New York: Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-025-42650-4. 
• Guernsey, Otis L.; et al. (1968). The Best Plays of 1967–1968. Burns Mantle Yearbook. 49. New York: Dodd, Mead. OCLC 990510372. 
• Hischak, Thomas (2012). Broadway Plays and Musicals: Descriptions and Essential Facts of More Than 14,000 Shows through 2007. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. ISBN 978-0-786-45309-2. 
• Jewell, James C.; Howard, Thomas E. (1977). Broadway and the Tony Awards: The First Three Decades, 1947-1977. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America. ISBN 978-0-819-10339-0. 
• Kazan, Elia (1988). Elia Kazan: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-394-55953-7. 
• Kazan, Elia (2015). Devlin, Albert J.; Devlin, Marlene J., ed. The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 978-1-101-91139-6. 
• Leeson, Richard M. (1994). William Inge: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-27407-7. 
• Spada, James (1984). The Films of Robert Redford. London: Citadel Press. ISBN 978-0-806-50898-6. 
• Turner, Roland; Podell, Janet (1980). The Annual Obituary. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0-333-32502-5. 
• Uglow, Jenny; Hendry, Maggy (2005). The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography (edisi ke-Fourth). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-50577-3. 

Bacaan lebih lanjut

• Reynaud, Bérénice, "For Wanda", in The Last Great American Picture Show, Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath and Noel King, eds, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004, pp. 223–47.
• Léger, Nathalie, Suite for Barbara Loden
• Gorfinkel, Elena. "Wanda’s Slowness: Enduring Insignificance". In On Women’s Film: Across Worlds and Generations, Ivone Margulies & Jeremi Szaniawaki, eds. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. pp. 27-48.
• Mörke, Luise (2020). "What's in a Cone? Barbara Loden's Wanda Between Weakness and Resilience." Senses of Cinema 96, October 2020.
• Rogers, Anna Backman (2021). Still Life: Notes on Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970)

Pranala luar

• Barbara Loden di IMDb (dalam bahasa Inggris)
• Barbara Loden di Internet Broadway Database
• Barbara Loden di Internet Off-Broadway Database