One of the great examples of how the ‘70s were not a great decade for women in film is how few actresses became lasting stars starting then. Meryl Streep, of course. Diane Keaton. Jodie Foster, though goodness knows she’s a special case. And that’s where you’re kind of running out. Talented actresses, goodness knows, and many who would at very least do solid work. Barbara Hershey’s career really took off in the ‘70s. But you have to really work to find big names, whereas when it comes to actors, it’s easy. Al Pacino. Robert DeNiro. Jeff Bridges, nepo baby though he is. Sylvester Stallone. Richard Dreyfuss. John Travolta. We could keep going. Possibly Jack Nicholson, whose big breakout is arguably Five Easy Pieces. But his costar, Susan Anspach, mostly gets a “who?”
In fact, Anspach did a lot of work with a lot of the big names of the ‘70s. She did a play with Al Pacino at the Actors’ Studio; Wikipedia doesn’t say what play it was, and as regular readers know, that sort of thing is a bear to try to track down. She was, however, in the ‘65 production of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge. Her costars were Robert Duvall, Jon Voigt, and Dustin Hoffman. (The Graduate is from ‘67 and disqualifies Hoffman from our tally.) She made a movie with Kris Kristofferson—who I learned today was a Rhodes Scholar, which is not at all how I think of him.
Personally, I think of her as being in a 1981 movie with Elliott Gould. (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice was in ‘69, but if you think of him from MASH, that’s 1970.) We will not speak of her other major costar from that movie (already a huge name by the ‘70s, albeit mostly from TV and stand-up), but it’s certainly true that Anspach is doing good work in the movie. A lot of the minor characters are, but I feel as though her role is particularly thankless. She’s there to be the mechanism to what a kid wants. That’s it; that’s her job. But she puts in solid work regardless.
And, of course, it’s hard to find what she did when the acting work dried up. She seems to have become an acting coach, which good for her; she worked on Prince of Egypt with the animators, trying to make the characters’ movements realistic. As a fan of that movie, I think that, if she did that, she did a damn fine job. It’s nice to know she had work at all. The ‘80s produced a damn fine crop of actresses, but many of the women of the ‘70s were not given work or, from what I can tell, even remembered. One episode of Murder, She Wrote actually indicates more how much she was forgotten, given what we know of the casting on that show.
Anspach seems to have been a mentally unhealthy woman—she may have been an alcoholic, and she spent a lot of time in analysis—with a great deal of talent. She had two children, one of whom she said was fathered by Jack Nicholson and looks it, and she was married twice. She marched with Cesar Chavez, protested apartheid, and advocated for human rights in Central America. She was a talented actress in an era with little place for talented actresses. And now, she’s basically forgotten. And people wonder why I find ‘70s film such a frustrating subject.
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