Where to start with Colleen Camp? She is arguably the least iconic major cast member of Clue, but there’s no shame in being less iconic than Tim Curry or Leslie Ann Warren. She is still a driving force for a major part of the movie, and she manages to hold her own against one of the greatest comedy casts ever assembled. She’s not overwhelmed by the people around her. She would go on to do roughly the same thing in Wayne’s World, wherein she’s the sponsor’s wife.
It’s also true that there are not a lot of actors who are also accomplished bird trainers. She would train and perform with macaws at Busch Gardens, presumably the defunct one in Van Nuys. This is not the usual career track for struggling artists, granted, but still. She was actually seen by a talent scout, who helped her be cast in commercials, then minor TV and movie roles. There are a few early roles that are memorable enough to be worth mentioning—she was in Funny Lady and Rich Man, Poor Man—Book II. She was one of the playmates in Apocalypse Now, and she’s in an episode of WKRP credited as herself.
In fact, I’ve even seen three of her movies in the theatre. Not Clue, as it happens. But that same year, she was in D.A.R.Y.L., a strange little movie of which I’m quite fond; I think we saw it as a double feature with Return to Oz, originally. In high school, I saw Wayne’s World with my older sister and a group of her friends, a trip that made me feel like one of the coolest people possible. Then she was in American Hustle, which I saw for Oscarpalooza. Each of those movies was at a different stage in my life, and she’s one of those actresses who has just always been around.
She has a total of 152 acting credits, with four more in production. Oh, that’s helped by the fact that, other than Yvette, few of her roles are very big or the sort of thing that takes much time. She’s often only on screen for ten or twenty minutes, as when she was Mrs. Vanderhoff. Actually, Yvette gets less screen time than you might remember, come to that; she’s in another room or dead for a lot of the picture. Still, Colleen Camp puts in a lot of work. She has five movie credits this year alone, pretty much all with movies you’ve heard of, and she hasn’t had an uncredited role since 2005.
Honestly, she’s not bad as Yvette. Of the roles of Camp’s I’ve seen, it remains the most noteworthy, and there’s a moment in the movie where she suddenly makes it clear that the way we’ve seen her up to that point wasn’t real and that she’s merely pretending—not even the accent is real. It’s one of the endings, and I can’t remember if it’s before or after the lights go out and therefore if it’s universal to the three, but still. It’s not a bad moment, especially because it comes out of left field at a point where you think you know everything you need to about the character. If you’re only really going to be remembered for one role out of hundred, there are definitely worse choices.
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