She was such an understated presence in movies that there are no quotes from her on her IMDb page, few memorable quotes from her many characters. What she seems to have excelled at is being the quietly competent woman whose husband is the focus of the plot. It’s far from universal; I eventually settled on something her Dirty Rotten Scoundrels character said. But she was so understated that I’m not sure she was even on the Celebrating the Living list. Even though I’ve liked her for years and was always pleased to see her turn up in things.
It’s true that it’s easy for anyone to slip through the cracks in the made-for-HBO And the Band Played On. That’s a stacked cast, with half of Hollywood apparently determined to have even a single scene. Headly was a major character, however, presumably cast because of that aura of quiet competence that served her so well as Tess Trueheart. That would serve her so well as Iris Holland. You can believe that she was capable of cracking the epidemiological secrets of HIV in the days when it was called “gay cancer” if it was referred to at all, and that she would be completely unfazed by the lurid details of her interviewees’ sex lives.
There’s a lot of hay made over the idea of leading men in character actors’ bodies and vice versa, but I think we forget how much of entertainment is built on actresses like Headly. The industry and the art form need them. The plots we’re accustomed to seeing don’t work unless you have a steady supply of actresses of Headly’s abilities and characterization—and fail to notice them. I wonder even as I write this how many people will react to news of her death with, “Oh, her! Oh, she is good!” Probably a lot. Even as it becomes “she was good.”
It is also interesting to look at her roles that don’t fit the typical mold. The two in particular that come to mind for me—I’ve actually only seen Dirty Rotten Scoundrels once—are both TV. She was Dr. Abby Keaton on ER, an incredibly skilled pediatric surgeon who has an affair with the young Carter, and she was Karen Stottlemeyer on Monk, a bit of a flibbertigibbet who I seem to recall eventually realized that her marriage wasn’t working for her. But she is still, in both those roles, defined by the men around her, because that’s kind of how most female characters work in media these days.
She was a fine, talented woman. She spent more time on the stage than the screen, I think, but one place or another, she acted opposite some greats. She was in the Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble with ex-husband John Malkovich. She acted with Kevin Kline, Raul Julia, a very young Ryan Reynolds. She was in On Golden Pond with Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. David Hyde Pierce. At the time of her death, she was working on a show for Hulu with Ed Begley, Jr. And that’s all before we start to discuss the things most people know her from. Which are more than people realize.
