Her ability to establish an immediate connection with audiences began with her voice—rich, weary, tender, lived-in, skeptical, and capable of shifting effortlessly between harshness and sweetness. It could be metallic, almost masculine and cutting, or as soft as a feather pillow, sometimes within the same film: ideal qualities for an actress equally at ease in every genre, from the woman’s picture to the western, by way of noir and sophisticated comedy. More iconoclast than icon, a character actress in the tradition of Bogart or Cagney, she was neither a great beauty nor a polished star. And it is precisely this—her refusal, or inability, to be reduced to a single image—that constitutes one of the determining factors in her longevity. If she was sometimes underestimated in her own time, her art of restraint—the fluidity of movement, the stillness in repose, the contained intensity—now appears strikingly modern. Moving across genres, the retrospective will highlight the many facets of an iconoclastic artist.

Curated by Molly Haskell.

Photo: Barbara Stanwyck, 1945