Bounty Beyond Measure: Angelica Page Celebrates an Icon

(Three Rooms Press.)

“The main thing is to be able to control your instrument, which, in the actor, is yourself. Once you’ve trained the instrument to do what you want, you’re in control, you’re free.”

--Geraldine Page

When he revealed the winner of the Academy Award for lead actress in 1986, F. Murray Abraham prefaced the announcement by declaiming, “I consider this woman the greatest actress in the English language.” He genuflected when she arrived at the podium. It was Geraldine Page, who had been nominated seven previous times for the honor. It must have been profound for her 23-year-old daughter Angelica to witness the entire planet bestowing such stellar acclaim for her mother towards the end of a long and rewarding life on stage and screen. And perhaps kind of daunting for someone just starting out herself on that well-traveled road, still seven years away from her Broadway debut in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie and the release of her first feature film, Nobody’s Fool, the following year. Talk about having the maternal bar raised to astronomical heights! But as her new memoir of her mother, Bountiful, published by Three Rooms Press, makes abundantly clear, the larger-than-life Method actor was always her mother first and a star second. Even more touchingly, she also gave her daughter the perfect role model to emulate as an authentic human being. There is paradox aplenty but no contradiction in the important lesson of having both dramatic emotional delicacy and wonky screwball comedy in the same person at the same time. That’s what made her mother so exceptionally human and humane. And that’s also what makes this family memoir such a tender-hearted tribute.

"The greatest actress in the English language."

Maybe it was inevitable, given the immense personality of the lady who brought her into the world (her father was the volatile actor Rip Torn), that she would eventually portray her own mother in a one-woman theatrical play that opened in Los Angeles in 2015 called Turning Page. Her biographical evocation of the powerful shadow cast by her mother, which toured nationally until 2017, reaped avid praise from Charles McNulty of the L.A. Times: “For those who have been touched by Geraldine Page’s sorcery—and I personally don’t know any great actor who hasn’t been—Angelica’s virtuosic conjuring of her mother’s spirit is something to behold.” That show was the basis for the memoir that would emerge, after gestating for a decade more, in the form of Bountiful: Growing Up with Geraldine Page. She has described the play as the skeleton to which the biography adds flesh. It is a guided tour behind the public veils of that Page sorcery, an in-depth experiment in conjuring her mother’s spirit sometimes feels almost like a séance. And for me, a longtime passionate admirer of Geraldine Page’s uncanny and beguiling acting, Angelica Page conducts this mediumistic tour in a manner which leaves us permanently gobsmacked by her mother’s consistently impressive ability to remind us that actors were performing with an instrument, themselves, and that acting, when it occurs at the highest level, was a kind of emotional grammar, an almost existential piano that the greatest artists, both on stage and screen, have learned to play by ear. There was a method to her magic, as the author reveals, and it was called the Method, though not all Method actors were as proficient at it as her mother was. She could demonstrate a master class in the Strasberg-Hagen school of acting as deftly on screen as on stage, though fewer fortunate members of the public managed to witness that magic in plays by Tennessee Williams, Anton Chekhov and Noel Coward.

How many times have a huge number of us watched her in action, as she slowly and methodically builds up steam until her portrayal leaves you with your mouth gaping open? The question was not so much who as what am I watching here, what is this secret storm in a dress sharing more tender vulnerability and commanding wrath than I ever imagined was possible? She was a force of nature that made the viewer suddenly realize that this woman possessed a rare kind of beauty, one that has no dictionary definition.

Incredibly enough, this is the first book-length study of Geraldine Page (as well as being the literary debut of her daughter). And the author pulls off this huge venture with a perfect combination of unalloyed love and courageous honesty, especially when discussing the challenge of being a child in the midst of the roiling cauldron of love and rage that constituted her parents’ marriage. The author also had the benefit, in the later drafts of this biography, of coming into possession of her mother’s unfinished autobiography, which proved to be a goldmine in terms of confirming the veracity of her own memory of her childhood as the kid of someone who was pretty much universally acclaimed as the consummate actor’s actor. And among the most touching tributes she has made to that maternal monument in these pages was maybe the ultimate accolade possible for an actor: that Page was able to shift gears from emotionally intense playscript or screenplay to down-to-earth domestic reality. As the author shared with Three Rooms Press’s co-founder/editor Kat Georges, “It was astonishing really to see her transformation from being a character back to being my mom. In life she was natural, unaffected and casual in her appearance. On the stage and screen she was always larger than life and could be scary. When she played a villain it was especially relieving when she came home as simply herself.”

Page with Julie Harris, Eileen Herlie, Maureen Stapleton, and Anne Bancroft. (Photo: Friedman-Abeles studio.)

Her mother’s acting career is the stuff of legend, including the interruption in her film career by the McCarthy era and its shameful blacklisting by Hollywood executives of many screen actors. During that drought, as a direct consequence of her association with the Actors Studio, she simply rose to lofty triumph in the theatre. Like everything else she encountered in her bold and vivacious life, she apparently took even a looming roadblock like being blacklisted for eight years as an opportunity to engage in the craft on the Broadway stage. Once back in action with the collapse of the blacklist, she made up for lost time, and her reinstated movie career brought her four Oscar nominations for Best Actress and four for Best Supporting Actress, as well as a British Academy Film Award, two Golden Globe Awards and two primetime Emmys. She was also nominated for the Tony four times.

Page took Broadway by storm when she appeared in her first play, Midsummer, in 1953 and garnered Tony Award nominations for Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Absurd Person Singular (1974), Agnes of God (1982) and Blithe Spirit (1987). Her friend Anne Jackson, a.k.a. Mrs. Eli Wallach, offered this tribute: “She used the stage like no one else I’d ever seen. It was like playing tennis with someone who had 26 arms.”

Even a partial list of her films is vertiginous: Hondo (her film debut in 1953), Summer and Smoke (1961), the movie version of Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), Dear Heart (1964), You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), The Beguiled (1971), Pete ‘n Tillie (1972), Interiors (1978), The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984), and finally her Oscar Award-winning role in the performance of a lifetime, The Trip to Bountiful (1985).

Both on stage and on screen she embodied the Method just as Marlon Brando did, or James Dean (with whom she once had a brief but intense affair). She often plumbed not only her own private experiences for her roles but also consulted therapists to contour her interpretation of character. “If I read a part and think I can connect to it,” she once told the L.A. Times, “that I can touch people with it, I will do it, no matter what its size. And if I think I can’t do something with a part, I won’t take it.” She admitted that she also utilized the controversial emotional recall technique, calling on her own private experiences in preparation for her roles.

Externalizing the interior: Page as Eve in Woody Allen's Interiors. (Photo: United Artists.)

One hopes that apart from those of us who were able to absorb her brilliance as it took place in real time, younger members of subsequent generations will now be able to experience her masterful performances afresh. Needless to say, many of her films are stalwart features in the programming by curators working for Turner Classic Movies, as well as features presented by cinemathèques devoted to the golden age of cinema she so clearly represents. One of the highest praises I can impart to Angelica Page, in addition to her crisp and compelling writing style, is what I have no hesitation in characterizing as her own disarmingly intense naturalness and seemingly effortless theatrical empathy in examining the rich and rewarding chronicle of her remarkable mother’s life and times. This she does with considerable charm, modesty and skill, managing to effectively position her own life as an actress (with impressive and well- earned achievements of her own) closely adjacent to the wild roller-coaster ride of growing up Page. Her mother’s friend and acting peer F. Murray Abraham encapsulated this saga most accurately and affectionately: “Be warned, this book is dangerous, it can make you regret never having lived through the thrilling times Geraldine Page lived in and partly created. In these trying times, she is an important reminder of the individual, in art and in life.”

Meanwhile, the astute theatre critic Charles McNulty, who also had the benefit of knowing both the bio-subject and the author well, penned the book’s introduction that is similarly poignant and therefore worth sharing: “Bountiful is the book Page’s myriad admirers have been waiting for, and Angelica turns out to be the person best situated to write it. Having lived with Page’s paradoxical nature—shy but fierce, private yet daringly uninhibited, touched by the gods with talent but still disarmingly ordinary offstage—she had no need to iron out her inconsistencies. As a daughter, she knows where the secrets are buried. And as an actress herself, she understands the inextricable yet ineffable relationship between life and art. Geraldine Page gloriously lives again in the pages of a book torn from the heart.” That ineffable relationship was as real and tangible to the author of this memoir as her familial bonds were, as she expressed it so well in her own Preface:

Both my parents have now left this mortal coil, so I’m finally prepared to tell this tale. Of growing up the only daughter of the late great Geraldine Page. I’ve been avoiding writing this book. I’ve actively avoided it for over two decades. Before she died, my mother asked that there be a waiting period of seven years before documenting her life. She requested the waiting period so that everyone involved could get perspective. She didn’t want to be canonized. I began channeling the first draft of the fifty-five-page monologue which would become the solo play Turning Page. By performing the play, I allowed my mother to diligently remind me of every moment we shared. It was voluntary anamnesis.

Angelica also movingly celebrates the mixed blessings of growing up in the eye of a celebrity storm and being swept up the emotional hurricane that was her parents’ often pathological relationship. Not your average celebrity memoir (though it does include insider stories of the acting life in the footlight and spotlight), it is also something of a profile in courage, both the mother’s and the daughter’s, in facing the challenges of surviving together as a supportive team. The author quite skillfully mixes her own coming of age and successful attempts to go her own way professionally while being just as mesmerized as the rest of us by her mother’s larger-than-life public persona, ironically coupled as she was with an almost extra-normal and self-effacing lady once the cameras were turned off and she was permitted to return to what seemed like her favourite role: Mom. She threads it all together so effectively because in actuality the author is the thread and her mother is the needle. This memoir is all these things at once, and can be accurately described as both a theatrical history lesson and a survival guide to life in the fast lane. Most importantly, perhaps, it is a love song. It often feels like something a classic troubadour would share while wandering.

She commences appropriately with what she swears is her earliest memory, being swaddled as a baby being brought from the hospital: “I remember the safety that she provided me as I snuggled inside her coat—keeping me warm as it snowed, I remember her gorgeous manicure as she range the doorbell. It revealed her as a consummate class act and a superb provider.” And she concludes with what amounts to something approaching a final memory, or at least a sensation of mortality: “Okay Mom, I did what you asked. I took your ashes down to our house in Mexico where you always thought you’d retire. I live there now. And I found someone to tell your story. You.” Though she embodied the theatrical essence of a true trouper to the end, Geraldine did not manage to show up for the afternoon and evening performances of Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward in 1987. At the end of that evening’s performance, the play’s producer announced from the stage that Page had been found dead in her lower Manhattan townhouse. Her immense and tender heart, which had hypnotized so many of us non-stop for over forty years, had simply stopped beating. But it still beats on in every frame of film she illuminated with her incandescent presence. And it lives on in this splendid memoir by her daughter.

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.