Elizabeth Hartman

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Mary Elizabeth Hartman (born December 23, 1943 in Youngstown , Ohio , † June 10, 1987 in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania ) was an American theater and film actress. She gained fame for her award-winning feature film debut in the drama Dreaming Lips (1965). As a result, the fragile, child-like actress was mainly entrusted with the depiction of sensitive female figures. Due to depression , her career ended in the early 1980s after only 14 film and television roles.

Life

Training and theater work

Elizabeth Hartman, called "Biff," was the middle of three children born to B. C. and Claire Mullaly Hartman. She grew up in her native Youngstown, Ohio, and was considered shy and solitary in her childhood. Hartman played theater successfully in high school and was named "Ohio High School Actress of the Year". After graduating from school, she became a member of the renowned Youngstown Playhouse . The red-haired actress who starred Emily Webb in a local theater production of Thornton Wilders Our Town was her first success . She then worked in the summer theater and attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, later Carnegie Mellon University , where she was also a member of the local theater company. After just a year, Hartman gave up training there and went to New York to pursue a professional career as an actress.

She returned to Ohio after just five months, spent mostly in her apartment for fear of audition rejections. There she became a member of the Cleveland Playhouse ensemble . Later she moved to the Kenley Players in Warren (Ohio) , where she met the future theater director John Kenley, who tried to persuade her to return to New York ("She didn't have the aggressiveness it needed. She didn't trust himself. ", says Kenley).

Hartman finally moved to New York a second time, this time being looked after by an agent. She made her Broadway debut in 1964 in the comedy Everybody Out, the Castle is Sinking, and was invited to screen tests by MGM and Warner Bros. in the same year .

Successful feature film debut in "Dreaming Lips"

In 1965, Hartman made her feature film debut in MGM's Dreaming Lips, directed by British Guy Green . The drama, starring Sidney Poitier and Shelley Winters in additional roles , is based on a novel by Elizabeth Kata and depicts the relationship between a white, blind girl and an African American . In preparation, Hartman attended a school for the blind, while director Green retrospectively hailed her as one of the greatest instinctive actresses he would have ever worked with. Dreaming lips , playing against the backdrop of the African American civil rights movement in the 1960s, met with an echo from specialist reviews and at the box office. In the southern United States, however, the film was only allowed to be shown in a cut version.

Elizabeth Hartman's portrayal also received praise, and she received two nominations for the 1966 Golden Globe Awards . Nominated alongside well-known professional colleagues such as Julie Christie ( Darling ) or Simone Signoret ( The Ship of Fools ) , she lost out to British Samantha Eggar ( The Catcher ) in the category Best Lead Actress - Drama . In the award of the award for the best young actress , she finally prevailed against Geraldine Chaplin ( Doctor Schiwago ), among others . At the Academy Awards that same year, Hartman was nominated for Best Actress for the role of the sensitive and blind Selina D'Arcy , but had to admit defeat to Julie Christie. At the age of 22, the actress was considered the youngest actress to be nominated in this category.

Depression and career decline

After the success of Dreaming Lips , Hartman was offered numerous other film roles, according to her agent Howard Rubin, although the majority of them were young women with disabilities, whom she turned down. In 1966 Hartman starred in Sidney Lumet's film The Clique as the sexually repressed Priss. Joan Hackett , Candice Bergen and Shirley Knight were her film partners in the drama about eight daughters from the American upper class who befriended in a private girls' school in 1933 . In the same year she acted in Big Boy, now you'll be a man! , the graduation thesis of the young Francis Ford Coppola at the University of California . In it she took on the female lead of the playful, mysterious and man-devouring actress Barbara Darling , who takes on a young and naive librarian (played by Peter Kastner ), only to reject him later.

For Big Boy , Hartman received a third Golden Globe nomination in 1967, this time for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical . Film critic Richard Schickel ( Life ) saw the chance for the actress to break out of the roles of the " gray mouse ". However, Hartman herself was unsettled about her own performance, so according to her statements, Ford Coppola was the driving force behind her portrayal. “I actually liked myself in the role, even though I didn't expect it. It's not the kind of fun that I really love. In the end, I felt like one thing, all cold and icy. I wish the people I play to be in trouble. I want to cry, ”said Hartman. After a supporting role as shy Zinaida in John Frankenheimer's drama A Man Like Job (1968) with Alan Bates , she applied unsuccessfully for the lead role in Alan J. Pakula's tragicomedy Pookie , which was to serve as a career springboard for Liza Minnelli . Hartman is also said to have turned down a part in Rat mal, who comes to dinner (1968) as well as the offer to play Alice in Paul Mazursky's relationship drama Bob & Caroline & Ted & Alice .

Hartman, described outside of the film set as shy and fearful, could not handle the success , as she revealed in an interview in 1969. “The initial success knocked me down […] It whirled up with me, into a position I didn't belong in. I wasn't ready for it. I suddenly saw myself fail. ”, Said the artist, who, according to her own account, locked herself in her New York apartment for two years before finding new courage, again through the role of Emily in the Broadway revival Our Town (1969) alongside Henry Fonda , scooped. After A Man Like Job and the appearance in Don Siegel's war drama Deceived (1971) with Clint Eastwood in the lead role, Hartman's career stagnated from the early 1970s. The once highly acclaimed actress, started again from severe depression and paranoia to suffer.

Due to financial problems, Hartman followed offers in commercial productions. In 1973 she starred in the hit action film The Great From the Dark (1973), in which she played a supporting role as the killed wife of Joe Don Baker . Influential film critic Pauline Kael praised Hartman's performance, even though she complained that director Phil Karlson had put too much pressure on her tear glands. "Hartman is a talented actress who is rarely seen." Summed up Kael and compared the actress to the young Janet Gaynor . Nevertheless, Hartman was only sporadically seen in US film and television in the years to come. “I would love to play a balanced girl who doesn't suffer from anything in a comedy like Katharine Hepburn did. Oh i forgot Nobody writes balanced things anymore. ”, Hartman said in an interview in 1979.

In 1981 she appeared in a supporting role as a brittle teacher in the less than successful horror comedy A Werewolf Bites Through , her last appearance as an actress in a movie. A year later she dubbed the worried title heroine for Don Bluth's cartoon Mrs. Brisby and the Secret of NIMH (1982). Hartman then disappeared from the television and big screen and moved to Pittsburgh in 1983, where her family lived. After a suicide attempt and a year-long hospital stay in Connecticut , Hartman returned to community theater, playing a role with Myrtle Brown in Morning's at Seven in Boston , for which she received good reviews. During this time, however, the actress had to be constantly looked after and a tour ended after a guest appearance in Los Angeles at the second stop in Chicago .

Private life and death

Elizabeth Hartman was married to director and screenwriter Gil Dennis from 1968 until her divorce in 1981 , who separated from her. Then she moved into her sister's household. Because of her deteriorating health, she was sent to an institution more than a dozen times. She kept in touch with Francis Ford Coppola and her colleague Geraldine Page from Big Boy . Hartman, who once said of herself, “Acting is what I do best. I am not trained in everything else… ”(“ Acting is what I do best. I'm not trained for anything else… ”), most recently lived on savings from disability insurance and social benefits and was financially supported by her family.

On June 10, 1987, Hartman fell from a window of her fifth-floor apartment in Pittsburgh. She was living alone at the time and was an outpatient at the local Western Psychiatric Institute Clinic . The 43-year-old did not leave a suicide note , but phoned her attending doctor shortly before her death and complained of depression and suicidal intent , whereupon the police assumed she was suicide. Hartman was buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in her hometown of Youngstown.

Filmography (selection)

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Sandra Konte: The Short Life of Elizabeth Hartman . In: Los Angeles Times , November 22, 1987, pp. M3-M4 / 41-44.
  2. ^ Biff Hartman of Playhouse Roles Has Broadway Lead . In: The Steel Valley News , Nov. 22, 1964, p. 24.
  3. ^ Schickel, Richard: Growing Up Frantic in Cloud Cuckooland . In: LIFE , 62 (March 24, 1967), No. 12, p. 6.
  4. ^ Shy Elizabeth Hartman gets a brand new look . In: LIFE , 62 (March 24, 1967), No. 12, pp. 43-46.
  5. ↑ Elizabeth Hartman, 'Patch of Blue' Star, Is Suspected Suicide . In: New York Times , June 12, 1987, Section D, Page 28, Column 3, Cultural Desk.
  6. ↑ quoted from Konte, Sandra: The Short Life of Elizabeth Hartman . In: Los Angeles Times , Nov. 22, 1987, p. 42.
  7. ↑ Hartman buried in private ceremony . United Press International, June 13, 1987, Domestic News, Boardman, Ohio (accessed February 4, 2007 via LexisNexis Economy ).
  8. ^ Biography in the Internet Movie Database (accessed June 3, 2006).
  9. ↑ Actress Elizabeth Hartman Dies After Leaping From A Window . Associated Press , June 11, 1987, Domestic News, PM cycle (accessed February 4, 2007 via LexisNexis Economy).
  10. ^ Profile at findagrave.com (accessed February 4, 2007).
  11. ↑ Elizabeth Hartman Given Award of Theater Owners . In: New York Times, September 30, 1966, p. 50.
personal data
SURNAME Hartman, Elizabeth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hartman, Mary Elizabeth (maiden name); Hartman, Biff (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION US-american actress
DATE OF BIRTH December 23, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Youngstown , Ohio, United States
DATE OF DEATH June 10, 1987
Place of death Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania, United States