Tuesday Weld’s 80th birthday on August 27 is a valid excuse to remind all cinephiles of the wondrous work of one of American cinema’s most gifted and enigmatic actresses. And a reminder is desperately needed because over the six decades of her original, fearless, often lacerating performances in film and television, Weld’s reluctance to promote herself makes Greta Garbo look like Demi Lovato.
Oldsters probably first discovered Weld in her youth as the scintillating Thalia Menninger on the popular TV sitcom “Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” (1959-1963), a show that also boasted featured roles for future Oscar winners Warren Beatty, Jack Albertson and Ron Howard.
And once anyone, especially men who were young boys when Weld was a young girl, discovered the actress with the weekday moniker, like the old flame that is never quite extinguished from a forlorn heart, Tuesday Weld never disappeared — though her career seemed too often to barely flicker.
Here then, along with best birthday wishes, are 10 essential Tuesday Weld film performances (and one TV movie keeper) that ably make the case for a true film great’s always rebellious, completely unique contribution to American cinema.
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'Wild in the Country'
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Director: Philip Dunne
Year: 1961Variety called Weld’s performance in this racy Elvis Presley dramatic feature, “a flashing and arresting portrait of a sexy siren” and it deserves a place near the top of the pantheon of Elvis’ leading ladies. Weld was never shy and retiring, never the simple vixen or the minor minx. To be sure, she was always about striking allure, but never without startling intent. In “Wild,” she knows what she wants and she holds her own opposite The King. It’s worth noting that “Wild” raised Weld’s profile to the front pages, as the duo made bountiful “are they or aren’t they” headlines in the tabloid press.
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'Bachelor Flat'
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Director: Frank Tashlin
Year: 1962Fans of the antic comic genius filmmaker Frank Tashlin revere his rowdy ribald vision of American cultural mores, whether it be via his work as one of the seminal members of the Warner Bros Looney Tunes cartoon gang or director of zeitgeist hits like “The Girl Can’t Help It.” Based upon the British stage comedy, “Libby,” by Budd Grossman, “Flat” is one of the first films of the ’60s to make comic hay out of the generation gap. Here, Weld as “Libby,” is at the center of the teen chaos that envelops British paleontologist Bruce Patterson (Terry-Thomas). A prime example of what Slate’s Louis Jordan calls Weld’s “sex kitten” pictures, Variety deemed “Flat” “a mite too risqué for the family trade,” but Jordan makes the case that “Flat” “contains inspired comic moments that rank with the best of Tashlin’s work.”
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'Lord Love a Duck'
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Director: George Axelrod
Year: 1966Based upon Al Hine’s 1961 social satire novel, Axelrod’s story takes the tale of a young female Faust, Barbara Anne (Weld), and uses her devilish quest for success as a leaping off point for a black comedy about American consumerism and carnal impulses, which makes Weld the perfect vehicle for expressing female empowerment and the American male’s terror of same.
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'A Safe Place'
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Director: Henry Jaglom
Year: 1971A year earlier, Jack Nicholson was searching for the meaning of life as Bobby Dupea in Bob Rafelson’s Oscar-nominated “Five Easy Pieces,” but here he’s supporting spacey flower girl Tuesday Weld’s quest for reality or sanity, whichever arrives first. To make sure of that, as John Lennon suggested a few years earlier, “nothing is real, nothing to get hung about,’ the film’s resident magician Orson Welles is on hand to mess with our minds.
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'Play It as It Lays'
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Director: Frank Perry
Year: 1972For Hollywood trivia buffs, this will always be the mythological “women’s picture” that at one time was reportedly a film project for macho violence maestro Sam Peckinpah. For Joan Didion fans, “Play” is an example of the difficulties of bringing Didion to the screen. For everyone else, “Play” is a must-see Frank Perry film that embodies the intellectual ambition and cinematic risk-taking that marks the best of that era’s revered “New Hollywood.” Hollywood actress Maria Wyeth Lang, (Weld) is very much on the verge of a nervous breakdown and then very much over that edge. Weld brings fierce honesty, deep wells of angst and the uncanny ability to convey a wide range of psychological discomforts, all of which she conveys with a simple gaze, a brief glance or an almost imperceptible gesture. The film garnered Weld an acting award at the Venice Film Festival and a Golden Globe nomination.
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'Pretty Poison'
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Director: Noel Black
Year: 1968The ultimate starting point for Tuesday Weld’s filmography is this Noel Black neo-noir crime thriller co-starring Anthony Perkins and noteworthy as one of Hollywood’s earliest environmentalist-minded features. Fifty-four years before “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” Perkins plots a course to stop a polluter in his town in their nefarious tracks, but when he elicits help from local psycho teen Sue Ann (Weld), his mission suddenly gets subverted by her fratricidal designs on her family. Pure unfiltered Weld at her most twisted and effervescent.
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'Looking for Mr. Goodbar'
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Director: Richard Brooks
Year: 1977A landmark film for its frank look at female sexuality and post-Pill American morality, “Goodbar” earned up-and-coming actress Diane Keaton a Golden Globe nomination, started the smoking hot young Richard Gere on his path to stardom and garnered Weld her only Oscar nomination. As Keaton’s swinging older sister, Weld ticks all the boxes of 70s female rebellion, multiple lovers, abortions and recreational pharmaceuticals. Classic Weld.
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'Who’ll Stop the Rain'
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Director: Karel Reisz
Year: 1978If Tuesday Weld has a history of delivering great performances in little-seen films that are usually intense social critiques seemingly made in the margins of mainstream cinema, “Rain” is the ultimate embodiment of all of the above. Released under chaotic corporate circumstances and fighting the currents of post “Jaws” and “Star Wars” blockbuster Hollywood, “Rain” links America’s Southeast Asian military adventures with the heroin trade and the slide of America’s psyche from early 60s hopefulness to late 60s obliviousness. Again, Weld’s character is fragile, relying on drugs to maintain equilibrium, caught between a desensitized to near catatonia husband (Michael Moriarty) and a war-weary vet (Nick Nolte) who knows that Vietnam has boomeranged back on the land of the free and the home of the brave and no one Stateside will evade the wages of evil that Uncle Sam hath wrought.
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'Thief'
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Director: Michael Mann
Year: 1981From the beginning of his film career, premiering with “Thief,” to his current Adam Driver-starrer “Ferrari,” Michael Mann has made films that strive to hit emotional hard targets and he makes sure to pack those films with the acting talent to deliver on his creative ambitions. Oscar winners Russell Crowe, Al Pacino, Daniel Day-Lewis come to mind. In “Thief,” Weld co-stars with the James Caan as the titular outsider, playing what Variety described as a “retiring but streetwise wife,” a character that Variety rates as “beautifully etched.” The film’s standout scene, an emotional roller coaster conversation between Caan and Weld, is almost universally cited as the film’s high point, as well as one of Mann’s top dramatic stagings.
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'Once Upon a Time in America'
Image Credit: ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection Director: Sergio Leone
Year: 1984Let the record show that Sergio Leone’s masterpiece was entirely overlooked by the Academy Awards, with zero Oscar nominations, while Weld’s supporting actress work in “Time” garnered one of the film’s five BAFTA nominations. Matching the gangsters at the center of the yarn, played by acting heavyweights Robert De Niro and James Woods, Weld plays Carol as a woman every bit as corrupted and corroded from the inside out as the worst of them. A still controversial rape scene sets the stage for a wholly unconventional set of relationships, both seen and described. We hear of an off-screen husband reduced to cuckoldry and voyeurism and we see her go mano a mano with both Woods and De Niro, before twisting and cajoling De Niro’s character into a decision he’s foolish enough to think he’s making.
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'Scorned and Swindled'
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Director: Paul Wendkos
Year: 1984Director Wendkos is a study for further research, but a quick scan of his credits demonstrates why he’s the perfect match for Weld: he directed the original “Gidget,” a cultural touchstone of its time, and also made socially critical genre films such as the eerie Glenn Ford conspiracy TV film “Brotherhood of the Bell,” and gave us Burt Reynolds’ film debut in the evocatively sleazy evangelist melodrama “Angel Baby.” Made as a quickie TV time filler, the New York Times called “Scorned” “fascinating…offbeat…unsettling” and credited the cast, including Peter Coyote and Keith Carradine as “quite good, and Miss Weld is even more than that.”