Posted on 01/22/2004 6:34:08 PM PST by quidnunc
Ann Miller was 81 when she died, but for most of the last several decades she was usually described as “ageless”, which she was — ageless, that is, in the sense that nobody of any age looks like that. I saw her on stage thrice and met her a couple of times, and I liked the way she existed in a kind of self-created fantasy world. No point comparing her with anyone. She was a good-natured broad, who had an agreeable dollop of self-parody about her, as if she figured the best thing she could do was stick as close to her Hirschfield caricature as possible: Her eyes were barely visible beneath their huge lashes and the gleaming teeth framed by dazzling high-gloss lips took up most of the lower half of the face. On the top of her head was her trademark lacquered wig, subject of many bad jokes — “There was a hurricane in New York today.” “How do you know?” “A hair on Ann Miller’s head just moved.” And underneath, of course, were the million-dollar pins, machine-gunning the stage as mercilessly as ever until well into her seventies.
Her film career stretches from Stage Door, where she’s a game 17-year old trying to hold her own among savvier, sassier types like Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball, Eve Arden and Katharine Hepburn, to David Lynch’sMulholland Drive a year or two back, where she’s a game octogenarian holding her own among younger, hipper types. Good old Ann. Nothing ever fazed her, and nothing Lynch pulls could be as weird as some of the numbers in Hit The Deck.
On stage she was terrific in Sugar Babies, despite a co-star who couldn’t always keep up (Mickey Rooney) and a script assembled from painstakingly exhumed gags: 'He had a freak accident. A freak fell on him.' In the courtroom sketch, Rooney’s judge would hammer his — um — equipment with his gavel and assert that Miss Miller's vicious husband should have been 'bloody well hung'. 'Oh, he was,' she’d say, fluttering those famous lashes.
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(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Her statement at CPAC declaring herself a "proud right-wing Christian bigot" was obviously sarcasm and characteristic of her well-known rapier-sharp wit, something which Bob Hope and Howard Hawks both recognized. The dips at PFUAW didn't recognize it at all, though. And while I might not share her faith, I still love her, and love the work she's done, especially in trying to raise awareness about adoption. She's sort of a female Roy Rogers, in that respect.
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