Laurette Taylor

If you could, wouldn’t you travel back about 60 years and catch Laurette Taylor doing Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie? I watched that documentary on Broadway’s golden age again last night. I had caught it at the Angelika when it came out. To a person, every one of the luminaries interviewed picked Taylor as the greatest actress they had ever seen. Even the notoriously hard-to –please Uta Hagen praises her (actually, Hagen dissects a Taylor moment from Outward Bound at some length in her book “Respect For Acting”). She must have been the ticket.

There is a brief screen test done in 1939 by the Selzick company in which Taylor, older than I’d have thought, plays a simple scene in a Pittypatish get up. She is, truth be told, so real and so honest. It’s a tiny nothing of a scene --- and she is dazzling.