Sept. 13, 1944— Jacqueline Bisset, whose
beauty made Hollywood scramble to cast her—though, more often than not, unable
to place her in vehicles that measured up to her talent—was born in Weybridge,
Surrey, England, to an English father and French mother.
Her last name has left many people unfamiliar with
her background thinking that the blue-eyed
brunette was a French natural, but in fact she had to learn the language. Once
she mastered it, it might have been better for her career—and certainly her
sense of artistic fulfillment—if she had simply decamped for the continent,
where filmmakers could have given her complicated, interesting roles as she
matured.
In recent years, that strategy has worked for fellow
Briton Kristin Scott Thomas. Bisset herself tried it once, in Francois
Truffaut’s 1973 valentine to movies, Day for Night, in
which her screen-siren character hopes she will no longer suffer breakdowns now
that she’s married her doctor.
But it was Bisset’s misfortune to come to the
attention of Tinseltown between eras more hospitable to actresses.
When she win notice for her supporting work in a
quartet of films in 1967 and 1968 (the dramedy Two for the Road, the
James Bond parody Casino Royale, and the police procedurals Bullitt
and The Detective), Hollywood was in the death throes of the studio system
that had held sway since the dawn of the sound era.
In the system’s heyday from the Thirties to the
Fifties, Bisset might have been contractually forced to appear in unappealing
projects, but she also would have done so much work—and maybe even of such
variety—that it would have kept her constantly before the public.
Conversely, if she had started her film career in
the late 1990s, Bisset might have benefited from an environment with more
outlets, on cable TV and in independent film, where she could have had
significant breakout roles rather than served as highly decorative background
in movies crowded with major stars or major spectacles.
Instead, it was Bisset’s lot, in the Seventies and
early Eighties, to play in American disaster movies (Airport, When
Time Ran Out...)—or, more often than not, appear in American movies that became
disasters: Inchon, The Greek Tycoon, Rich and Famous, and Class
(the last two involving her older-woman character having sex with a younger man
in, respectively, an airplane rest room and an elevator).
To her annoyance, the film that brought Bisset her
greatest success depended less on her emotive talent than her anatomical
charms. If you ask viewers of the 1977 movie The Deep to describe its
plot, they will be very fortunate indeed to mutter anything beyond, “A couple
discover buried treasure at sea.”
What they will remember is Ms. Bisset’s
underwater wet T-shirt scene—footage that rescued an utterly forgettable
adaptation of Peter Benchley’s utterly forgettable follow-up to Jaws
enough so that producer Peter Guber would recall that it "made me a rich
man."
Ms. Bisset took whatever solace she could from an
on-location fling with co-star Nick Nolte and from a Newsweek cover story
that pronounced her "the most beautiful film actress of all time." It
was the kind of line a publicist can only dream of, perhaps not equaled until
Nicole Kidman’s performance in David Hare’s The Blue Room elicited the
description, “pure theatrical Viagra."
It was not until her 40s that Bisset appeared in
roles that more consistently required greater depth from her, such as John
Huston’s Under the Volcano and a TV
adaptation of Anna Karenina
co-starring Christopher Reeve. In the past two decades, she made more guest
appearances on TV in smaller roles that often won praise, including on Nip/Tuck, Joan of Arc and Dancing on the Edge.
Bisset inspires warm memories from males of a
certain age for her past work. But somehow, the hope still arises that she will
finally land a role that calls for all of her skill and wins fervent critical
notice.
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