1932-33 – Diana Wynyard
Cavalcade
I know my opinion might not be popular when it comes to Diana Wynyard, but I wasn’t terribly impressed with her performance in Cavalcade. In it, she played a British wife and mother at the turn of the century. The film was about the lives of the wealthy family and their servants, and as you might expect, much of it focused on her, rather than her husband or her children. The movie was an ensemble piece, but if there was a lead, it was her. Unfortunately, I just expect more from a Best Actress nominee.
First, and this one isn’t entirely Wynyard’s fault, there was the way the character was written, and the general narrative structure in which the story is told. The turn of the century held some extremely traumatic events, and the character of Jane Marryot was written as a woman who is so reserved and emotionless that she seemed almost unaffected by the tragedies, like the death of one of her sons when the Titanic sank, or when her husband is forced to go to war, or when the Queen died. I’m not sure the role itself was worthy of the nomination.
Wynyard did her best with the emotionally repressed character. The few times when Jane’s emotions did boil to the surface, they were played with the proper poise and reservation, though I kept wanting more. But one of Wynyard’s weak points was that in the whole film, she only showed three or four facial expressions. She had the same countenance whether she learned that her second son had been killed in WWI, or when she was reflecting on a good life, despite the horrors and tragedies she’d had to endure, and that was on the actress, not the script-writer.
Another thing I didn’t care for in her acting was how she played her part, delivered her lines, as if she was on stage in a live performance. Everything seemed too… forced. Too rehearsed. There wasn’t an ounce of natural ease or spontaneity in her performance. The scant emotion she had to portray was carefully planned out and deliberate. It felt false, like she was trying too hard to be dramatic. Some of her lines actually came out in a kind of sing-song tone that wasn’t at all realistic. Instead, it was distracting. I know. Probably not the most popular opinion.