Widdoes

Kathleen Widdoes in almost anything. Given the specificity of her appearance–an unexplained “ethnic” look that manifested itself, largely, around the eyes–Widdoes was often cast in films as the “different” girl, the intellectual second banana to the more flighty star–viz Julie Christie and KW in “Petulia,” for instance, or the “artistic” albeit organizing Helena in “The Group.” Indeed, Widdoes remains one of greatest Mashas–the penultimate angry outsider–I have ever seen. In Sidney Lumet’s alternately dreadful and fascinating 1968 screen version of “The Seagull”–you can hardly understand what Simone Signoret is saying in the movie, and Vanessa Redgrave is an entirely too robust Nina–Widdoes’ Masha treats sex and death as the same thing. When we first see her she’s just had a roll in the tall grass but it means nothing to her; she’s pinning up her hair as she talks about being in mourning for her life. In the George W.S. Trow-penned “Savages,” Widdows sports a tuxedo and awkwardly tap dances around the proceedings, like a white skee ball on an over polished floor. One great honor: KW came to a reading I gave last spring; she’s a writer now, which makes perfect sense given what she always projected on screen: a writer’s isolation, all dressed up in costuming that worked around her remarkable face. (In this she resembles one of my sisters, a woman of high style with a remarkable face.) During the Q and A after my talk, I made
the mistake–based on a magazine article–of assuming KW had gone to The Actor’s Studio. KW paused before she spoke. “But I never studied acting.” Still, while KW may not have chosen acting, it chose her. Herewith a quote from Kennedy Fraser’s 1973 essay, “Style,” which is a perfect title card to accompany Kathleen Widdoes movie persona–a persona that contributed a great deal to developing my way of seeing–and the various looks my sister sports when she walks around town. My sister: my intellectual conscience with heavily rouged cheeks, my first poet.

Fraser:

Style is rarely glimpsed in times like these, which at best encourage its humble relative, good taste. While style and taste have been known to intermingle in the past, the currently widening gap between them reminds us once more of their fundamental enmity. The world of the merely tasteful…is bound to barricade itself, in the end, against style, which is individual, aristocratic, and reckless….But then style is more rewarding than the ways of elegance or taste: it is more akin to philosophy, and it is surely closer to an art.