Best Actress: Joanne Woodward
I have a rule in my house...
...If I'm scanning the channels for something to watch, and The Three Faces of Eve is about to start, I watch it.
It's not to say that this is one of my favourite films, it's just that I love Joanne Woodward's performance(s) so much that I'll carve out time in my day, if I'm around, to watch this.
The Three Faces of Eve follows a young mother living with mental health issues. Due to a traumatic childhood incident, she lives with dissociative identity disorder and there are two main personalities that come out: Eve White, the primary personality who lives day-to-day and has amnesia about what the other personality, Eve Black, gets up to. Her husband has had enough of her blackouts and there's recently been an incident where Eve tries to harm her daughter, so she goes to the hospital where she is treated by Dr. Luther. In the end, to deal with the trauma of her past and the feelings that being in treatment and the suffocating effect her husband has on her, a third personality named Jane comes out and the truth of what happened when Eve was a child comes to light.
Joanne, in effect, plays three different women in The Three Faces of Eve and it's fascinating to watch the subtle ways her body language changes as she shifts through the three personalities. And she's believable in each personality. As the upset and amnesiac Eve White, as the firecracker Eve Black, and as the soft-spoken Jane, she gets to showcase her talents as she makes them all believable characters.
There's a wider conversation to be had about the depiction of mental illness in this film, and I don't pretend to be an expert. I hope I've been clear overall that I'm mostly enthralled by Joanne's performance as the character and not holding this film up as a shining example of how to depict dissociative identity disorder. Here's a good article explaining how it falls short on that side.
I do so enjoy Joanne as a performer. She went on to receive several more Oscar nominations but never won again, and the way she acts is so vibrant and real.
Joanne Woodward was nominated against Deborah Kerr (Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison), Anna Magnani (Wild is the Wind), Elizabeth Taylor (Raintree County), and Lana Turner (Peyton Place). Joanne would have my vote, and the story behind her Oscar dress is great.
DID I LIKE THE THREE FACES OF EVE? Of course! See my opening line.
Did you like The Three Faces of Eve? What are your thoughts on Joanne Woodward's Oscar win?
Keep up with all my Rewatching the Best Actresses posts here.
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