Happy Birthday, Barbara Loden! Born today in 1932 as Barbara Ann Loden, this American actress and director of film and theater was born and raised in North Carolina.
Loden began her career at an early age in New York City, New York as a commercial model and chorus-line dancer.
Loden became a regular sidekick on the irreverent American black and white comedy show The Ernie Kovacs Television Show (1952–1956) in the mid-1950s, generally wearing tiny outfits and getting hit by pies or getting sawed in half. She was also a lifetime member of the famed Actors Studio.
Loden appeared in several projects directed by her second husband, Greek-American director, producer, writer and actor Elia Kazan ('On the Waterfront', 'A Streetcar Named Desire'). Loden's first husband had been American film producer Laurence Joachim.
Most notably among his credits, Loden co-starred in Kazan's 1961 American Technicolor period drama/romance film 'Splendor in the Grass'. This was as flapper and sexually-promiscuous party girl Ginny Stamper, the older sister of Bud (Warren Beatty).
Loden's subsequent performance in a 1964 Broadway production by American playwright, and essayist in the 20th-century American theater Arthur Miller's After the Fall had earned her a Tony Award. This was for Best Featured Actress.
Six years later, Loden wrote, co-produced, directed and starred in the 1970 American independent drama/crime film 'Wanda'. This was her first and only feature film.
Set in the anthracite coal region of eastern Pennsylvania, Wanda (Loden), a wanderer in a dreary Rust Belt town, drifts from bars to motels, jobs to jobs and men to men. She's directionless and futureless; an aging beauty seen by men as usable and disposable.
She hands over custody of her children because she knows they're better with their father. She eventually tags along with petty criminal Norman Dennis (Michael Higgins), a bullying bank robber on the run.
He's desperate, disreputable and abusive, but Wanda, meekly accepting her fate, still sleeps with him.
The final, heartbreaking final image of 'Wanda' is a freeze-frame snapshot of the eponymous character quietly driving through a life of small-town bars and misery.
The film premiered at the 31st Venice Film Festival, where it won the International Critics Award.
Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen.
An until now this difficult-to-see masterpiece that has nonetheless exerted an outsize influence on generations of artists and filmmakers, 'Wanda' is a compassionate and wrenching portrait of a woman stranded on society’s margins.
American film critic and journalist Travis Crawford writes: "Expertly coaxing authentic performances from a cast mixing nonprofessionals with local nonactors, Loden has chronicled a type of character rarely glimpsed in American film–and in the process, she also created one of the greatest "one-shot" directing achievements in this country's cinema".
Throughout the 1970s, Loden continued to work directing Off-Broadway and regional theater productions, as well as direct two short films.
In 1978, Loden was diagnosed with breast cancer. She passed two years later on September 5, 1980 in New York City. She was 48.
Loden had been married to Kazan until her death, and was the mother of their two children.
American film critic Richard Brody of The New Yorker had described Loden as the "female counterpart to John Cassavetes".
In 2017, 'Wanda' was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Loden had been active from 1957–1980.
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