When Lifetime Achievement Awards are bestowed on film stars, female actors are often given short shrift. Still. Awards groups such as AMPAS (Honorary Oscars), the former HFPA/now just Golden Globes (Cecil B. DeMille Award) the AFI, the Film Society of Lincoln Center (Chaplin Award), etc…love to celebrate male actors and creatives. The Ladies, not near as much. As an example, only 11 of the 50 AFI Life Achievement honorees have been female. 17 of the 70 Cecil B. DeMille Award recipients were women. The Film Society has feted 17 females of their 49 recipients.
In addition, many gifted veteran female thesps are overlooked, while younger stars are given tributes. Where are the celebrations for Vanessa Redgrave, Faye Dunaway, Jessica Lange, Ellen Burstyn, Marsha Mason, Liv Ullmann, Sally Field, Sissy Spacek, Barbara Hershey, Dianne Wiest, Candice Bergen, Cher, Kathleen Turner? And that is just a tiny list of Oscar-winning and/or nominated actresses who are over 70 and still working.
And what about those egregiously overlooked by the Academy despite delivering stellar performances year after year?
One truly outstanding actress who has been a movie star since the 1960s but has never received enough recognition for her tremendous and impressive work is Jacqueline Bisset. Her career spans seven decades and she’s starred in a host of critically acclaimed films and box office mega-hits. Her credits practically dominated the late ‘60s, all of the ‘70s and well into the ‘80s onscreen. She, then, glided back and forth from film to TV in the ‘90s-2000s and is still making a splash with her TV and indie film work.
Born in England, Jacqueline Bisset made her screen debut (uncredited) in Richard Lester’s now cult hit, The Knack …and How to Get It in 1965. Her official debut came a year later in Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-sac. 1967 brought featured roles in Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road, starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney as well as the James Bond spoof, Casino Royale where he played Miss Goodthighs.
Her appearance in Gordon Douglas’s The Detective (1968) opposite Frank Sinatra, brought her major recognition. She was a last-minute replacement for Mia Farrow, who Sinatra was divorcing. The same year she had a significant part in Harvey Hart’s The Sweet Ride with Michael Sarrazin, which brought her a Golden Globe nomination for Most Promising Newcomer. A year later she played Steve McQueen’s girlfriend in the Oscar-winning thriller, Bullitt, directed by Peter Yates.
Jacqueline Bisset started off the 1970s co-starring with Dean Martin in George Seaton’s daddy-of-a-disaster film, Airport, which was a massive success and received 9 Academy Award nominations (winning one for Helen Hayes for Best Supporting Actress). In 1971, she landed a starring role in Paul Wendkos’ supernatural horror film, The Mephisto Waltz and reunited with Sarrazin in the little-seen, Believe in Me. And she was part of John Huston’s star-studded ensemble cast for The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) with Paul Newman.
Bisset’s game changing role was that of American movie star Julie Baker in François Truffaut’s Oscar-winning valentine to filmmaking, Day for Night in 1973. The same year she camped it up with Jean-Paul Belmondo in the hilarious satire, Le Magnifique. In 1974 she co-starred in Sidney Lumet’s all-star masterpiece, Murder on the Orient Express, as the Countess Andrenyi, sharing the screen with Albert Finney, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman and Vanessa Redgrave, to name a few. Her 1975 credits include Peter Collinson’s remake of The Spiral Staircase with Christopher Plummer, Maximillian Schell’s End of the Game, co-starring Jon Voight and Luigi Comencini’s The Sunday Woman, opposite Marcello Mastroianni.
Another big commercial success came in 1977 with Peter Yates’ underwater thriller, The Deep, co-starring Nick Nolte and Robert Shaw. In 1978 she received her second Golden Globe nomination showing off her great comic chops in Ted Kotcheff’s Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? She also starred in J. Lee Thompson’s controversial barely-veiled look at the lives of Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis, The Greek Tycoon.
The ’80s began with two ill-fated, all-star projects, James Goldstone’s When Time Ran Out, again with Paul Newman and Terence Young’s Inchon, starring Laurence Olivier and Ben Gazzara. On Inchon, she was one of the first actresses to earn a seven-figure fee for a movie, $1.65 million.
She bounced right back with George Cukor’s directorial swan song, Rich and Famous, delivering one of her best performances opposite Candice Bergen, and Lewis John Carlino’s box office hit, Class, co-starring Rob Lowe and Andrew McCarthy. In 1984 she scored her third Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress in John Huston’s Under The Volcano, starring Albert Finney. Most prognosticators had her predicted to receive her first Oscar nomination, but she was absent from the list. The same year she starred in Forbidden and was nominated for the CableACE Award for Actress in a Movie or Miniseries.
For the remainder of the decade into the 1990s she continued working in both mediums. One of her motion picture highlights was Claude Chabrol’s disturbing, La Cérémonie(1995), for which she picked up a César Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. On TV, she capped the decade with Emmy and Golden Globe nods for the TV miniseries, Joan of Arc.
Other TV work includes episodes of Ally McBeal, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Nip/Tuck and Rissoli and Isles as well as the TV miniseries Dancing on the Edge (2013), which finally brought her a Golden Globe Win for Best Supporting Actress.
More recent film highlights include Christopher Munch’s highly underrated The Sleepy Time Gal (2001), Tony Scott’s Domino (2005), Boaz Yakin’s disturbing Death in Love(2008), Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York (2014), Catherine Hardwicke’s Miss You Already (2015), Linda Yellen’s The Last Film Festival, François Ozon’s L’Amant double (2017), Per Fly’s Backstabbing for Beginners(2018) and, most recently, Russell Brown’s Loren & Rose (2022).
In, Loren & Rose, Bisset fully embodies the role of an iconic actress hoping to revive her career and work with a promising new filmmaker (Kelly Blatz). After their initial meeting, and through their fruitful and successful collaboration on the project, a deep bond Is formed. Bisset is beguiling as Rose, a woman who lives to be creative. Loren & Rose is available to stream exclusively on Amazon Prime.
The fact that Jacqueline Bisset has never been Oscar-nominated is dumbfounding.
The Contending had the giddy honor of zoom chatting with the icon about her extraordinary film career.
