Number 56: Mary Streenburghen as Lynda Dummar in "Melvin and Howard" (Best Supporting Actress Ranking)

The reality that Mary Steenburghen is an Oscar-winner appears to be fairly forgotten right now but in 1980, she swept the Supporting Actress awards for her overall performance as Lynda Dummar, the charming, quirky and a little bit odd spouse of Melvin, an everlasting loser who constantly lets every bit of cash he gets slip by way of his fingers.

Melvin and Howard is a very interesting but also peculiar film – it is the kind of film that seems to have no genuine stage and leaves the viewer with more inquiries than solutions but it also offers some good entertainment and some quite unique characters. One particular of them is Lynda – she sometimes looks to be a bit slow but she is not silly, perhaps a bit naïve but at the very same time she evidently is aware what she needs. She does not have a correct heart of gold – possibly silver simply because she is a quite sincere, open and great-hearted individual but she will not tolerate any type of actions she simply cannot take.

Mary Steenburghen is an exciting circumstance for me. She is quite lively and charming in Melvin and Howard and sometimes a accurate comedic gem but she also feels extremely static, lifeless and inconsistent at other individuals. The difficulty is that Melvin and Howard, even even though it tells a chronological tale, feels quite ‘jumpy’ with no any genuine plot or character growth and Mary Steenburghen would seem to be a little bit dropped sometimes. Melvin and Howard is the sort of film in which a lot transpires whilst you come to feel that absolutely nothing happens at all – and this is the case with Mary Steenburghen’s functionality, way too.

It would be ideal to say this – when the script denies her any prospects, Mary Steenburghen is nevertheless intriguing to watch as the constructs the character of Lynda. When the script provides her any choices, she is golden. Her scenes in the strip golf equipment, exactly where she performs simply because she enjoys to dance, are hilarious and, of system, who can fail to remember her most popular times when she does a faucet dance at a match present in Television set? Her dance, her pleasure when she wins, her jumping around and screaming is just unforgettable.

These comedic scenes are combined with different spectacular times like dropping the custody of her kid or leaving Melvin (for what feels like the a thousandth times) after he once again spent all their cash on issues they don’t require. Her little conversation with him prior to she leaves in which she tells him of her dreams of becoming a French interpreter is practically heartbreaking.

It’s a really authentic performance and if Mary Steenburghen experienced been given a much better character in a more powerful motion picture, she might actually have been excellent. So, she experienced to settle for a minor considerably less but even now provides a fantastic, unforgettable overall performance.