SWEET JESUS! I don't know when I've seen such terrible acting, AND THAT ACCENT!!
WTF! Hands down the most hideous attempt at a Southern accent EVER. It was completely unwatchable. How did any director in their right mind see that and think"Yea, that's good enough for the movie"
I'm so confused!
"People who live within their means suffer from a lack of imagination" Oscar Wilde
https://www.datalounge.com/thread/13556983-they-threw-it-away-self-destruction-and-acting-careers
By the time she was on the set of Oklahoma!, she was on a rampage. She was a liability because she couldn't sing -- she's so tone deaf even her whistling in The Big Heat is dubbed. Not only that, but she wouldn't come to the set and often deliberately stepped on other people's lines or upstaged them. I wish I could remember who the actor was, but the bio Suicide Blonde relates that near the end of shooting, she grabbed the cowboy hat of one of the actors and shoved it down over his head. He had enough and apparently threatened to leave the movie right then and there. She was ostracized by the time of the wrap party and basically blacklisted in Hollywood.share
Of course, she also slept with her husband Nick Ray's teenaged son, which may not have made the tabloids but everyone in Hollywood knew about it.
Not many people ruin their careers as spectacularly as Gloria Grahame.
—Anonymous
reply 169 01/07/2014
Her odd, stiff body language and expressionless face were an imitation of the actress who played the role on stage. Apparently the composers liked it when the role was played without resemblance to any other human living or dead, and they wanted all subsequent actresses to play the role the same weird way the first one had.
Well it may have worked on stage, but it didn't work on film! The accent was the least of her problems.
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Not taking a side plot seriously is not an excuse for a lousy performance. It's hard to laugh when a performer just does a plain horrible job. I disagree about the potential sexiness taking away the hilarity of the scenes together - I personally think it would have added to it, you can most definitely be sexy and funny at the same time! And...how would it defeat the whole purpose? Annie is desired by at least two men, and she brings up the type of attention she had been getting from the boys since she "rounded up." I mean...really? How can she...NOT be sexy? How does being a sexy, desirable woman sought after by two men defeat the purpose of...being a sexy, desirable woman sought after by two men? What sense does that make?
I don't know where you heard that R&H specifically chose Gloria Grahame to play Ado Annie, but if that's true then it wouldn't be the first or the last time that authors who've written great stuff have made bad decisions regarding their work. I've known for a long time that even great authors don't always know what's best for their own source material.
And Gene Nelson was not a bad singer.
Yeah, she was so awful. It was a very stiff, tone-deaf, awkward performance - not only that, but in trying to act like a ditz who's not very bright, she came off as someone who belonged in a mental institution. And, knowing how badly she treated people on set (even violently), I'm very puzzled to what the director and producer were thinking in casting her. She did not have the talent and obviously not the ability to work with people. Not to mention that while she was very pretty in her other movies, she's hideous in this movie. I don't know how or why they did it, but Ado Annie is supposed to be very appealing and desirable, and Gloria's version wasn't. Not in the slightest.
On another note, I heard that Betty Hutton was considered for Ado Annie but she turned it down only to regret it later. Well, now so do I! I LOVED Betty's performance as Annie in Anne Get Your Gun - she would have been PERFECT for Ado Annie!
I'm no expert and I imagine a lot of Grahame's personal problems factor in to our appreciation of her performances, but she was practically a type. Like, if you want someone like Rodney Dangerfield or Brod Crawford for a role, that's who you get and that's what you get. I can't imagine the whole production of OK going forward with a loose cannon providing an awful performance. I think she delivered what the producers and director wanted.
And GG stands out in almost everything she did. She was kind of like a Judy Holiday. I wish she didn't have such personal demons.