I don't find her likable at all. In everything I've seen her in, she comes across and whiny and neurotic. Maybe that's what all those characters are supposed to be, but I just find her annoying. In The Haunting, Reflections in a Golden Eye, East of Eden, and now in this.
shareshe comes across and whiny and neurotic.
--
That was indeed, kind of the point.
One thing written about in certain places is that, to go along with the "Actors Studio Method Actors" like Marlon Brando and James Dean and their peers in the 50s(I think Rip Torn, Ben Gazzara and John Cassavetes counted, too)...there was a separate set of "Actors Studio Method Actresses" who took feminine vulnerability up a notch in Method and ended up pretty hard to watch at times: Kim Stanley, Julie Harris, Geraldine Page . They were "all of a piece."
Still both Julie Harris and Geraldine Page had long careers -- Page won a Best Actress Oscar in the 80s. Kim Stanley kind of faded away -- though you can find her in a Night Gallery TV episode about a giant spider in the early 70s!
Funny: for all the Brando-esque Method mumbling of some of the male Method actors, several "bona fide" actors studio men delivered pretty straightforward work in the 60s and 70s: Martin Balsam and Martin Landau for two.
Method-trained Eva Marie Saint is pretty mousy and method in "On the Waterfront" but guys like Hitchcock and Otto Preminger "glamourized" Saint and she ended up with a bigger career than Harris or Stanley or Page.