What the legend has given us is a more dramatic version of events than the documented record supports—and a more entertaining one. The question is whether the entertainment value is worth the distortion.
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GERALDINE PAGE, KATHARINE HEPBURN, AND LEE REMICK: THE OTHER NOMINEES
The Best Actress category at the 35th Academy Awards has been treated almost exclusively as a contest between Davis and Bancroft, with Crawford as a shadowy off-page presence affecting the result. The other three nominees—Geraldine Page, Katharine Hepburn, and Lee Remick—have been largely erased from the public account of the evening. This is worth correcting, because all three gave performances that were, by their contemporaneous critical reception, serious contenders for the award.
Geraldine Page was nominated for *Sweet Bird of Youth*, Richard Brooks’s adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play in which she played Alexandra Del Lago, an aging film star who has faked her own death to escape the reviews of a disastrous comeback film and who finds herself traveling with a young gigolo through the corrupt political landscape of a Southern town. The role was the kind of extremity that Williams excelled at—simultaneously camp and devastating, requiring the actress to perform both the character’s self-deception and her moments of brutal self-knowledge. Page brought to it the technical intelligence and emotional range that had characterized her work since her Broadway debut.
She had been nominated twice before—for *Hondo* (1953) and *Summer and Smoke* (1961)—and would receive seven nominations total before winning for *The Trip to Bountiful* in 1985. Her seven nominations without a win, until that final award, made her one of the great emblems of Academy under-recognition. Her work in *Sweet Bird of Youth* received warm critical notices and was at least as strong a contender as Davis’s *Baby Jane* in the views of critics who covered both films.