OBITUARY: Jessica Walter

TW: Abuse.

Jessica Walter, the American actress perhaps best known for her roles in Play Misty For Me, Arrested Development and Archer, has died in her sleep at the age of eighty, her family announced last week.

Though Walter should be noted for her six decades in the entertainment industry, with work ranging from Emmy-winning police procedurals to Broadway musicals, the millennial outpouring of grief on social media suggests she is remembered for one role above all others, a role she only assumed in her sixties: Arrested Development’s Lucille Bluth.

A refreshing character

“This was an older female character who was undeniably and refreshingly unlikeable”

Walter’s role on Mitchell Hurwitz’s deeply strange, fourth wall-shattering cult sitcom exemplified a type. As the wife of a disgraced real estate tycoon and the mother of the four Bluth children, a varied bunch of erratic rich kids, Lucille was every inch the aloof, out of touch WASP matriarch. This was an older female character who was undeniably and refreshingly unlikeable; Hurwitz’s sharp writing and Walter’s curt putdowns and withering stares combined to create a woman who was an unrepentant alcoholic (her breakfast consisted of a vodka on the rocks and the reluctant addition of a piece of toast), repeatedly disdainful towards her children (her much-memed offhanded assertion that “I don’t care for [her eldest son] Gob’”), and blissfully unaware of anything outside of her wealthy bubble (perhaps the show’s most famous line involved her questioning in a wonderfully blasé tone how much a banana cost, giving ‘ten dollars’ as an estimate).

In fact, Walter nailed Lucille’s archetype to such an extent that she effectively reprised the role when she voiced Malory Archer, the mother of the eponymous protagonist of the animated spy sitcom Archer and another similarly boozy and uninterested matriarch. Walter herself, however, was keen to emphasise the subtle differences between the two roles, noting Malory’s status as a self-made businesswoman as opposed to Lucille’s reliance on her wealthy husband, an attitude reflective of her genuine love for playing complicated women.

The blueprint for complicated women

Indeed, though Jessica Walter may always be remembered as Lucille or Malory to a younger generation, their parents perhaps know her more for one of her earliest ‘complicated woman’ roles, that of Evelyn in Play Misty For Me (1971) opposite Clint Eastwood. The young Walter’s radio show superfan-turned stalker is a delightfully unhinged portrait of female obsession, in her descent from groupie to a fully-fledged murderer. Like her role in Arrested Development, this role also provided something of a blueprint; just as Lucille spawned Malory as well as the likes of Moira Rose in Schitt’s Creek, Evelyn’s influence was felt throughout the decades in films ranging from Fatal Attraction to Single White Female.

Perhaps the ubiquity of the archetypal roles mastered by Walter speaks to the misogyny still rampant in Hollywood storylines which still find a space for ‘crazy ex-girlfriends’ and highly strung mother figures; the one notable role played by Walter that is straightforwardly ‘feminist’ is the titular character in Amy Prentiss, a 1970s police drama which dealt with such issues as single motherhood, misogyny in the police force and in the workplace more generally. However, Walter’s interviews reveal a fascination and even empathy with the more questionable female roles which a lesser performer would reduce to mere stereotypes; speaking to The AV Club in 2012, she lovingly called Lucille “great, strange and complicated” in comparison to what she termed “vanilla ingenues”, and appeared to take a joy in finding the root of her characters’ evil. Indeed, this empathy perhaps imbued Walter’s performances with a sense of tragedy; behind Lucille’s cynical eyebrow raises were decades of marriage to a womaniser, and when Evelyn queries “who needs nice girls?” near the beginning of Misty, one is forced to wonder about how even the most dastardly female characters suffer under misogynistic behavioural pressures.

A role model

“Walter was a role model who demonstrated not only longevity…but also how to respond to abuse with integrity”

This quality of empathy and sensitivity in Walter is also evident in her conduct behind the scenes. Not only did many of her interviewers note the stark difference between the actress and her abrasive characters, but she was also recently lauded in 2018 for her response to allegations of verbal aggression against her by her Arrested co-star Jeffrey Tambor. During a New York Times interview with the entire cast, in which several of her male co-stars dismissed such behaviour as being par for the course in showbusiness, Walter stood out for her tearful recollection of her experience. This was candid testimony from a victim of abuse that has become normalised, which forgave and sought reconciliation with Tambor while not resorting to gaslighting other victims or minimising the effects of his behaviour. As a veteran of the industry in her seventies, Walter was a role model who demonstrated not only longevity and continued passion for her craft, but also how to respond to abuse with integrity.

Jessica Walter was married to her Archer co-star Ron Leibman, who passed away in 2019, and she is survived by her daughter, Brooke Bowman, from a previous marriage. Bowman gave a statement to Deadline which remembered her for her “wit, class and joie de vivre”, and for the pleasure she took in “bringing joy to others through her storytelling”.

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Featured image courtesy of Gage Skidmore on Flickr. Image license found here. No changes were made to this image.