Countdown: 12 Best Allison Janney Movie Roles for which She Did Not Win An Oscar
I cannot claim to have seen all of Allison's films (I count at least 60 feature film roles), but I have seen many, and for the rest, I have found clips. After much research, angst, and deliberation: Here are Allison Janney's top 12 movie roles for which she did not win an Oscar.
12. Nurse Betty (2000)
11. The Help (2011)
As the intimidating mother of Emma Stone's character, her best-known line is likely "get your raggedy ass off my porch," and while a memorable character, her best scenes fell to the cutting room floor. And according to Stone, she was even funnier in deleted footage. After the director dared Janney to make them laugh while shooting a cutscene in which she learns her daughter's boyfriend is the son of a prominent southern senator, she ad-libs: "Well, Senator Whitworth? He f*cked me silly after Ole Miss won the Sugar Bowl!"
If only Tennessee Williams were alive to do a show starring Janney on HBO.
This recent Netflix movie is not, to my great disappointment, a biopic of Tallulah Bankhead starring Allison Janney -- we live in the worst timeline, remember -- but it is still a great part. Ellen Page plays the title character, a vagrant hippie abandoned by her boyfriend, and Allison Janney is Margo, the mother of Tallulah's boyfriend who is going through a messy divorce. After Tallulah essentially kidnaps a toddler from a delinquent mother, she panics and brings her to Janney claiming it is her son's baby -- and thus Margo's granddaughter.
As Margo, Janney plays a woman abandoned by her husband for another man. She conveys the loneliness and pain that, in our "ra ra come out of the closet" times, can so often downplay the casualties of a gay man's late in life awakening. In "Tallulah," we watch Janney on a painful journey toward letting go. In the magical last scene, Janney floats better than Bullock in Gravity.
9. Primary Colors (1998)
A primary reason Janney got the chance to secure her multiple Emmy-winning role on The West Wing was by making an impression on Aaron Sorkin in her bit role as a clumsy librarian who sleeps with Travolta's Bill Clinton-esque character in Primary Colors. The part where she does a walk-and-talk with Travolta and then falls down the stairs is Janney at her Lucille Ball best, and directly inspired her introduction on The West Wing, where she famously flies off the treadmill, and later, into the pool.
(Start at 1:41 in the video below).
8. Finding Nemo (2004)
7. The Ice Storm (1997)
Her role in this Ang Lee 70s period drama is essentially a cameo, but it is a memorable one. As the enthusiastic host of the pivotal "key party" in the film, in nearly clownish makeup and black-and-white stripes (see the photo at the top of this post), she is unforgettable. I'd drop my key in her jar, that's for sure.
Listen to Janney describe Ang Lee's critical director's note for her perceived "overacting" of the moment when she opens the door in welcome ("I was just doing my mother!"), now a highlight of the film. Trust your instincts. Janney did.
6. The Way Way Back (2013)
Another dramedy about a boy coming of age, Allison Janney plays "gregarious, hard-drinking Betty," the neighbor at the beach house. A somewhat similar role to the hilarious child-insulting mother in the otherwise twee Away We Go, here she plays another character (as in Tallulah) who was recently left by a gay husband ("Not a shock! Let's just say in bed his favorite view was the back of my head."). An open book of a character, drunk most of the time, Janney is a riot -- but manages to move us, too, with her barely concealed pain.
5. 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
As the somewhat perverted Ms. Perky, constantly interrupted from writing her erotic novel by deviant students requiring guidance, Allison Janney gets many of the best lines in the excellent screenplay by talented duo Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith. And when Allison Janney gets a good line, she kills.
4. Liberal Arts (2012)
This Josh Radnor dramedy's best scene is after he sleeps with his old teacher, played by Janney. As Judith Fairfield, she is the ironic "Romantics" professor who has not just given up on romance, she's given up on humanity -- and means it. Jaded, grizzled, cynical, bitter, cutting, and cruel, the hard shell of mean Janney creates here foreshadowed all she would bring to her Oscar-winning role in I, Tonya. Josh Radnor's screenplay is overwritten (he literally explains the irony) but Janney makes it work. Watch the scene:
3. American Beauty (1999)
2. The Hours (2002)
1. Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999)
A film more appreciated now than in its own time, in which it was unfavorably compared to the similarly-accented Fargo, the comedy is pitch-black, wickedly fun, and actually written by a Minnesota beauty pageant survivor. Janney's performance is perhaps the peak Janney-laugh on film (on television, of course, it is this scene), and as the neighbor-friend who has faith in her friend's daughter and tries to imbue her with a competitive drive to win (a kinder version of her Oscar-winning role), she injects genuine feeling into a film full of manic comic energy. In most of these movies Janney blends in and serves the film -- here she triumphs over a difficult to execute script with an iconic and very human comic performance. For that, it's my number one.
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