Barbara Loden

Barbara Ann Loden (July 8, 1932 – September 5, 1980) was an American actress and director of film and theater.

Born and raised in North Carolina, Loden began her career at an early age in New York City as a commercial model and chorus-line dancer. She moved to New York after high school, using money she had received from being in a car accident to buy her railroad ticket. Loden earned a living through cheesecake modeling and posing for romance and detective magazines for a handful of years. retrospective also state that she was 48 at the time of her death, supporting 1932 as her birth year, despite a 1964 article which notes that "she's 30 now," indicating her birth year as 1934. in Asheville, North Carolina. Her father was a barber, and she described herself as a "hill-billy's daughter" from a "broken home". She attended high school in Asheville and did not fit in with her peers, saying people saw her as cheap because of the makeup and tight clothing she wore in an attempt to emulate the women she saw on in films. She joined the cast of The Ernie Kovacs Show as a "scantily clad" sidekick to Kovacs, a job that her first husband, television producer and film distributor Larry Joachim, helped her obtain. Loden's job on the show was to walk around in bathing suits, and she said she believed this earned her the nickname "Dumb Barbara".

1960–1966: Film; marriage to Elia Kazan

In 1960, Loden appeared in Elia Kazan's film Wild River as Montgomery Clift's secretary. Loden said she believed she got the part because of the relative closeness of Wild River'''s setting, Tennessee, to where she grew up. Loden received a Tony award for best actress for her performance in After the Fall as well as an annual award of the Outer Circle, an organization of writers who covered Broadway for national magazines. —not because of their physical likeness, but "in their approach to life, in their philosophy, in their desire to move up life's social and intellectual ladder". Loden said she always wanted children but never wanted to marry and "disapproved of marriage" due to her childhood. She had another son, Leo, with Kazan, and though estranged and considering divorce, they were still married at the time of her death from breast cancer at the age of 48. Kazan was a major film director who had great influence. He had also secretly been shown a private screening of the film by his friend and producer Spiegel (producer of Kazan's On the Waterfront) and had reportedly interfered with the final cut. Among the scenes that were entirely recast and reshot was the notorious Loden scene, with Broadway stage actress Janice Rule replacing Loden. Neither Loden nor Pollack was credited on the film. All that remains of the lost scene are still photos taken on set, which appear in Chris Innis's 2014 documentary The Story of The Swimmer. Intrigued by this story, she eventually wrote the screenplay for Wanda, a rumination on a poverty-stricken woman adrift in Pennsylvania coal country who becomes embroiled in a similar plot. The film asks, "what pain, what hopelessness could make a person desire to be put away? How could imprisonment be relief?" After sending the script to a number of potential directors, Loden felt that they "didn't seem to understand what this woman was about." She said that at first she was too afraid to say she was directing the film because of the reaction people had to women directing films. Despite the film's meager budget, Loden still struggled to raise money for Wanda. While looking for funding, she said, "when I went around and took people my script I'd never hear from them again". In 2010, with support from Gucci, the film was restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and screened at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. it was noted for its groundbreaking anti-Hollywood view of a woman adrift in the American underworld. Loden said of her title character, "She's trying to get out of this very ugly type of existence, but she doesn't have the equipment"—an independent-minded idea for a cinematic heroine at the time, making Wanda an anti-heroine. In 2017, Wanda was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

While Loden never made another feature film, she directed two educational short films for the Learning Corporation of America. The first one, The Frontier Experience, was released in 1975. It depicts a widowed pioneer woman, played by Loden, in Kansas attempting to survive the harsh winter with her children. Described as a "political prequel" to Wanda, the short explores similar themes. The second, The Boy Who Liked Deer, was released in 1978. It is a cautionary tale about vandalism, in which two boys accidentally poison a deer.

Four months before her death, Loden was interviewed in Katja Raganelli's 1980 documentary I Am Wanda. The film documents Loden's final months, when she taught acting classes.

Death In 1978, Loden was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the time, she had completed several other screenplays with Proferes that Kazan described as "devoted to the neglected side of American life." She and Kazan were estranged at the time of her cancer diagnosis and planning to divorce, but her illness precluded their separation. In June 1980, Loden was working with her acting teacher Paul Mann on a one-act play to be shown on Off-Off-Broadway. She had planned to work as director, producer, and leading actress, but lost the energy to complete the project. In a retrospective, she said "my life was hard too much of the time", but also that she had made her peace with life.

At the time of her diagnosis, Loden was prepared to direct a feature about Kate Chopin's The Awakening, but her cancer treatments prevented her from starting it. She died at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City from the disease on September 5, 1980. She worked mainly with non-professional actors, which resulted in the film's original script being loosely referenced. Loden believed that using non-professional actors helped the film stay uninhibited, and that if she had used well-known actors it would "get in the way of the story". Loden said she valued content over technical aspects in film, arguing that "slick" films were not all they were built up to be. She said that more films should be shot in documentary-like styles to show "that was shot under real circumstances".

Legacy French writer and experimental filmmaker Marguerite Duras cited Wanda as an inspiration, particularly Loden's ability to inhabit her character onscreen, saying in an interview with Kazan, "I think that there is a miracle in Wanda. Usually there is a distance between the visual representation and the text, as well as the subject and the action. Here this distance is completely nullified; there is an instant and permanent continuity between Barbara Loden and Wanda." Duras described Loden's performance of Wanda's "demoralization" as "sacred, powerful, violent and profound."

With its hand-held camera, anonymous locations, available lighting on 16mm (blown up to 35mm), and improvisation by a mostly amateur cast, critic Richard Brody considers Wanda to be not so much in the tone of the concurrent French New Wave, but more like the improvisational directorial work of John Cassavetes. In 2021, Anna Backman Rogers's book Still Life: Notes on Barbara Loden's "Wanda" (1970) was published. It analyzes the themes of Wanda and discusses its lasting importance.

Filmography Film Year Title Role Notes 1960 Wild River Betty Jackson 1961 Splendor in the Grass Ginny Stamper 1959 Look After Lulu! Gaby Broadway; directed by Noël Coward 1959 The Highest Tree Broadway; co-starring Robert Redford 1960 The Long Dream White Girl Broadway 1964–1965 After the Fall Maggie Broadway; Tony Award for Best Featured Actress 1964 But for Whom Charlie Sheila Maloney Broadway 1964 The Changeling Beatrice Broadway 1968 Winter Journey Broadway 1968 The Country Girl Broadway 1969 Home is the Hero Off-Broadway; director 1975 The Love Death Plays of William Inge Off-Broadway; director 1976 Berchtesgaden Off-off Broadway; director 1980 Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean Mona Off-Broadway

Awards and nominations Tony Award – Best Featured Actress, 1964 (for After the Fall) International Critics Award — Venice Film Festival, 1970 (for Wanda)