“Marian,” a documentary about Marian Seldes that upset many theater people because it shows the actress in the grip of dementia, will be screened on Saturday as part of the Williamsburg Independent Film Festival.
I saw the movie on Thursday and, while it is harrowing and heartbreaking, especially for those who knew and admired Seldes, it’s not, as some have charged, exploitative or cruel. It strikes me as an honest portrait of a great actress, who in the third act of her life was struck down by Lewy body dementia, a neurodegenerative disorder.
While it is harrowing and heartbreaking, especially for those who knew and admired Seldes, it’s not, as some have charged, exploitative or cruel.
James Grissom, a writer who was close to Seldes, called the movie “grisly” and “scabrous.”
“Marian is abused for nearly half an hour,” he wrote on his blog. “It is a terrible memory to have of this wonderful, generous actress.”
Some people accused the film’s director, R.E. “Rick” Rodgers, of exploiting his access to Seldes, who agreed to do the movie before she was ill. She died in 2014 at age 86.
Speaking publicly for the first time, Rodgers tells me that, as Seldes began to decline, he asked her if “she was OK with what I was doing. She said, ‘I want you to keep filming.’”
He also says he had permission from family members, including her brother, Timothy Seldes, who died in 2015, to film the final years of her life.
“I was not going rogue with any of this,” he says. “I have releases from everybody in the movie.”
On-screen, Seldes does seem to know she’s getting sick. “I always believed the future will be as beautiful as the past, which you know I love,” she says. “But I cannot say that to you honestly anymore. I’m afraid of the future.”
She speaks candidly about slipping into a depression as her health begins to fail, and about remembering to take a cane so she doesn’t fall.
She did, in fact, fall in her apartment, shattering her shoulder. But she was due to see her friend Angela Lansbury in “A Little Night Music,” and she did, sitting through the whole show with a broken shoulder.
“No one but my mother could do that,” her daughter, Katharine Claman, says in the movie. “But she did it for Angela.”
Claman is candid about the problems she had with her mother. Seldes raised her after she divorced her first husband, Julian Claman, in 1961.
“She could be terrifying,” Claman says. “If you displeased her, she would go silent. And now she is silent forever.” Her grief for her mother is, she says, “polluted” by tensions in their relationship.
“Marian” doesn’t focus entirely on her illness. For much of its 28-minute running time, the old Marian, sharp as ever, talks about her love for the theater, revealing her wicked sense of humor. Hearing actors say they wished they could go outside on a matinee day, she says, “Well, go outside — but don’t be in the theater!”
The most memorable scenes are those between Seldes and her former Juilliard students, who visit her when she can barely speak. One tries to get her to read flashcards. She manages to read one that says, “My Birds,” which is what she called her students. “Fly away, little birds,” she would tell them when they graduated from her acting class.
“This is a movie about a woman who taught those Juilliard students how to speak,” says Rodgers. “And then she loses her voice, and they come to see her, and they speak for her. I hope I am one of those people who speaks for her.”
See the movie, and decide for yourself.