Jessica Walter, RIP

[Schmo]

Veteran actress Jessica Walter passed away Wednesday in New York City.
https://deadline.com/2021/03/jessica...nt-1234721873/

[TMC]

Jessica Walter, Emmy-winning Arrested Development and Archer star, dies at 80

Walter died in her sleep at her home in New York City on Wednesday, her daughter Brooke Bowman announced. Walter earned Golden Globe nominations for her memorable roles in the 1966 film Grand Prix and the 1971 film Play Misty for Me. She won her only Emmy in 1975 for playing the title role in NBC's Amy Prentiss, a spinoff of Ironside, starring as the first female Chief of Detectives for the San Francisco Police Department. But Walter will best be remembered as Lucille Bluth, the alcoholic matriarch of Arrested Development, a role that earned her an Emmy nomination and the Internet's love as the show's most GIFable character. In fact, she could be considered Arrested's biggest star. "Always drinking, always exuding an air of entitlement, the sarcastic Lucille was at the center of an ever-evolving mess of a once-wealthy, now desperate family on the Fox/Netflix sitcom. Her razor-sharp work was a huge reason for the show's cult appeal, and her lines became catchphrases and her mannerisms memes," writes Chris Koseluk. In a 2013 Vanity Fair interview, Walter recalled Arrested creator Mitch Hurwitz telling her that Lucille and Gob were the hardest roles to cast. "I remember the day that I went to audition," she said. "They had seen my tape and the next day they flew me out to L.A. to meet the network. Will Arnett was there, along with about five other actors. I was the only one for Lucille that day. I got the offer right then and there. And I said, 'O.K., I’ll be back for the pilot!'" Walter also described how she channeled Lucille. "I knew some people in real life, and I also tried to use things inside myself," she said. "We all feel anger and rage. We all have the feelings that Lucille has, somewhere. Everybody wants to kill somebody at one time or another. Or keep up a lifestyle that they really shouldn’t. I tried to use those things inside myself to keep it close to the vest and not let it become a caricature." Walter also voiced Malory Archer on FXX’s animated series Archer since 2009. Walter's last TV appearance was just last month on American Housewife. Walter's death comes 15 months after the death of her husband and fellow Archer actor Ron Leibman. Walter's survivors include daughter Brooke Bowman, who is Fox Entertainment's senior vice president of drama programming. “It is with a heavy heart that I confirm the passing of my beloved mom Jessica," Bowman said in a statement. "A working actor for over six decades, her greatest pleasure was bringing joy to others through her storytelling both on screen and off. While her legacy will live on through her body of work, she will also be remembered by many for her wit, class and overall joie de vivre.”

ALSO:

• Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz calls Jessica Walter "the best kind of comic actor": "I’m stunned and so very sad to hear this news," Hurwitz said in a statement to Variety about Walter. "Jessica was one of the sharpest, funniest people I’ve ever worked with — and I’ve been incredibly fortunate in working with some true greats. She was, to me, the best kind of comic actor — one who’s fearless in her willingness to draw upon the, shall we say, less desirable aspects of our character that, well … make us funny. She effortlessly sunk her teeth into depicting a type of mother that, given how people related to her, must be more common than is usually celebrated."
• Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, Tony Hale, Alia Shawkat, David Cross and Henry Winkler pay tribute to their Arrested Development co-star: "I just heard the sh*tty news about Jessica Walter an absolutely brilliant actress and amazing talent," tweeted Cross. "I consider myself privileged and very lucky to have been able to work with her. Lucille Bluth is one of TV's greatest characters." Hale added: "She was a force, and her talent and timing were unmatched. Rest In Peace Mama Bluth." Winkler tweeted "It was an honor to watch her comedy explode from the very first row." Shawkat posted an image of Walter, captioned by a broken heart emoji and the words "love you Gangie." Arnett recalled first meeting Walter 25 years ago: "Jessica Walter was a deeply talented person," Arnett tweeted. "We first met on a pilot in ‘96 and I was instantly blown away. I’m fortunate to have had a front row seat to her brilliance for 25 years. My thoughts are with her daughter Brooke and grandson Micah today." Bateman tweeted: "R. I. P. Jessica Walter. What an incredible career, filled with amazing performances. I will forever remember my time with her, watching her bring Lucille Bluth to life. She was one of a kind. All my love and thoughts to her family." Farewell Jessica, you’ll be missed.
• Read more celebrity tributes to Jessica Walter
• In 2013, Jessica Walter weighed in on her most memorable Lucille Bluth GIFs
• "RIP Queen" trended on Twitter in honor of Walter
• Twitter users remember Lucille Bluth's most iconic moments
• Jessica Walter and George Segal, who also died this week, co-starred together in Sidney Lumet's 1968 film Bye Bye Braverman
• Archer creator Adam Reed and FX Networks pay tribute to Walter: “The Archer family is heartbroken to lose Jessica Walter, our beloved colleague and friend," said Reed. "Jessica was a consummate professional, an actor’s actor, and the exact opposite of Malory Archer – warm, caring, and kind, with an absolutely cracking sense of humor – and it was both a privilege and a true honor to work with her over these many years. She will be greatly missed, but never forgotten.”
• The Jim Henson Company remembers Walter for playing the matriarch of ABC's Dinosaurs

[80sTrivia]

So sad to hear of Jessica's passing. Loved her on Arrested Development...

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Jessica Walter played Arrested Development's most iconic role, which is saying something for a show stockpiled with eccentric characters

"The Walter role that looms largest today is Lucille Bluth, the boozy, self-absorbed, anti-maternal matriarch on Arrested Development," says Jen Chaney of the Emmy-winning actress, who died Wednesday at age 80. "Actors are often praised with comments like 'No one else could have played this role,' and usually that is an exaggeration. In this case, it’s true. Walter was perfect for the role of Lucille, the privileged, blunt, uncaring mother whose delivery of every snarky comment was drier than the martinis she sipped at every conceivable hour of the day. 'Jessica Walter never missed,' John Levenstein, a writer for Arrested Development, tweeted today. 'If she didn’t get a laugh, there was a problem with the script.' Arrested Development featured a stockpile of eccentric characters, from never-nudes to wannabe magicians, and had a cast filled with comedy all stars. So it’s saying something that Walter’s Lucille has become the show’s most quoted, most revered, and most iconic — yes, that word gets tossed around too liberally, but dammit, it’s warranted in this case — figure. Not a day goes by on Twitter without the appearance of a GIF or image of Lucille rolling her eyes, telling her adopted son Annyong to go 'see a Star War,' or dropping this always-applicable gem: 'I don’t understand the question, and I won’t respond to it,' a line that’s even funnier in the context of the actual episode in which it appears. (Lucille says this with a combination of disdain and disinterest after a server at a restaurant called Klimpy’s has the audacity to ask, 'Plate or platter?') Great performances should not be assessed on the number of memes they generate. Still, the fact that so many of Walter’s moments on that series stood out enough to be digitally memorialized tells you something about why that performance was so phenomenal: because Walter didn’t waste a single second of it. It would have been very easy to ham up every scene and make a meal out of Lucille’s out-of-touch ridiculousness, and there are certainly times when Walter deliberately went in that direction — her bizarre yet somehow elegant take on the Michael-mocking chicken dance comes to mind. But what makes her Lucille so sharp is her sense of control and the nonchalance with which she makes truly brutal statements."

ALSO:

• It's okay that Jessica Walter's career is being memorialized in memes: "Walter, of course, had a career spanning decades," says James Poniewozik. "And you might think that remembering her life’s work through these brief quotes and gestures — sometimes not even entire lines, sometimes not lines at all — is reductive even if well-meaning, the minimizing of a screen icon into a meme icon. In fact, it’s a tribute to exactly what made Jessica Walter so exceptional. TV history is full of brilliant lines, memorable scenes and captivating characters. But few of them have been so GIF-able, have so dominated the visual language of social media, as Walter’s Lucille did late in her life. For an image to work as a GIF — to instantly convey tone, context and intent — you must be able to hear it the instant you see it, even without sound. And that’s what Walter accomplished, episode after Arrested Development episode, by consistently delivering some of the greatest line readings in sitcom history."
• Walter became the patron saint of sh*tty mothers thanks to Lucille Bluth: "Motherhood is a cult of demanding sacrifice that never measures up, but Lucille doesn’t even try to play the game," says Sonia Saraiya. "It’s awful—tragic!—and such a release too, to see the perfectly polished Walter ignore or manipulate her children to serve her own needs. Can you imagine Lucille changing diapers? Breastfeeding? Wiping spit-up off of a baby’s mouth? Never! Darling, you pay people for all of that. Nothing gets in the way of cocktail hour at the club. As the product of a difficult mother who is now a mother myself, I’m too familiar with how fraught those feelings are, both as the child and as the parent. What I love about Lucille is how she transmutes the angst into comedy; with her every gesture, she makes the concept of bad mothers something we can all cope with, and maybe even laugh at. It’s often pointed out that even when antiheroes swept television, no female character could survive the scrutiny of being a crappy mom. Except for Lucille, who sucked on broadcast television, and everyone loved her for it. There’s guilt wrapped around every decision that goes into being a mom, and yet here’s Lucille, shame-free, sipping a martini poolside. How effortlessly she flips the script."
• Walter's 2018 New York Times interview comments about Jeffrey Tambor helped Hollywood reckon with sexism, misogyny and harassment: "As the cast assembled to promote the new season, ostensibly prepared to weather questions about Tambor, Walter took the brave step of speaking out about (Jeffrey Tambor's) on-set outburst that left her rattled," recounts Jude Dry. "...Clearly unprepared for such honesty, Arrested fans were shocked when Walter’s male co-stars, in particular Jason Bateman and David Cross, interrupted, minimized, and tried to refute Walter’s account. Only Arrested star Alia Shawkat, the only other woman in the interview, spoke up in support of Walter. The blowback was so swift that Bateman issued an apology, tweeting that he was 'incredibly embarrassed and deeply sorry to have done that to Jessica.' This was a crucial moment in Hollywood’s reckoning with sexism, misogyny, and harassment. It illustrates the culture of misogyny in Hollywood that leads stars to think they can harass women — whether sexually, physically, or verbally — is so insidious that even an award-winning actress with six decades of experience was nearly silenced from calling it out, and the men doing the silencing didn’t even know they were doing it. Along with all the laughs, indelible one-liners, and a performance for the ages, Jessica Walter gave us this turning point in the ongoing reckoning with Hollywood sexism. As if the GIFs weren’t enough."
• Walter had 160 TV and film credits, so it's funny that she found her career-defining role late in life: "Jessica Walter worked," says Alan Sepinwall. "She worked in the literal sense, in that she was rarely without an acting job from the time her career began in the early Sixties, with a role as Julie Murano on the CBS daytime soap Love of Life, all the way through this past February, when her guest appearance on ABC’s American Housewife aired, just weeks before Walter died at the age of 80. Her IMDb page lists 160 film and TV projects, and many series that brought her back repeatedly in different roles, particularly Sixties and Seventies mystery shows like F.B.I., Mannix, and The Streets of San Francisco. Which brings us to the other way in which Walter worked over decades before she improbably found her career-defining role as pickled matriarch Lucille Bluth on Arrested Development: People kept hiring Jessica Walter not because she was famous, but because she was good. In any role, in any genre, from cop dramas to family sitcoms, you could trust her to show up and provide exactly what was needed for the character in question — with her performance often adding more life than there was on the page. Walter’s reliable professionalism and late-in-life success only made it funnier that she finally found her niche on Arrested, and as the voice of Malory Archer on FX’s animated spy comedy Archer, playing sarcastic, past-their-prime drunks. Walter was the exact opposite of an overnight success. Rather than exploding from obscurity, she just leveled up year after year in roles that made her a familiar, even welcome, face in the living rooms of people who probably didn’t know her name. She waited nearly a lifetime to find a role that fit her like a designer glove, then got to live to enjoy more lifetimes in the business over the 18 years since. Even without Arrested and all it did for her, Walter would have had an interesting career. After leaving Love of Life, she was a fixture on the small screen, guest-starring on iconic shows like The Fugitive, Mission: Impossible, and Columbo."
• Lucille Bluth made Walter relevant to an entire new audience: "Arrested Development wasn’t just contemporary; it was light-years ahead of its time, too niche to last long on broadcast but popular enough in its afterlife to fuel the rise of Netflix, which shrewdly saw a revival as a shortcut into subscribers’ hearts," says Alison Herman. "And Walter was key to its success. The bitchy grande dame is a classic archetype, but Walter carried it into an era of shaky, handheld cameras and layered, meta in-jokes, years before 30 Rock or The Office...Affection for Lucille led directly to Walter’s next starring role—the longest-lasting of her entire career, and one that technically still continues. The character description for Malory Archer, the acid-tongued boss (and progenitor) of the animated FX comedy’s namesake secret agent, told prospective players to 'think of the type as Jessica Walter from Arrested Development.' Naturally, Walter was the first voice actor cast by creator Adam Reed; why settle for a type when the inspiration herself was happy to sign on? Over 11 seasons, Malory would become the go-to source for the lewdest, funniest lines on an already over-the-top show. Freed from the strictures of network TV, Walter could lean even further into her newfound specialty."
• Walter made mean mom jokes an art form: "I never thought much about why I loved the character of Lucille Bluth so much," says Emma Spector, "but the news of Walter's death has made me realize how much it meant to me to see a mother figure on TV who wasn't perpetually warm or nurturing. I come from a long line of funny, slightly mean women, starting with my mother's mother, who was ... well, more than slightly mean; to be fair, she had a hard life, but like Lucille, she drank heavily, had four kids—her least-favorite changed almost every week—and right up until she died, she could absolutely annihilate you with a tossed-off insult in either English or Italian. In contrast, my own mother is a genuinely kind person, but her blonde bob, fondness for white wine, and occasionally barbed bon mots have earned her many comparisons to Lucille over the years. (On the plus side, this meant I could usually wriggle out of trouble with a good-enough joke.) Like my grandma and my mom, Lucille wasn't perfect—what parent is?—but she showed up, and she was funny, and that was enough."
• Archer Season 12, airing later this year, will feature Walter's voice, as she recently wrapped production
• New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman: Walter requested that I not use her as my Twitter avatar
• Watch Walter look back at her career as TCM's guest programmer in 2005

With Lucille Bluth, Jessica Walter brought soulfulness to an ancient stock character: the bitch

Walter, who died Wednesday at age 80, showed how playing lovably hateable was an art form," says Spencer Kornhaber. "The physicality of Walter’s performance, combined with the concision of Lucille’s cruelties toward relatives and service workers, proved to be catnip for the then-new genres of the GIF and the YouTube compilation," says Kornhaber. "But what’s timeless is the way she brought a whisper of soulfulness to an ancient stock character—the ice queen, the mean old lady, or, most plainly, the bitch. She’d played such characters before, and she’d play them again, and she’d always do so with oddly uplifting vigor and joy. Sexism shapes the cultural concept of the bitch, and Arrested Development—a show about deeply insensitive people—did not always recognize the line between mocking prejudices and amplifying them. With Lucille, viewers were invited to laugh at a type of motherly callousness that is rarely treated as remarkable in dads. Yet in the confrontational rasp of her voice, in the suspiciousness of her glares, and in the way the range of negative emotions she let herself show never seemed to include sadness, Walter implied a tragic—and ordinary—backstory. A lifetime of objectification and heartbreak (her husband, George Sr., is a womanizer who gives money more freely than love) lay behind every killer glance and manipulative comment. High society, vodka, and the micromanagement of her youngest son, Buster, commanded her attention in the place of a functional home environment."

ALSO:

• Jessica Walter showed what can happen when Hollywood lets women thrive no matter their age: "Jessica Walter had a rare Hollywood career, which spanned over five decades," says Tatiana Tenreyro. "Aside from notable exceptions like Meryl Streep, Judi Dench, and Helen Mirren, women in Hollywood so often 'age out' in middle age, losing the opportunity for meatier work. But Walter, who died on Wednesday at the age of 80, would get her most significant roles over 30 years into her career, showing what can happen when Hollywood lets women have their moment to shine later in life. Walter’s stardom only grew bigger as she grew older. Walter excelled in dramatic roles from the beginning. Her portrayal of the titular character in 1970s police drama Amy Prentiss earned her an Emmy, and she received a Golden Globe nomination for her second feature film, Grand Prix, in 1967. But Walter would become most beloved for her comedic chops. As Lucille Bluth on Arrested Development, the actor transformed into a meme queen and symbol of the out-of-touch 1%, becoming a significant part of millennial humor online. It says a lot that upon the announcement of her death, thousands paid tribute to her by sharing screencaps of her Arrested Development character’s best quotes as the show’s delightfully cold-blooded matriarch. The series has one of the most talented sitcom ensembles, including Alia Shawkat, Michael Cera, Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, Tony Hale, David Cross, Portia de Rossi, Jeffrey Tambor, and Liza freakin’ Minnelli. But most of the show’s biggest moments were Walter’s, with the actors giving their best performances bouncing off her impeccable timing."
• Walter got a lot of mileage from a pursed lip, an arched brow, a widened eye: "In the earlier seasons, especially, when other characters babble on compulsively, Lucille can be terse — lobbing in some well-timed irony grenade or a 'What the hell is this?' — but she’s always watching and listening (unless she is making a show of not paying attention)," says Robert Lloyd. "The editors often go to her for reaction shots: horror, disgust, fiendish glee. As Lucille, Walter had a way of holding her head so she often seems to be looking to the side, as if she were hiding in plain sight...Although Walter once described herself as 'really a nice, boring person,' there must have been a spark of the imp within her. She embraced the rude, the weird, the mad. It was a short walk from Lucille Bluth to Malory Archer, the self-aggrandizing, sex-driven head of a spy ring and hostile mother of H. Jon Benjamin’s idiot secret agent in FX’s Archer. Together, Arrested Development and Archer positioned in her within modern comedy and set the stage for her late career, including a hilariously profane turn in Julie Klausner and Billie Eichner’s Difficult People and a couple of episodes of Tru TV’s At Home With Amy Sedaris as Amy’s old teacher Mrs. Brittlecrunch, who drops in to cheerily embarrass the host."
• Lucille Bluth was Moira Rose before Moira: "Lucille is why the Bluths are the Bluths. There would be no Arrested Development without her," says Stuart Heritage. "In the last year or so, a lot of love has been shown for Moira Rose, the similarly eccentric matriarch from Schitt’s Creek. Lucille was Moira before Moira, just as moneyed and out of touch, but with no identifiable soft edges. And yet, it was still possible to identify with her. Look at the blizzard of Lucille memes that sprung into action when it was announced that Walter had died. They all show a woman of a certain age who has simply stopped listening to the rules. She’s drunk. She’s dismissive. She’s knowingly cruel. There’s a freedom to Lucille that I think everyone envies just a little bit. This was her masterstroke. She wasn’t likable, but she was aspirational. Even more impressive was that, when Arrested Development returned in its diminished form on Netflix, Walter became the star. The rest of the cast made a lot of noise about having to slot the reunion around their newly busy Hollywood schedules, but Walter – along with (Alia) Shawkat – seemed to be the only one who wanted to devote herself to the series. It rewarded her in kind. The Netflix episodes are patchy affairs, drowning in complicated plot that only distract from the jokes, but Walter did some incredible work on them. She made Lucille more monstrous than ever, while locating a frequency of performance that makes you feel sorry for her."
• Walter was more than Lucille Bluth: "She invented her beloved Arrested Development role virtually single-handedly, and her 60-year career is full of similar transformations," says Keith Phipps. "Nobody described what made Jessica Walter’s performance as Arrested Development’s Lucille Bluth so rich and wonderful better than Walter herself. Speaking to the Chicago Tribune in 2019, Walter recalled receiving a pilot script that provided little in the way of detail. 'I think it just said, "matriarch of this family,"' she said. So she filled in the blanks herself. 'I just had a take on it: A mother who loves her children but cannot show it — and who is desperate to keep the lifestyle that she was accustomed to having.' That last element provided Lucille with her motivation, a need to keep up appearances and, more importantly, keep herself in the style to which she’d become accustomed. But it was the way Walter buried an unmistakable sense of love deep — often extremely deep — within the performance that made Lucille memorable. Another actor could have sipped martinis and delivered blistering insults and made it funny. But it was Walter that gave Lucille her withered but still beating heart. Walter had a way of fleshing out potentially thin characters from her start."
• Looking back at Jessica Walter's other TV roles: Walter's other small-screen work over a 60-year career includes her Emmy-winning performance in Amy Prentiss, 90210, NCIS and Three's Company spinoff Three's a Crowd.