Adrienne Shelley: 1966-2006

(A great indie actress/filmmaker--a tragic loss)

Beyond Belief
by Richard Harland Smith
Movie Morlocks



I spent two hours eulogizing my late friend Victor Argo on Thursday night/Friday morning and woke up six hours later to the news that another friend, actress/writer/director/wife/mother/rara avis Adrienne Shelly, had died alone in her Manhattan office. I don't mean to write about death so much, I really don't. But what is it they say? Death is what happens when you're writing about something else.

I met Adrienne in 1996, well after her impressive film debut in Hal Hartley's The Unbelieveable Truth (1989) and its follow-up Trust (1990). She had just played the lead in the then-unreleased Grind (1997), with Billy Cruddup and had directed her first feature film Sudden Manhattan (1997). We slided easily into brother-sister mode. I was five years her senior, a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier, but I walked in her shadow. Despite her childlike stature, Adrienne had a commanding, forthright delivery and a claxton-like voice that definitely drew focus ("This is Adrienne calling," she'd announce on the telephone, like a character from a 30s movie barking into one of those two-piece candlestick phones). Adrienne often played bookish, brainy characters and she was one in real life. I remember her marching up the five flights of stairs to my old tenement flat in Yorkville with her nose buried in a magazine she'd swiped from her doctor's office, reading aloud as she pushed into my apartment, fascinated with what she was reading and eager to share it. If she ever played the movie star, it was never with me. I happened upon her shooting her second film, I'll Take You There (1999), one autumn day in Lower Manhattan and stopped to watch her at work. Singling out my face from a crowd of dozens of gawkers, she bounded out of her canvas chair and ran, not walked, but ran to give me a hug. I last saw her in 2001, at a screening of Revolution #9 (which she associate produced and in which she played a supporting role) but we fell out of touch when I moved from New York. This summer, around her 40th birthday, I sent her an e-mail. I was happy when she replied, and we swapped pictures of our kids. Life was good, it seemed.

It's an actor's craft to develop backstory for a character, to fill in details and history that the audience will never know but which inform the author's text with a subtext and give the drama wholeness and weight. Of course, all real people have backstory and subtext... and that we can never know anyone's full story is what makes life so hard and what drives us to the movies where, even if it all ends tragically, we are left with some small understanding of why it had to be.

Link

More in a retrospective at Green Cine:

Adrienne Shelley: 1966-2006

Which includes this latest report that it was murder:

Brooklyn Man Charged With Murder Of Actress