Eileen Brennan

Eileen Brennan overcame a heck of a lot over the years. She was a recovering alcoholic. Then, six years after she stopped drinking, she was coming out of a restaurant after lunch with Goldie Hawn and was hit by a car. (Don’t drink and drive even if the odds are small you’ll hit a BAFTA-winning actress!) This led, naturally, to an addiction to painkillers. In 1990, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy. Eventually, she died of bladder cancer. It’s a lot. She even broke a leg by falling into an orchestra pit while playing Miss Hannigan in Annie. Like, at a certain point, why would you even go outside anymore?

Still, it’s fortunate for us that she did, because she was a talented actress. Because of her appearance and voice, she tended to get typecast as tough women. She herself said she’d basically cornered the market on madams and the goal was just to try to make them all different and interesting. Now, she played more characters than just that, but it is true that, if you wanted a tough dame, Eileen Brennan was a go-to choice for several decades.

Of course, for the movie where I think of her first, she’s actually not playing the madam. She’s playing the wife of a Senator who, you know, may be engaging in some light espionage as a treat. That whole cast is firing on all cylinders to the extent that I’ve mentioned it heavily in the articles I’ve written about literally every cast member I’ve covered so far, unto Kellye Nakahara who played the cook. And she has like two lines and then dies! But Eileen Brennan is just a force of nature in that movie, probably the most genre-savvy in the bunch. She’s fantastic.

She was capable of being funny and serious and warm and bitter. So okay, her career was sidelined a couple of times by things like addiction and recovery and so forth. But man, when you watch her on the screen, she’s so great. She’s done two movies that are in the National Film Registry, and that just means it’s time for Clue to join The Sting and The Last Picture Show, and get me started again about how comedy isn’t seen as being as important as drama. She doesn’t get into the conversation at the same level as other people in a lot of her movies, but often that’s because the movie is so full of talent.

Then again, there’s the rest of her career. She did no few of those made-for-TV Title: Subtitle dramas. She did a made-for-TV version of Freaky Friday that’s so 1995 it stars Shelley Long and Gaby Hoffmann and features Sandra Bernhard and Drew Carey. She was in Deadly Intentions . . . Again? Which exists, it turns out. She was Mrs. Piper and Widow Hubbard in that Keanu Reeves/Drew Barrymore Babes in Toyland, which I’ve never seen because I’m an Annette Funicello version person. And she appeared in something called Cinemax Comedy Experiment that I know nothing about and neither does IMDb, but boy howdy what a strange list of people were on it.