Judy Holliday [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Judy Holliday never wanted to be an actress. "Acting is a very limited form of expression," she once commented, "and those who take it seriously are very limited people." An unusual comment for a woman who, from the first moment she was "pushed" onto a stage to her last Broadway bow, was to be almost obsessively painstaking in the refinement and perfection of her art. It is an extraordinary comment for a woman who, in a career that was to last little over twenty years, was to win the highest awards of screen and stage: an Oscar for her performance in Born Yesterday; a Tony for The Bells Are Ringing; and that most impressive of all unofficial accolades, the acknowledgment that she was an "actor's actor"—a performer whose technique is so subtle and so self-effacing that it can only be fully appreciated by the initiated. But such contradictions were the very essence of Judy Holliday. Running throughout her life is a fascinating counterpoint between what she believed and what she did, what she needed and what she got, what she appeared to be and who she really was. It was not simply a conflict between professional and private images, though that was certainly a part of it. There was a strain of ambivalence and conflict that ran deep in Judy, and it was to be the source of her profoundest struggles and her greatest successes. Nowhere is this ambivalence more readily apparent than in Judy's attitude toward her professional life. While Holliday