"Bessie Mae's" (I always though he called her that as a play on the song "Besame Mucho") TCM tribute to Clift is my favorite of all of those. Forty years later, you could hear how much she still loved him.
His waning commitment to the theatre seems to go hand in hand with his personal deterioration (which began before the car accident, though it escalated irrevocably afterward) in Patricia Bosworth's excellent biography of him. His final stage appearance was as Treplev in a star-studded 1954 revival of The Sea Gull which he produced along with his friends Kevin McCarthy (Trigorin) and Mira Rostova (Nina). It had a troubled rehearsal and preview period, and though it sold out on the strength of its cast (which also included Judith Evelyn, Maureen Stapleton, George Voskovec, Sam Jaffe, Will Geer and John Fiedler) it was a disappointment to more people than not, including him. His dreams of playing Hamlet evaporated around this time, and there is a poignant moment in the biography which tells of him drunkenly running into Alfred Lunt and being painfully aware of how far he had fallen since they had worked together in There Shall Be No Night in 1940. |
