Ann Savage, Guy Maddin's "Mother" in MY WINNIPEG, Dies

(Via MCN.)  Ann Savage, the B-movie star of the 1940s and '50s, who most recently appeared as Guy Maddin's mother in his "docu-fantasia" MY WINNIPEG, died on Christmas Day in a Los Angeles nursing home.

Savage's best known role was as the femme fatale in the noir classic DETOUR (1945).  In his essay about the film in his "Great Movies" series, Roger Ebert wrote of her performance:

"Ann Savage's work is extraordinary: There is not a single fleeting shred of tenderness or humanity in her performance as Vera, as she snaps out her pulp dialogue (``What'd you do--kiss him with a wrench?'')."

 

In a piece this summer for the UK's The Guardian, Maddin praised Savage.  The whole thing is lovely, but here's an excerpt:

"The most unknown aspect of Ann is that she has a fine ear for music. She cried for three days when Ray Charles died. I believe her ear for music extends to the music of poetry, and good film dialogue. Ann does not intellectualise these things, but she feels them - it's this music that galvanises her performance. But she speaks off camera with the same crackling music, that same staccato patter, that scores her best movies. In fact, she showed up in Winnipeg spitting rivets, styling hard and fast conversations out of another, more lyrical era. "That doesn't cut any ice with me!" was her favourite way of telling me to think of a better solution to an on-set problem.

Savage comes from a time when faces, especially faces in luminous, silvery close-up, counted most. And she still has a wealth of this dazzling currency. As in her prewar screen tests at MGM, her face today, 70 years later, seizes the camera, arrests it, and loads even the newest, cheap film stock with quantities of silver not used in Hollywood since the 1940s. The power of her visage is still shocking, at age 87. It imperiously demands a third dimension as it spectrally wafts - no, looms threateningly - out toward her beholders."

Savage even had her own MySpace page, where she described Maddin as one of her heroes:

"(H)e's like Mike Todd, Jean (Cocteau) and Jacques Tati all rolled into one!"