Requiem for Madeline Kahn by Tim Wick
This one actually hurts a little.
I look with sadness on the death of celebrities I admire, but typically not
with actual pain. James Stewart was a great actor, but I didn't take his
death personally. Same with Bette Davis, George C. Scott or any number of
other greats who have passed away in recent years.
I reacted to the news about Madeline Kahn in much the same way that I
reacted to the same news about Jim Henson and Mel Blanc. I could not say
anything. I thought about her great film roles, her smile, her voice, her
comic lisp in "Blazing Saddles", her hair in
"Young Frankenstein" and how
young she was. She was only fifty seven. Fifty Seven! My mother is fifty
seven.
Now, I'll admit that I was a hormonal teenager when I first saw most of her
films on video and I pretty much spent my time observing that she was a
babe. Probably not politcally correct, but it's true. When I got a little
older, that was when I noticed what was really important - her ability to
create overstated comic characters but play them in an understated fashion.
Her characters never thought they were funny, they took themselves
seriously. That is the secret to playing a good comic character - never let
the character know they are funny.
She gave us some of the funniest characters that ever made it to the screen.
Who can forget Lili Von Schtupp from "Blazing Saddles"?
How about Empress
Nympho from "History of the World, Part I"?
Her screen time was remarkably
limited in both of these films, but it is her lines I remember most of all.
How many times have you found yourself exclaiming "Oh! It's Twue!"?
When you look at her filmography, you won't find an "Amadeus"
or a "Titanic"
or a "Gone with the Wind" because those weren't the kinds of films she chose
to be in. Thank goodness for that. When I heard of her death, I looked on
the internet movie database
for a list of her movies and found myself saying
"Oh! That one! I forgot she was in that one! She was great in that
movie!" a lot. Some of them are movies that could easily be considered
mediocre. But she was never mediocre in them.
So thinking of a world without her hurts a little. We lost a great one.
The world is just a little less funny than it was a week ago.
Internet Movie Database filmography for Madeline Kahn
Harry Knowles' obituary on Aint it Cool News
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