Favorite Marsha Mason performance

She was good telling her husband he stunk to HIGH HEAVEN

“Goodbye Girl” is probably the most endearing, but I also like “Only When I Laugh”. Yes, it’s synthetic, but I got taken in anyway and love the moment in her “Oscar Bait” breakdown scene when she loses it and slams the phone down repeatedly.

Actual favorite, though, are her hilarious appearances on “Frazier”.

She was very good in Saturday Night Fever.

Yeah, it was Oscar Bait...

I think most of her Oscar-nominated performances were mediocre, but she genuinely impressed me in “Cinderella Liberty,” which I enjoyed far more than I ever expected. I’d probably give her the Oscar for 1973, and then no other nominations.

She was fun as Sherry on “Frasier.”

For some reason when I saw Cinderella Liberty recently for the first time...her nude scenes shocked me. I don't know why. Just odd to see her like that.

I only know that Mark Hamill once compared Corvette Summer to The Goodbye Girl

Her autobiography was interesting.

I wish Neil Simon hadn't required her to only act in his stuff, because she's good in the things she did before and after their marriage.

All his projects are kind of middle brow "meh".

Is that why she turned down Norma Rae r8?

What an odd Oscar race that was Our Sally beat three actress (Mason, Jane Fonda, Jill Clayburgh) who all turned down the role.

R8 Yes. I don't think Neil Simon explicity FORBADE her to take outside jobs, but it just came to be understood that she was to be there for him in all ways. Traveling to a location he wasn't on would not fit into what he needed in a wife. It was complicated by the fact his previous wife (the mother of his children) had just died the same year he married Mason....so Mason felt she needed to be really "there"...unlike Wife #1.

Near the end of their marriage Mason rented an office/studio where she would go to work on her own stuff, just for herself. That's when the marriage really disintegrated.

Eh... none.

r10 Faye Dunaway turned down NORMA RAE, too. It's hard to picture her in the part, the way she usually plays things...but she is actually a poor sharecropper's daughter from the south, and if she'd been able to shed her chic chilliness, she might have been good.

Dunaway's chic chilliness is because she's a from that background. She has to compensate.

Please. No talent whatsoever. Once she stopped sucking Neil Simon's cock her career went down the shitter.

Whilst I voted for Only I When I Laugh, Marsha Mason's best performance is not listed: Promises in the Dark (1979), one of the very few non-Neil Simon films she made whilst married to him.

Its funny all the actresses that were offered Norma Rae and thankfully turned it down. I couldn't imagine Mason, Clayburgh, Fonda or Dunnaway pulling off the grittiness that Sally Field gave to the role.

How did the Chapter Two monologue inspire a Seinfeld episode?

R17, on “Seinfeld”, Jerry received a breakup letter that was plagiarized from Neil Simon’s “Chapter Two”.

No love for Audrey Rose?

She was really the film version of Bonnie Franklin

R19 - I love Audrey Rose. Saw it twice on release and have it on Blu Ray but haven't gotten around to watching it again.

So that makes two films she made along with Promises in the Dark (1979) that weren't Neil Simon screenplays during her marriage to him.

In the 70s I think it was obligatory to nominate her for an Oscar. Sort of like an early version of Meryl Streep.

I'm still waiting with my fingers crossed.

Loved her as Audrey the Vampire in an episode of Dark Shadows.

All the dames in Cheap Detective were wonderful.....

The Amy Adams of her time.

The one with Matthew Broderick playing her son and the old guy Sam Robards as her estranged father. Odd little movie.

MAX DUGAN RETURNS, R27

Jason Robards not Sam R27

I haven't seen all the films on the poll, but she was good as a doctor in "Promises in the Dark". It's not a great screenplay, but she and Kathleen Beller work well together, and I ended up bawling. I remember I liked her in the Love Canal TV movie too, but haven't seen it in years. I hate Neil Simon.

I think she would have an excellent Miss Hannigan in Huston’s ANNIE had Neil let her do it.

R27 yes, thank you. Interestingly, Sam Robards is the son of Jason Robards and Lauren Bacall.

She's good in a TV movie with Ellen Burstyn and Molly Ringwald about teen suicide. "Surviving" it was called. The scene where she finds the Ringwald dead and hauls her out of the car is pretty harrowing stuff.

Max Dugan has a few funny moments. The way she always oversleeps and wakes up with a start and frantically has to get to work always cracked me up.

She was the brunette Susan Anspach. Some guys go for overbites.