What was Susan Hayward’s best performance?

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Deadline at Dawn

Did she record an album? Her voice in VOTD is powerful and enigmatic.

Helen Lawson's best performance was as Susan Hayward.

My Foolish Heart. Her 1940s work holds up....she got weird in the 1950s.

The Hairy Ape

I liked her work, especially from "My Foolish Heart", and onward. She was wonderful.

[quote] Did she record an album? Her voice in VOTD is powerful and enigmatic.

I think she recorded all her songs for "I'll Cry Tomorrow." I know they used her own voice for the soundtrack, and she performed those classic Lillian Roth songs in concerts at the time.

Supposedly she did not enjoy singing, but she had a decent voice (though they don't use it in "With a Song in My Heart" or "Valley of the Dolls"--in both films she's dubbed when her character sings). She was one of the most memorable campy gesturers in history, though. As he has admitted Charles Busch always channels her gestures when his characters sing in movies (like in the opening credits for "Die, Mommie, Die!).

Here's Susan in the famous medley of American songs at the end of "With a Song in My Heart." She's hilariously mannered (I love how condescending and sugary she is when she agrees to sing the song for the weepy Indiana veteran), but you just cannot get her dramatic gestures out of your head. (She's not singing, just lipsyncing Jane Froman's voice.)

She was my favorite actress during my pre-adolescent years. I was captivated by her passionate and endearing characterizations which stood out against most of her cast counterparts.

She started out as a model, and then started doing B-movie work in the early 40s, but she was considered so much better than the films she was in she made the graduation to big movie star. By then she had become mannered, but it was just a matter of time before she won an Oscar because she was nominated so often, usually for playing sexy sinners who suffered great hardships and/or repented.

I picked I'll Cry Tomorrow only because she said she would have preferred to have won her Oscar for that.

Steve Hayes, the Tired Old Queen At The Movies, does a terrific Susan Hayward impression

Her scenes with Jo Van Fleet in I'll Cry Tomorrow are brilliant. They both should have won Oscars for that movie.

The last 20 minutes of I Want To Live! are some of the most tense captured on film

R16=the catererer at Sophia Petrillo and Max Weinstock's wedding

Where Love Has Gone, also starring Miss Bette Davis, is currently available free with your Amazon Prime subscription. I have it pencilled in for this weekend's viewing pleasure. Wish me luck!.

Ditto to “The Hairy Ape.”

R18. Don't forget Joey Heatherton and Mike 'Mannix' Conners!

R18. It’s a blast. Almost Valley of the Dolls level

I’ll Cry Tomorrow

I Want To Live!

I like her in general, but I don't think she deserved the Oscar for I Want to Live. Her performance was so over-the-top and very.....grande dame. The real Barbara Graham was a two bit floozy.

I'll Cry Tomorrow. I agree with R15. Hayward's scenes with Jo Van Fleet were excellent.

Did she EVER give a good performance? God, she was always so ridiculously over the top.

Something I've always loved and found fascinating about Susan's film performances is the way she can visually and vocally deliver a line, a glance, a gesture--almost like a performing magician executing a sleight of hand, is the only admittedly not great description of it that I can think of. I feel as if she could just knock someone over with the way she interacts with other characters in her scenes. Ditto for loving here most in "I Want To Live!" followed by "I'll Cry Tomorrow."

I would love to have seen her play Mame in Vegas. I wonder if she played it like Helen Lawson in Hit The Sky?

I'll Cry Tomorrow and I Want to Live are both on ok.ru.. Google ok.ru. and the movie title to get the direct link.

Hayward is such a great drunk.

The Lusty Men, a rare foray into auteur cinema with Nicholas Ray and Robert Mitchum

Susan at her most understated.

In Back Street, where she is reunited with her lover over the body of his passed out slut of a wife…

…and watch for the scene where her dress matches her apartment drapes. Fabulous.

Where Love Has Gone is a complete campfest. Hayward driving home from her attorney's office via every San Francisco landmark makes her character seem drunk or demented.

But you have to love how she zips through SF in that ginormous Chrysler Imperial! Love it!

Say Goodbye, Maggie Cole

[quote]R18 Where Love Has Gone, also starring Miss Bette Davis, is currently available free with your Amazon Prime subscription.

An extraordinarily subtle actress:

R37 LOL! As subtle as a bullhorn at a funeral. :-)

r16, you're ready to fly right outta here, aren't you?

^huh?

Regarding Susan in I Want to Live, Bosley Crowther said her performance was "so vivid and so shattering ... Anyone who could sit through this ordeal without shivering and shuddering is made of stone."

I remember sitting down to watch "I Want to Live" for the first time, having heard so much about Hayward's incredible performance. I was expecting something spectacular, but I ended up laughing through most of it. For one thing, she was way too old to be playing Barbara Graham, so right away, I had difficulty getting into the story.

And it seemed her version of showing emotion in the movie was to have sudden, frequent outbursts. It was so laughably over the top, it was like "Mommie Dearest" 24 years before "Mommie Dearest" was made.

The only truly good part of the movie was the harrowing gas chamber scene at the end. And that's mainly because she kept her mouth shut in it.

I find her totally watchable and entertaining in mostly everything I’ve seen, over the top or not