Why wasn't Barbara Parkins a bigger star?

Because she was in the craptacular "Valley of the Dolls".

She has a strange affected accent. That’s why.

Mia Farrow was the 60's it girl. Barbara needed someone bigger than Frank, and LBJ wasn't going to leave Lady Bird for her.

Once you’ve been the Gillian Girl, it’s ok downhill.

I've always felt the same about Marianne McAndrew, OP. She was luminous.

When you are acted off the screen by Sharon Tate, it's time to pack up shop.

I loved her voice. It was so icy. In the Peyton Place pilot, she tells Ryan O'Neal's character... "Summer's ending, Rod." It was perfection.

I looked up her credits, and the only thing I've seen her in (aside from Valley of the Dolls) was the miniseries Captains & the Kings and a TV movie called A Taste of Evil (which I barely remember).

She can't really act. She's no Dina Merrill!

You can tell she always worries about how she looks (not anything new for an actor, but still).

Watch her screen tests for Neely, she's doesn't have the emotional access to fill out the material and make you believe her. She'll raise her voice and gesture and indicate a range of emotion without a shred of authenticity or real heart.

Robotic. Dull. R8 However The Mephisto Waltz was a decent horror. In the Satan sub genre. DL fave Edna Unger / Pamelyn Ferdin in a small role.

She wouldn't do anal.

She was great on Peyton Place with James Douglas's Steven. They were two of a kind. You could never buy that Betty would settle for the simple life with Rodney.

Well

At least she had great success as the Gillian Girl

OP, your being obnoxious!

R5-You're the only one besides my beloved late Mom who thought she was beautiful. When we went to the film of "Dolly", we all thought Barbra looked almost "beautiful" in the period wigs and costumes. My Mom kept saying "never mind Barbra--look at the actress playing Irene Molloy--she's gorgeous". I could never see it

You can see why Ryan hit it big, I don't get why Mia was the one and not Barbara. Barbara just popped off the screen.

[quote]OP, your being obnoxious!

Oh, dear.

Her lack of talent and her leaden personality [italic]may[/italic] have had something to do with it.

[quote]Word has it you're terrific in the role and this is really going to skyrocket your career.

By the time filming was over, did anyone really believe this about VOTD?

Always wondered why Joan Hackett didn't have a great career either - she was terrific in everything she did, and she had a few big roles, but never really broke through.

Dying didn't help, I guess.

I had a terrific crush on her when I was very young. Even then I had a "type": brown hair dark eyes. And there were a lot of them back then: Lesley Ann Warren (Cinderella), Marlo Thomas, "Victoria Winters" (involved in the Sunny Von Bulow scandal) AKA Alexandra Isles, Stephanie Powers, Diana Rigg... I could go on and on.

I miss the gorgeous brunettes.

Marianna McAndrew was so obviously dubbed and not good at the lip-synching. Add to that her nose-jobby nose and slightly crossed eyes...

Her fake accent is ridiculous.

Her initial scene with Martin Payton (George Macready) was fantastic .

R13 a midget model with no neck!

R25 = Hannah Cord.

She was limited as an actress. Parkins looked like any number of mid 60s brunettes. Mia's waifishness and look were novel. Not a great actress with huge range, but Woody Allen showed she could do humor. She was a very good fit for Rosemary's baby.

Her weird voice was off putting.

R23 she's Canadian

I think that Parkins herself got enough of a taste of the fast lane with “Peyton Place” and “Valley of the Dolls” to realize the hard work and media scrutiny were not for her. I 5ink she was strong-willed about what she wanted to do, did not want to play the game and was hampered by her limited talent and icy demeanor, which was out of fashion.

She was very like elegant ‘50s starlet Dana Wynter. She didn’t make it big either but she was smart enough to marry Greg Bautzer, one of Hollywood’s hottest (in all senses of the word) attorneys.

And I think Parkins let herself go as far as weight gain and maintaining her figure — she always looked sort of soft and squishy for all her glamour.

R15, my mom (and I) loved her too. I think her voice is hypnotic, in the best way.

[quote]And I think Parkins let herself go as far as weight gain and maintaining her figure — she always looked sort of soft and squishy for all her glamour.

Fuck you, R30.

Parkins and McAndrew were both too old fashioned for the 60's. McAndrew made Julie Andrews look like a hippie. And Parkins' fake posturing went against the reigning 60's counterculture in a big away. Bad acting aside, there was no way either of these two would become big stars.

R30- Soft and Squishy!

Ha ha ha 😄

Are you the same queen who once said that Sada Thompson was

Plumpish?

That's Bridget FONDUE Elfman, please and thank you.

Those nutty 60's movie mags - Photoplay, Modern Screen etc, loved to detail Barbara's every real/suspected romance. Apparently she went through Ryan O'Neal, David Hedison, Jim McMullan, Eddie Fisher, Adam West, Omar Sharif and Cat Stevens. Ruth Warrick wrote in her autobiography that Parkins had an envious admiration for Mia, copying everything Mia did except the pixie cut. Mia was a genius at playing coy and fey, and kept people guessing. Babs was a little too obvious. Both were close to Sharon Tate, and both after 1969 moved to England for work/to live. I heard while they really rivals on PP, they later became true friends and Mia gave Barbara advice when she wanted to adopt her daughter.

Barbara should have stuck with TV instead of trying to be a film star. She just wasn’t special enough to make it on the big screen. She’d have been great on one of the 80s-90s prime time soaps

R21 Gayle Hunnicut

Because of her DUMB name

If she called herself Barbara PERKINS instead of PARKINS she would have gone much further in her career.

R29, that’s not a Canadian accent.

I was surprised to learn that Barbara Parkins and Patty Duke absolutely loathed each other during the shooting of “Valley of the Dolls” and forever after. Well, until Patty died anyway.

And I have no doubt that it was all Patty's fault.

Why weren't YOU a bigger store, OP?? Cuntasaurus!

- the ghost of Barb P

I was just thinking of her. Does anyone know how to access valley of the dolls? I checked YouTube Netflix Amazon paramount etc.

I watched the clip with that great song. So sad. There is Patty Duke . Exploited . Mentally ill. And Sharon Tate — horrors too u thinkable to write.

Sharon Tate would’ve been in the league of Jane Fonda, Faye Dunaway and Barbra Streisand in the 1970s. She was an excellent dramatic actress and a comedienne. She was one of the most beautiful women onscreen.

Parkins is divine.

Uh, because she has minimal talent perhaps.

"Mia's waifishness and look were novel. Not a great actress with huge range..."

Yes, she is. Woody knew what he had with her, and that's why he put her in everything for years on end.

[quote]Sharon Tate would’ve been in the league of Jane Fonda, Faye Dunaway and Barbra Streisand in the 1970s.

Cut your meds in half.

"Valley of the Dolls" is a camp classic for us. But the rest of the world hated it.

But yeah, she was a beautiful woman with an offbeat flair. It's too bad nothing happened with her.

Sharon Tate acted as if she’d undergone a lobotomy.

She's no Paula Prentiss.

R40 No, that's a Twentieth Century Fox Elocution Department voice.

Face it, OP Barbara is limited...

R50 “The rest of the world” might have thought “Valley of the Dolls” was a piece of junk, but they all went. It was one of the biggest grossing movies of the year.

Yes R55 I think it ranked #2 for 1967. Usually even a turkey that makes money springboards an actress's career. Parkins had a problem - with Mia gone from PP, she was the big attraction so keeping her on the soap, which still made money but the ratings were down, 20th Century Fox wasn't going to let her be a movie and tv star at the same time, so she didn't get to do another film until PP ended. And never again as the lead.

Woody crafted movies around whatever actress he was dating at the time and unlike, say, Diane Keaton in things like Annie Hall, Mia never gave the greatest performance within any of her films with Woody. She was mostly passable and sometimes good with great direction (Woody, Roman Polanski, etc.)

Barbara Parkins was adopted. I always wondered if she ever contacted her birth parents, who would surely have been in shocked confusion. (“My little baby ended up in… The Valley of the Dolls??”)

Mia made many stupid moves after Rosemary. She turned down True Grit, she did Secret Ceremony instead. I wish she had worked with John Waters.

[quote] "Valley of the Dolls" is a camp classic for us. But the rest of the world hated it.

Not for me. I find it drab and boring. It has very little camp value.

[quote]R59 Mia made many stupid moves after Rosemary… . I wish she had worked with John Waters.

I don’t think they have much in common. She’s a versatile actress, but much too refined for him.

Helen Lawson and I'll Plant My Own Tree ALONE cements it as a CAMP CLASSIC!

[quote] "She has a strange affected accent. That’s why."

R2, you're being obnoxious!

[quote]You can see why Ryan hit it big, I don't get why Mia was the one and not Barbara. Barbara just popped off the screen.

Because the vogue in the late 60s was for girls who looked thin, androgynous and underaged. Mia.

Valley of the Dolls is a loooooooooooooong film with significant sequences that drag on and on, particularly those featuring the subject of this thread. Really only the Neely O'Hara scenes and the Helen Lawson scenes (Lee Grant's scenes maybe, too) make it camp. It's a lot to slog through for a few pristine moments of gloriosu camp!

Lee Grant refers it as a piece of shit, which is a good description.

She had poor personal hygiene - it's been said she smelled like a Tuna Trawler after a week on the high seas. Even upwind the fumes were so potent that unsuspecting bystanders passed out within seconds! Even now people avoid her like the plague.

Because her nose had no cartilage.

R13 Poor Mark Robson thought he was so edgy with this sequence.

Because Miriam’s lasagna had a more lasting impression than Anne Welles choosing the perfect stick.

R67 you tried. But I really wish you hadn’t.

Her voice was too precious.

Have you seen her screen test for Neely? Beautiful but limited as an actress.

R45, you do dream on. Sharon has tiny tiny talent.

If Barbara Parkins got a really good movie role in 1969-70, she could have been a Movie Star. For a year or two. That was never going to happen because Parkins was so fucking affected. I don’t know what she was trying to do, act mature? elegant? Untouchable?

Bless. She’s so pretty, but she’s not natural at all.

Valley of the Dolls as unwatchable as it is now, intolerable really, was a hit. It's not even camp good. Patty Duke acts as if she never had a drop of talent in her life. I guess part of the zeitgeist of 1967 when popping pills and yelling FAG was edgy.

I think McAndrew is lovely in Dolly but her dubbing in the beautiful Ribbons Down My Back is truly the worst (what were the staff of all those old MGM pros thinking?)as is Michael Crawford's film sinking performance. After the 60s was over there was nothing for her to do except find another career or go the topless horror film route. Which is what Julie Andrews ended up doing.

Barbara Parkins' look was over by 1968. Teased hair and eyeliner flags, except for Streisand, were over. She looked like an old lady.

A bigger star?

If she were any bigger they'd have to crack a bottle of champagne on her ass when she leaves the house.

Mia would never admit it, but Woody Allen gave her career respectability. “Hannah and Her Sisters”, “Broadway Danny Rose”, “Radio Days”, and “The Purple Rose of Cairo” are classic.

Sharon Tate may have been of limited talent but she’s also the only character whom you feel for in her final moments.

Woody has been nothing but gracious about Mia’s very limited range. He was very open about how. Manhattan Murder Mystery was written for her and became a completely different movie with Keaton.

She got acclaim for 2 of his movies but she never got any awards and right before she met him she was doing low end disaster movies. She even admits in her book that she was very cheap for him to hire.

R78, are you aware of the fact that ANY actress could change her make-up?

McAndrew had a noticeable rhinoplasty. Same with Barbara Parkins when she got older - hideous.

I find her boring.

Joan Hackett stole her career.

Your acting career goes downhill after you've been Beaver's babysitter.

Tate was gorgeous and you couldn't stop looking at her, even though she obviously couldn't act. Duke mostly screams her lines and you don't want to look at her. Parkins has rather little presence, at all.. The camp is intermittent, but even Tate has some campy dialogue. like discussing her lack of talent and her breast exercises.

Joan Hackett was my favorite of the 60s actresses -- and she, too, did not have as great a career as she should have. But she was wonderful in everything she did. (My other favorite, Paula Prentiss, also faltered, but that was probably because of her mental issues and the fact that her sister tried to kill her husband).

Her pussy stank.

I think Prentiss' sister tried to kill Richard Benjamin long after Paula's career opportunities had disappeared. There was not a causal relationship between the two.

LOVE Paula Prentiss, and all the quirky crazy girls like Sally Kellerman and. Brenda Vacarro. Diane Keaton comes close. But no Barbara Parkins, no Sharon Tate or any of those faux glamour chicks who expect to be rewarded for the size of their eyelashes and cleavage. It’s probably not their fault, but how management marketed them. I always thought Lainie Kazan was a campy and funny as hell even though she always played a femme fatale early in her career.

In an act of desperation Parkins appeared nude in Playboy but I don't think it did her any good.

Prentiss, Kellerman and Vacarro had talent.

I also find Tate compelling to watch. She should have had a great tv career. So watchable and she would have developed some acting skills and tricks especially as she got older.