JILL CLAYBURGH

Jill Clayburgh was born in New York City in 1944. She was the daughter of an upper class Jewish family, and she went to the prestigious Brearley School and Sarah Lawrence College, where she decided to be an actress. She joined the Charles Street Repertory Theater in Boston and there she met Al Pacino (who had come up from New York for a season), and they would live together from 1970 to 1975. She went back to New York with Pacino, and acted on Broadway. She started doing some movies, and had a significant role in Portnoy's Complaint in 1972, and was the female lead in the 1976 bomb, Gable and Lombard (opposite James Brolin), but that same year she had a large role in the comedy hit, Silver Streak, and the next year she was the female lead in the extremely funny Semi-Tough. But it was in 1978 that she had her breakout role, which was playing the lead in An Unmarried Woman (nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for this film). The following year she married playwright David Rabe, and she made the disastrous choice of starring in La Luna, Bernardo Bertolucci's much reviled movie, where Clayburgh's character has an incestuous scene with her son. That same year she was a lead in Starting Over (nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for this film), with Burt Reynolds and Candice Bergen, and I consider the movie an overlooked gem! But her other film choices were not very good, and she made fewer of them, eventually doing a movie every four years or so. In recent years she has done some TV and Broadway. In many ways Clayburgh's career has mirrored that of Al Pacino, her longtime early boyfriend. It took her a long time to get noticed, and then she had some excellent performances, mixed with several lesser ones, and then her career went into a long decline. But unlike Pacino, she never had a major career resurgence, which may simply reflect how few top roles there are a woman in her forties and fifties! Sadly, she passed away in 2010 at the age of 66.