Just recently, I’ve been searching for an answer as to who might be the American theatrical diva for our time.
I’m thinking of the sort of woman Ethel Barrymore was, someone to follow in the footsteps of the wooden-legged Sarah Bernhardt, Dame Edith Evans and the shocking Tallulah Bankhead (who, apparently, like Ethel’s brother, John, used to drink out of a wooden leg).
These days, I’ve heard people refer to Dame Judi Dench and Dame Maggie Smith as divas. But does one have to be a British dame to be considered a diva?
Wouldn’t the untitled, politically incorrect Vanessa Redgrave make the cut?
There are other strong candidates among the foreign-born transplants. Zoe Caldwell, who’s from Australia, certainly trods our boards frequently enough to be considered an American grande dame.
And the divinely serene Rosemary Harris, at present strutting her formidable stuff in Edward Albee’s “All Over,” hails from the very English county of Suffolk but made her theatrical debut (in 1952) in New York.
Still, isn’t there an actress who’s just a little more . . . American, one with a genuine American accent, for example?
There is. I nominate the gorgeous, the perennially at-work Marian Seldes.
Seldes was born in New York, and she first appeared on stage – now here’s a diva for you – at the Metropolitan Opera House with the American Ballet Theater in “Petrushka.” Her dance career – as an extra, I suspect – was short-lived, and she soon found herself on New York stages in “Medea” and “Crime and Punishment.”
She’s still dazzling audiences, currently in the role of a faded B-movie star in a dampish squib of a play, “Play Yourself,” by Harry Kondoleon.
Seldes leads with her profile, balances words as if they were glass tumblers and shoots glances at the audience – not to mention the cast – as if flirtation were going out of style.
Here, the woman is not only the epitome of camp, but she is also adorably vulnerable behind the mascara and pancake. She looks like she’s having glorious, easy fun.
But what qualifies her to wear the diva mantle?
First of all, a diva isn’t just a star, or even a superstar, but something more. Divas exude both fame and glamour, they coruscate with diamonds and blossom in flashlights.
It’s a title as much as anything, not a title bestowed by any government, but one earned by general and inarguable public acclamation. In any event, it’s too good and useful a word to waste on everyday earthlings.
It is strange that there is no commonly used male equivalent for diva. The word is Italian for star, and, not unexpectedly, it was used originally for female Italian opera luminaries of a certain – what’s the word? – magnitude.
Perhaps, it was also used for prima donnas who were too big for their larynxes.
But it’s too descriptive a term just to be used for opera. First, it spread to ballet, then to the theater and – always used sardonically, if not unkindly – finally to everyday life. In this realm, some men are even called divas.
It seems that the theater doesn’t have so many divas as opera or ballet. For one thing, divas really need bouquets – preferably thrown at them. And, nowadays, you never see a bouquet in the theater.
Perhaps everyone has heeded Bernard Shaw’s shrewd comment that he would believe in the sincerity of flowers thrown on stage if he ever saw people leaving the theater with bunches of flowers unthrown.
Yet theater people – though they may be drab sparrows compared with the multi-hued plumage of opera and ballet’s birds of prey – do indeed have their divas.
Seldes, with her regal air, proudly carries the torch.
Remember John Springer’s book about old Hollywood: “They Had Faces Then.” Well, Seldes has a face.
Like all divas.
