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20. Merci Docteur Rey (2002)
Every great performer should have at least one baffling movie on their CV, and this curio, produced by Ismail Merchant, is Dianne Wiest’s. The plot is bananas: she plays an opera singer leading her gay teenage son to believe that his father (Simon Callow) is dead, by taking the boy to visit a fake grave each year. Guess what? He’s alive! Not for long, though: he’s soon murdered by his own gay pickup, with his son witnessing it all from inside a wardrobe. Wiest flails around Paris in a turban and a tizzy, while Jane Birkin is a fake therapist under the illusion that she is Vanessa Redgrave. The real Redgrave pops up briefly, as does Jerry Hall, because why not?
19. It’s My Turn (1980)
Claudia Weill turned heads with her 1978 indie comedy Girlfriends. This less assured studio follow-up gave Wiest her movie debut. It’s minor best-pal territory for the newbie – Wiest (her first name is spelled with a single “N” in the credits) has three scenes as the chipper cousin to a lovesick maths professor played by Jill Clayburgh. She dispenses romantic advice (“If you’ve found the right person, make it work”) and gets to sit with Michael Douglas at a wedding party.
18. Falling in Love (1984)
Another early best-pal role for Wiest as Isabelle, confidante to Molly (Meryl Streep). Both women are drifting away from unhappy marriages – Molly has fallen for Frank (Robert De Niro) – and Isabelle’s Spidey-sense enables the film to dispense with the convention of a big confession scene. “I haven’t seen you for weeks – who is it?” she asks out of the blue, antennae twitching, causing Molly to blurt out the truth then flee in a panic.
17. The Mule (2018)
As the patient ex-wife of an elderly horticulturist turned drug mule (Clint Eastwood), Wiest’s presence in a handful of scenes functions essentially to encourage him to reflect on the wastefulness of a selfish life. She is her sublimely understated self, each regretful, loaded look raising the emotional temperature. A terminal illness lends the story extra ballast, just as it did 30 years earlier when she played Michael J Fox’s dying mother in Bright Lights, Big City.
16. Practical Magic (1998)
As the friendly neighbourhood witches who raise their orphaned nieces (Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman) into the sisterhood, Wiest and Stockard Channing are the comic relief – and it’s certainly a relief whenever the film is plainly comic. As they boogie around the kitchen glugging midnight margaritas, it’s almost possible to forget you’re watching a film that mixes wind-chime wackiness with domestic abuse, serial killing, manslaughter, resurrection and murder. Still, it has plenty of fans: the four leads are back this year in a sequel filmed partly in London.
In small-town Utah, preacher John Lithgow outlaws rock music and dancing. New boy Kevin Bacon has something to say about that – and he isn’t too shy to quote Ecclesiastes at a council meeting to make his point. Wiest gives one of her studies in longsuffering, tight-smiling wifehood as the supportive spouse who serves as the lukewarm water to her husband’s fire and brimstone. A dry run for her role in The Birdcage, where she was called upon once again to manage a high-maintenance, stuffed-shirt husband.
14. Drunks (1995)
This is essentially a collection of monologues set during one Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Richard Lewis leaves early and wanders New York, struggling to stay sober, while the film cuts back to AA members played by Faye Dunaway, Parker Posey, Sam Rockwell and others. As a workaholic doctor worried that she has traded one addiction for another, Wiest gets a nice comic double-take when she realises the cigarette she is being offered by the man sitting next to her was pinched from her handbag.
13. I Care a Lot (2020)
Rosamund Pike is the con artist who makes a killing by applying for guardianship over her elderly targets, who are then consigned to care homes while she sells off their assets. She picks the wrong one in Jennifer (Wiest), who turns out to be the mother of a vicious gangster (Peter Dinklage). “I’m the worst mistake you ever made,” says Jennifer. The scene in which she is carted off in a flurry of paperwork is terrifyingly plausible, with Wiest’s expressions cycling through bafflement, incredulity and horror.
12. Radio Days (1987)
Woody Allen’s nostalgic collage-style comedy gets wistful for the wireless. Wiest plays the young hero’s Aunt Bea, dreaming of love but doomed to disappointment. Her romantic low point comes when one suitor drives off mid-date, leaving her to walk home after Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast convinces him that aliens have landed. When he phones, Bea won’t take the call: “Tell him I married a Martian,” she says.
11. Little Man Tate (1991)
Playing the head of an institute for gifted children, Wiest has her sights set on helping a seven-year-old genius (Adam Hann-Byrd) realise his potential. That puts her on a collision course with his sceptical working-class mother (Jodie Foster, making her feature directing debut), who fears that her son’s intelligence is widening the gulf between them. The picture rarely rises above TV-movie level, but Wiest is unafraid to show that her character’s sharp edges extend far beyond her shoulder pads.
10. The Lost Boys (1987)
You can always rely on Wiest to be bright and breezy, even when the chips are down and one of her sons is hanging out with the undead. There’s lots to relish about Joel Schumacher’s emo-teen-horror romp. It left an entire generation wishing they had Wiest as a parent and taught them – in the scene in which she inadvertently dates the head bloodsucker – that vampires can’t enter your home unless you invite them in.
9. Rabbit Hole (2010)
There’s an off-putting slickness to John Cameron Mitchell’s drama about grieving parents (Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart) struggling with the death of their son in a road accident. There’s nothing inauthentic, though, about Weist as Kidman’s mother, who lost her own son 11 years earlier. Grief never disappears, she tells her daughter, but it changes. “It turns into something you can crawl out from under and carry around like a brick in your pocket,” she says, her voice barely rising above a whisper.
8. The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
Allen’s masterpiece and Wiest’s first of five roles for the director. (The dreary September is the only one missing from this list.) As Emma, a sex worker chewing gum in between drags on her cigarette, she has a seen-it-all weariness. But she’s still open to the charms of the pith-helmet-wearing explorer (Jeff Daniels) who has stepped straight off the cinema screen and into Depression-era New York. After he explains why true love compels him to decline the offer of a freebie from Emma and her colleagues, she gives a plaintive sigh: “Are there any other guys like you out there?”
7. Bullets Over Broadway (1994)
The Academy loves to throw awards at actors playing actors (Maggie Smith in California Suite, Cate Blanchett in The Aviator, Renée Zellweger in Judy), so it’s no surprise that Wiest received Oscar number two for raising the roof as the sozzled drama queen Helen Sinclair (“My taste is superb. My eyes are exquisite”). She rages initially at being offered the role of a dowdy housewife (“I never play frumps or virgins!”), but falls into an affair anyway with the playwright-director (John Cusack). The part never advances far beyond caricature, but Wiest still finds nuance in it, as well as pockets of pathos, and Helen looks like Hedda Gabler next to the dimwit moll played by Jennifer Tilly (also Oscar-nominated).
6. The Birdcage (1996)
Guess who’s coming to dinner? A Republican senator (Gene Hackman) and his wife (Wiest), dear friends of the Jeb Bushes and eager to meet the parents of the man their daughter is marrying. What they don’t realise, having never seen La Cage aux Folles (on which The Birdcage is based), is that he has two dads, played by Robin Williams and Nathan Lane, the latter dragging up to pass as female. It’s the “decadent” crockery that first threatens to give the game away. “What interesting china,” remarks Wiest, peering at the patterned bowls as she sits down to dinner. “It looks like young men playing leapfrog. Is it Greek?” Stay for her final scene as she and Hackman dodge the paparazzi in disguise: he looks like a terrified Barbara Cartland, while Wiest, in elbow-length black gloves and leather Waffen-SS cap, resembles a Night Porter cosplayer.
5. Parenthood (1989)
Ron Howard’s ingratiating comedy, which marked the beginning of Steve Martin’s mid-period slide into cosy mediocrity, feels like a sitcom that reached cinemas due to a bureaucratic error. Nevertheless, Wiest “dignifies” the film, as Allen observed. She plays a single mother struggling with a surly son (Joaquin Phoenix, then known as Leaf) and a rebellious daughter (Martha Plimpton). The attitude toward sex feels retrograde – in one scene, Wiest’s character is forced to defend her use of a vibrator. But there’s so much to savour in her performance, such as the note of bitter comic resignation as she shares her wisdom about men (“Ah sweetie, they say [they love you] … and then they come”) or the repertoire of winces and squeaks with which she greets explicit photos of her daughter (“Woah! Here’s something for my wallet”).
4. Edward Scissorhands (1990)
If Tom Hanks is America’s dad, then Wiest has some claim on the role of America’s mom after The Lost Boys, Parenthood and, most of all, this modern-day Frankenstein from Tim Burton. That string of roles turned out to be something of a curse: even after winning two Oscars, her offers were limited to “a nice mom and that’s it”, she said in 2015. As Peg, the Avon lady who makes an improbable house call at the castle where blade-fingered Edward (Johnny Depp) is holed up after the death of his creator, she is a vital component of Burton’s pastel-coloured utopia. Both she and Alan Arkin, as her husband, prove that nice need not be boring. The scene in which Peg soothingly applies makeup to Edward’s scarred face (“Blending is the secret …”) is now an ASMR classic. “So many tingles,” says one YouTube commenter.
3. Independence Day (1983)
No, not that one. Zero aliens here, but something far scarier: an abusive husband who makes life hell for his wife, played by Wiest. Her hopeful smiles – and the facade of levity as she tries to laugh off the goading, which she can detect long before he starts flicking lit matches at her – add up to a detailed portrait of finely observed agony. Wiest had bigger roles further down the line, but perhaps nothing so tragic or taxing. Few actors but her could have persuaded us to buy the melodramatic (and literally explosive) ending. “You keep expecting [her performance] to turn into something trite,” wrote the New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, “but pretty soon you’re forced to admit you’ve never seen anything like it.”
2. Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
The first of two Oscars for best supporting actress – both for Allen films – came Wiest’s way for playing Holly, the former actor, part-time caterer, sometime cocaine addict and the loosest cannon among the three central sisters, who ends the movie paired with hypochondriac Mickey (Allen). The scene in which she and Carrie Fisher, as her friend and co-caterer, jockey to be the last one dropped off on the ride home with a dashing architect is sublimely cringeworthy. (“Naturally, I get taken home first,” she broods in voiceover. “I blew it.”) In other news: it will never stop seeming bizarre that Holly takes Mickey to a punk gig at which the audience is quiet, attentive and seated.
1. Synecdoche, New York (2008)
Who doesn’t love a last-gasp special guest star? (See also: George Clooney in The Thin Red Line, Harry Dean Stanton in The Straight Story, Sean Connery in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.) Wiest shows up only 15 minutes before the end of Charlie Kaufman’s wayward two-hour masterpiece about a theatre director, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who spends decades mounting a full-scale replica of his own life. Initially hired in the role of a housekeeper, Wiest’s Millicent Weems lobbies to play Caden, then persuades him to take the housekeeper role (“I do like to clean,” he concedes) and to let her direct him.
Providing the necessary emotional gut-punch in a work that often veers toward the cerebral, Wiest helps to push this gargantuan beast of a movie over the finish line. The shot of her sitting by a window, sobbing as she gazes out at a child skipping in the street, is exceptionally moving. She also gets to issue Caden with his final stage direction and the last line of the film, telling him simply: “Die.”
English (US) ·