Critical Acclaim

Some extracts of what the Critics thought of Lee and her performances are shown below:-

 
A FACE IN THE CROWD - 1957

Remick's first role was in the movie, A Face in the Crowd. Remick was cast 
as a high school drum majorette who would catch the eye of a radio 
personality and marry him. Remick was sent ahead on location to Arkansas 
where she was taught to twirl a baton and speak with an Arkansas accent. 
Remick practiced baton twirling six hours a day, which came across 
effectively in her performance.

"A Face in the Crowd was released to enthusiastic reviews. Remick shared in 
the glare of praise. Having made such an auspicious film debut with less 
than ten minutes of screen time, Remick had the industry's attention." 
--Rivadue

Remick's small role as the flirtatious high school drum majorette instantly 
brought her to the attention of the film industry. She was very grateful to 
have Elia Kazan as the director of her film debut. She referred to Kazan as 
her favorite director." --Rivadue

"My first film was under the auspices of Elia Kazan...I had this East Coast 
aura which allowed producers and directors to look at me a trifle differently 
than they might have looked at another West Coast face. I was not expected 
to be a dummy." --Remick

"Remick contributes a performance that is sharply and deftly drawn." 
--Saturday Review

"Lee Remick, making her film debut, is an amazingly sexy young baton 
twirler." -- Pauline Kael

THESE THOUSAND HILLS - 1959

"Remick's feisty contempt at being rejected as a "starched wife in a starched
home" for Murray's "starched reputation" was a dramatic highlight in a film
preoccupied with shootouts and mudfights."  --Rivadue

"Remick gets considerable pathos out of her role as the good-hearted
hostess."  -- Variety 

"These Thousand Hills had scenic CinemaScope grandeur and the interesting
sight of Remick gunning down the villain in a mudhole.  But Remick disliked
her performance as a saloon "hostess".  She reluctantly accepted the part
because she was expecting her first child and felt it's be her last
opportunity for a year

WILD RIVER - 1960

"As for the 'love interest', I cast one of the finest younger actresses I
knew, Lee Remick, then at the top of her strength and confidence.  I knew Lee
from A Face in the Crowd, and she was now an even more ravishing beauty--as
well as an exceptional person."    --Elia Kazan

A beautifully photographed, sensitively realized movie filmed in Cleveland,
Tennessee, Remick often named it as her personal favorite.  It reunited her
with Elia Kazan, and gave her a strong role opposite Montgomery Clift, whom
she admired highly. 

"Montgomery Clift was so impressed with Remick that he phoned his sister 'to
extol Lee Remick's virtues,' such as 'balance and maturity.'"    --Rivadue

"Lee Remick's performance is extraordinarily good; the scene where she
implores her lover to marry her is painfully embarrassing as, in real life,
honest and violent emotions often are."  --Films and Filming

"List as a finely shaded, genuinely emotional portrayal that of Lee Remick." 
--The New York Times

"Remick's chemistry with Clift makes their scenes fully moving and
believable."  -- Rivadue

THE DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES - 1962

"Days of Wine and Roses remains Remick's most acclaimed role.  It gave her
the only Oscar nomination she received during her nearly 30-year film career.
 Her performance remains an exceptionally sad and disturbing portrait of a
wife and mother unable to escape an addiction to alcohol.  Remick attended
women's jails and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.  The grim script, made
emotional demands that made Remick want less depressing roles in the future."
 --Rivadue

"Remick and Lemmon spent several nights in 'drunk tanks' studying people
suffering from DTs and watching the effects of seeing pink elephants and
other hallucinations."

"Her transformation from sweet and virginal Kirsten to the never ending drunk
is an absolute masterpiece of characterization development. Director Edwards
stands back and lets it all happen as Lemmon and Remick ignite the screen
with their amazing performances."

Remick's poignant decline and inability to find the strength to stop was a
perfect match for Lemmon's brutally memorable alcoholic frenzies.   Her
climatic insistence to be accepted despite her addiction and Lemmon's tough
stand against her unless she helps herself first,  is one of the most
palpably painfully scenes either actor ever performed.  The long shot of
Remick leaving down a bleak, dark street is unspeakably sad.

"Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick...give complex performances that are forceful,
controlled, and even waywardly charming."  --The Christian Science Monitor

"Remick maintains a core of integrity at the base of her being, even in
scenes of poignant despair and degradation."  --The Hollywood Reporter

"Miss Remick, in a much less clearly written part, and with the nuisance of
her extreme good looks, is first rate." --The New Yorker

"Miss Remick managed to fill the role with alarming effectiveness." 
--Courier Journal and Times

THE WHEELER DEALERS - 1963

"Hilarious dialogue and good direction...it will establish Lee Remick as a
Doris Day." --Hollywood Reporter

"Norman Norell designed Miss Remick's wardrobe, but God gave her those
astonishingly blue eyes."  --The New Yorker

BABY, THE RAIN MUST FALL - 1965

"Baby, the Rain Must Fall" contains one of Remick's most appealing
performances as a mother of a young girl who devotes herself to her ex-con
husband.  Remick makes the most lasting impression in the film.  It's a
hauntingly sad performance."  -- Rivadue

"Remick has a lovely ability to express inner calm."  --Washington Post

Remick is vividly alive in spontaneously appearing scenes with her daughter."
 -- Variety

"Remick is so pretty and so loving."  --The New Yorker

"Remick is ideal in the role; for all the simplicity of her character, she
makes a striking, very moving impression as the always hopeful if wistful
wife of the rambunctious McQueen.  Remick's most poignant moment is when she
tells a woman how happy and optimistic she is about the future; it is clear
that it's a very fragile form of wish-spinning she's barely concealing

WAIT UNTIL DARK - 1966

At the peak of demand as a film actress, Remick forfeited substantial money
in potential film roles to do the Broadway play, Wait Until Dark.  Remick
visited the Lighthouse Foundation for the Blind to research her role.

"Wait Until Dark opened on February 2, 1966 to overwhelmingly favorable
reviews for Remick and the play.  The show was an immediate sellout and kept
Remick on stage for a year playing to packed houses.  Remick was nominated
for a Tony."  -- Rivadue

Lee Remick has a marathon role as the blind wife, and she plays it
wonderfully well."  --New York Journal -American

"Played with spirit and humor by the delightful Lee Remick.  Miss Remick, who
is notable for skill as an actress in addition to her charm and good looks,
makes the heroine a believably valiant and appealing young woman of
distinction."  --New York Post

"Miss Remick simulates blindness very well."  --New York Times

"The play brings the beautiful Lee Remick her first genuine Broadway success.
 She plays the blind girl, and she turns in a masterful job in what must be a
most difficult role.  Wait Until dark is a dandy shocker."  --UPI

"Miss Remick brings natural intelligence to the role--in a word, she's
great."  -- WCBS Radio

THE DETECTIVE - 1968

"Remick was cast as Frank Sinatra's seriously straying wife.  As she found
with Montgomery Clift, Remick appreciated Sinatra for his ability to listen
in each scene.  'Many actors seem just to be waiting for you to get through
so they can make themselves seen.  But (Sinatra) is always there with you.'"
--Rivadue

"Lee Remick is very good indeed."  --New York

"Repeated plot digression--made bearable by the fact that it involves
top-featured Lee Remick." --Variety

"Remick's performance, full of ambivalent self-questioning, creates the same
kind of sympathy she engendered in The Days of Wine and Roses.  When asked
why she took the role, Remick replied, "'I did it precisely because I don't
really look like that kind of person.  They are sexy girls, but they don't
really lean on it--in fact, lean away from it, which somehow becomes sexier

HARD CONTRACT - 1968

In the spring of 1968 Remick was on location in Brussels for Hard Contract. 
She was instantly attracted to 38-year old British assistant director William
"Kip" Gowans.  During the three months of shooting throughout Europe a
romance developed. 

"It was one of those ill-fated projects I've never been able to understand. 
It had a good script, a good cast...a fine director.  But the whole
thing...was an unmitigated disaster--except that I met a handsome young
Englishman named Kip Gowans, who was assistant director.  We were married a
year later."  --Remick

"Lee Remick is excellent as a restless jet-set butterfly."  --Cue

Miss Remick delivers an attractive performance as a jet-set chick who breaks
down Coburn's cool and shakes his calm hand as he stalks his triple prey.

JENNIE: Lady Randolph Churchill -1974

"Her most notable achievement was the 1974 British series, Jennie: Lady
Randolph Churchill, which was long a favored project of hers to realize.  For
years Remick read as much as she could find about the life of Lady Churchill.

The film was a particular challenge since much of it was shot out of
sequence, requiring Remick to play different ages (18 to 67) back to back. 

The series inspired unanimous critical praise and popularity in England, and
Remick was named Best Actress by the British Academy of the Film and
Television Arts.  The award was presented to her by Princess Anne."  --Rivadue

"I had been intrigued with Jennie, and I'd read everything I could find about
her-- letters, diaries, journals, old newspaper clippings.  Jennie interested
me because she was a fantastically dynamic woman who violated all the rules
of Victorian England and managed to get away with it."  --Lee Remick

"I'll never forget when we assembled for the first rehearsal for Jennie.  The
room was vibrating with nerves...we were sitting round a table with a script
in hour hands and the thought of several months work ahead of us, and all of
the time you were wondering, what are they going to think of me?"  --Lee
Remick

"Lee Remick as Jennie is all fire and light, an enchanting actress if I ever
saw one."  --Stage and TV Today

"Remick is not only beautiful, she is truly one of the great actresses of our
times."  --The London Evening News

"Jennie is who Lee Remick was born to portray.  She is an ideal choice not
only for her charm and beauty but for her dramatic skills."  --Variety

"Remick as Jennie has so much spirit to her, such sexy dash and spirit...most
of the other women in the cast have been little more than ciphers."  --Los
Angeles Times

BREAKING UP - 1978

"Competent, sensitive account of how one woman (Remick) struggles to put her
life back together after her fifteen-year marriage ends."

"It is definitely Miss Remick's show."  --The New York Daily News

"Miss Remick, once again transcending her fragile good looks, manages a
remarkably forceful performance."  --The New York Times

NUTCRACKER: MONEY, MADNESS, MURDER - 1987

"In 1987, one of Remick's finest telefilm roles, steeped in psychotic
grandeur... was the ABC miniseries Nutcracker: Money, Madness, Murder. 
Remick's red-blooded portrayal of real life social hellion and murder
conspirator Frances Schreuder was among her best."  --Rivadue 

"In Nutcracker, Remick astonished.  It is a relentless performance.  Not for
a minute does she connive at our sympathies."  --New York

"Remick, cobalt eyes flashing throughout, convinces utterly."  --Los Angeles
Herald-Examiner

"The performance of Nutcracker star, Lee Remick, is so powerfully persuasive,
that its virtually impossible to envision anyone else in the role of Frances
Bradshaw Schreuder."  --Corel All-Movie Guide

"A powerful characterization of a woman trapped within a warped and steadily
deteriorating mind--incapable of love and distant from reality."  --Chicago
Sun- Times

"More than anything else, it is Ms. Remick who holds things together,
confidently and with unflagging flair.  For a performer who made her Broadway
stage debut in 1953, Remick is demonstrating the years have been kind and
generous in more ways than one."  --New York Times

"If (Remick) had been born with Bette Davis eyes or Katharine Hepburn
cheekbones, she might long ago have been recognized as one of this country's
most outstanding dramatic actresses.  But Remick happens to be all-American
pretty...one result is that she is frequently underestimated.  (This)
miniseries...should correct matters."  --New York Times

In an interview about the role, Remick says of Schreuder, "In my view, the
sickness about this woman is that she was totally narcissistic.  Only her
needs in this world mattered."  --Lee Remick

"Nutcracker was Remick's favorite telefilm role.  It is certainly her most
memorable one."  --Rivadue

 LOVE LETTERS - 1990

"Having recently been through a difficult siege of cancer treatments, Remick
returned to acting in June of 1990.  As she had begun her career on stage, it
would now, unknowingly, conclude with a stage role in the play, Love
Letters."  --Rivadue