"I'M AN ACTRESS"

In Lee's first movie, "A Face In The Crowd," she played a predatory teenager bent on seducing a radio star. In her second film, "A Long Hot Summer," she played a flirtatious and teasing wife. Lee's least favorite role came in her third film, "These Thousand Hills," in which she played a saloon girl. "Anatomy of a Murder," Lee's fourth film, made her a star and seemed to cement her reputation as an actress who could play the "sex-driven little voluptuaries".

Donald W. La Badie summed up her persona with this comment, "U.S. and foreign critics have been gratified that a girl who looks like a kitten on the white keys should have been able to play so many variations on the sick cat who prowls the dark ones."

Is it any wonder then that a few young college boys watching Lee's characterization of a backwoods Tennessee girl in the film "Wild River" became somewhat confused?

"When I was doing "Wild River," Gadge (director Elia Kazan) had me work without make-up, my hair hanging down to my shoulders and wearing sneakers. One day when we were just outside of Cleveland, Tennessee, I was in costume for the role, wearing a bedspread made into a dress. After we finished shooting I passed some college kids who had come to watch.

"Later that night my phone rang and it was one of the college boys saying he had a bet with the boys at school that it really was me they had seen that afternoon. I said it was and asked why there was any doubt. 'Last time we saw you in a picture you were wearing slacks and high heels and were very sexy,' he said. 'Tell me, Miss Remick, what's happened to you since that picture?' They seem to forget," Lee said with a quiet humor, "that I'm an actress."

Source: This Week Magazine, The Notorious Adventures of a Nice Girl in Hollywood, by Joe Hyams, 10/15/61

-- by Allison