Ellen Greene Movies
Supercharged American stage and screen actress Ellen Greene was educated at Ryder College. After her leading-lady film debut in Next Stop Greenwich Village (1978), Ellen's career was steady but unspectacular until she was cast as airheaded heroine Audrey in the 1982 Broadway musical hit Little Shop of Horrors. She was among the few cast members to recreate her role for the 1986 screen version; so winning was her performance in this film and the subsequent Talk Radio (1988), that critics and pundits predicted major stardom. So far as Ellen was concerned, she was already a star, and behaved accordingly. Cast as a neurotic rock 'n' roller-turned-evangelist in the 1989 TV movie Glory! Glory!, Ms. Greene became difficult and demanding, throwing her weight around in a manner suggesting that she been on top long enough to be permitted this behavior. Evidently her imperiousness paid off; Glory! Glory! was an excellent effort, thanks in no small part to the towering performance of its leading lady. After Glory! Glory!, Ellen Greene continued to get good roles on stage and in television; in 1992, the actress joined several other musical comedy veterans as a voice artist for the animated cartoon feature Rock a Doodle. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
An aspiring actor leaves his home in Brooklyn for adulthood in Manhattan in Paul Mazursky's loosely autobiographical comedy-drama. In 1953, would-be thesp Larry Lapinsky (Lenny Baker) flees his hysterically clinging mother (Shelley Winters) for a $25-a-month (!!) apartment in bohemian Greenwich Village. Between Method-like acting classes, a movie audition (where he meets a posturing actor played by Jeff Goldblum), and work at a juice bar, Larry hangs out with a circle of archetypal Village eccentrics, including suicidal Anita (Lois Smith), womanizing poet Robert (Christopher Walken), and flamboyantly un-closeted homosexual Bernstein (Antonio Fargas), as he negotiates the pitfalls of love and sex with liberated girlfriend Sarah (Ellen Greene). The fallout over the group's ill-fated love affairs, and the Lapinskys' inopportune surprise visits, finally lead Larry to make peace with his past as he contemplates his future in Hollywood. Mazursky looks back to the 1950s as in such other 1970s films as American Graffiti, Grease, and TV's Happy Days, but his Greenwich Village life is less a time of lost pre-'60s innocence than a precursor of things to come. Sex, Larry jokes, may be serious, but it is also an omnipresent fact of life rather than something to be feared or repressed; love is the real problem. Even as Larry's friends strike various poses, they are all out to do their own thing as best they can. Critical response to Mazursky's nostalgia trip was mixed when the film was released, but the performances, particularly Winters, were admired. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Lenny Baker, Shelley Winters, (more)
