IN Nicholas Ray’s The King of Kings, Mary, the Mother of God, was played by an Irish, Siobhán McKenna. A Spanish actress, Carmen Sevilla, was Mary Magdalene. A miniseries released
as a feature film, Jesus of Nazareth employed Olivia Hussey, a very young Mary. Anne Bancroft was Mary Magdalene. McKenna; Sevilla; Hussey, who was half-Argentinian; and Bancroft, who was Italian-American, were all Catholic. Or, at least, raised Catholic.
Mel Gibson, a Catholic belonging to the group known as Traditionalist Catholic, directed The Passion of the Christ. Seen as radical, the film would have Maia Morgenstern, a Jewish actress from Romania, in the role of Mary. The name of the actress means “Morning Star,” an appellation connected with Mary. The press and the public made much of this name and its implications to the movie. Monica Bellucci, an Italian actress, played Magdalene. Belucci, in many interviews she did for The Passion of Christ, declared herself to be an agnostic.
Just like the role of Christ, the role of Virgin Mary is one considered to be delicate. The pressure to play Christ is so big that the search for the actor to represent the man considered the Son of God by believers is almost equal to the weight of the film about him. Next to Christ, the role of Mary is seen extra-cinematically as a difficult one. Would an actress known for her amoral ways be assigned the role? Do we need to vet the inner character of an actress so she could be announced as deserving of the role of Mary? Couldn’t the persona of Mary be considered just that, a role that merely needs interpretation? It is interesting, therefore, to look at how actresses survived and subverted the role of one of the greatest women, if not the greatest, that ever lived in this world.
If a film by its technology is inescapably inter-national—one that is devoid of citizenship and freed from cultures—then Hollywood is infinitely amoral. It has actresses, and actresses and their values were and are not crucial to getting a role in any film.
In the 1950s and even 1960s there appeared to be one clear rule for any actress to be considered for the role of Virgin Mary: She should be ethereally and eternally beautiful. The models for Mary came in the form of countless paintings and sculptures. The allure and beauty we attribute to Mary could only be answered by the proliferation of lovely faces all willing to act, all willing to do anything for a role.
If beauty—physical beauty—is the main consideration for choosing an actress to be Virgin Mary, then Linda Darnell qualified, indeed, for the character. In the late-1940s, a poll was conducted and Darnell, Hedy Lamarr, Ingrid Bergman and Gene Tierney were listed at the top of the heap. They formed a group whose faces and features would remain as templates for women as saints, sinners, queens and eternal virgins. Linda Darnell would play roles that were insignificant until she played Mary in The Song of Bernadette. This was 1943. World War II was raging. By 1944 Darnell was one of the hot pin-up girls for the lonely soldiers on the Atlantic, as well as the Pacific. By that year, too, she started getting good and hot roles, most of them about women who brought ruin to men and the family they founded.
Linda Darnell would die, trapped in her home, during a fire.
Olivia Hussey became part of the consciousness of young boys and girls, and of critics, as well as literature teachers, when she starred in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet opposite Leonard Whiting. Both were in their teens at the time. Both were fulfilling the reality of their respective roles: Romeo and Juliet were teenagers. Both had devastating good looks. When Zeffireli went into Jesus of Nazareth, a project that was meant for TV, the director secured again the actress Olivia Hussey. Again, the actress with the director reclaimed the lost fact that Mary was, indeed, a young woman when an archangel announced to her a task that would not only change her but alter the movement of the universe and shift the nature of our sinfulness—at least those who are covered by belief systems that accept the notion of the Fall of Man.
Olivia Hussey was part-Argentinian and had the dark features of those from the area of Jerusalem—or of areas that glory our imagination about the biographies of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. In the series, Hussey was aged through prosthetics. Whether it was intentional or not, the wrinkles that she showed at the foot of the Cross seemed translucent. Her youth looked at us from those crystal lines gilding her face. Stabat Mater. This was the Mary that, we were told, never really grew old. This was the Mary that was always full of grace and was blessed among women.
Placed with a very gaunt Robert Powell as Christ, Olivia Hussey as Mary, eternally youthful, made us think and rethink about the extraordinary burden placed on an ordinary, young woman who, one day, was told she would be the Mother of God. We wondered in that moment she was swooning and grieving while looking at her dying son, whether it was fair to do this to someone so young. If the beauty of Mary could be equated to the spirit in her inner self, then Olivia Hussey is the most beautiful Blessed Virgin Mary ever to grace the silver screen.
Maia Morgenstern, a Jewish actress, benefited from the fearless and fearful deconstruction made by Mel Gibson of the life and passion of the Christ. Onscreen, Morgenstern looks massive.
She is Mary of the Pieta, the figure that was made bigger so as to accomplish the vision of an artist that Mary, in her strength and soul, had the heft to bear the Christ. Morgenstern’s Mary is full of grace and bravery. In a scene where she is looking for her son, Morgenstern as Mary, as Mother, is made to sense where her Son is. Against the pavement and against the wall, she could feel the energy of the One who came from her womb. It is a scene that is part-human, part-animal.
For all the controversy that attended the public reception of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, the film remained, up to this day, as the film showing Mary in her human capacity and valor, which are the same attributes that made her endure the most impossible task to be given to a woman/mother: to give birth to a Son who is God and endure the death and suffering of that Man/God.
Maia Morgenstern was the Blessed Mother in 2004. In 1994 Morgenstern was Edith Stein, the German Jewish philosopher and atheist who converted to Catholicism and became Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, a discalced Carmelite nun. Edith Stein was canonized as saint.