The dingbat is dead, and I'm sure she wouldn't mind me saying that.
"Jean Stapleton, 90; played TV’s memorable Edith Bunker" by Bruce Weber | New York Times, June 02, 2013
NEW YORK — Jean Stapleton, the character actress whose portrayal of a slow-witted, big-hearted, and submissive — up to a point — housewife on the groundbreaking series “All in the Family” made her, along with Mary Tyler Moore and Bea Arthur, not only one of the foremost women in television comedy in the 1970s but a symbol of emergent feminism in American popular culture, died Friday at her home in New York City. She was 90....
Ms. Stapleton was an accomplished theater actress with a few television credits when the producer Norman Lear, who had seen her in the musical “Damn Yankees” on Broadway, asked her to audition for a series. The audition, for a character named Edith Bunker, changed her life.
The show, initially called “Those Were the Days,” was Lear’s adaptation of an English series called “Till Death Us Do Part,” about a working-class couple in east London who held reactionary and racist views.
Yes, but it was also a time when you could speak more openly and when situation comedies actually addressed real issues like war and peace -- unlike today's pos comedies filled with nothing but sexual innuendo and political correctness.
It took shape slowly before “All in the Family” was first broadcast in January 1971.
For three or four months, hampered by mixed reviews, it struggled to find an audience, but when it did, it became one of the most popular shows in television, finishing first in the Nielsen ratings for five straight seasons and winning four consecutive Emmy Awards for outstanding comedy series. Ms. Stapleton won three Emmys of her own, in 1971, ’72, and ’78.
“All in the Family” was set in Queens. Most of the action took place in the well-worn but comfortable living room of the Bunker family, led by an irascible loading-dock worker named Archie whose attitudes toward anyone not exactly like him — that is, white, male, conservative, and rabidly patriotic — were condescending, smug, and demonstrably foolish.
Played by Carroll O’Connor, Archie bullied his wife; patronized his daughter, Gloria (Sally Struthers); and infuriated and was infuriated by his son-in-law, a liberal student (Rob Reiner) whom he called Meathead....
But Archie was essentially harmless. Critics routinely referred to him as “a lovable bigot,” as if such a thing were possible.
Not to defend his views; however, Archie was more ignorant than anything else, and anyone who ever watched the show (last two minutes) realized he had a heart (about one minute in).
Edith loved him, certainly, though he referred to her, in her presence, as a dingbat and was perpetually telling her to shut up. “Stifle yourself,” was how he put it.
Edith was none too bright, not intellectually, anyway, which, in the dynamic of the show was the one thing about her that invited Archie’s outward scorn. Ms. Stapleton gave Edith a high-pitched nasal delivery, a frequently baffled expression, and a hustling, servile gait that was almost a canter, especially when she was in a panic to get dinner on the table or to bring Archie a beer.
But in Edith, Ms. Stapleton also found vast wells of compassion and kindness, a natural delight in the company of other people, and a sense of fairness and justice that irritated her husband and also put him to shame. She was an enormously appealing character, a favorite of audiences, who no doubt saw in the ordinariness of her life a bit of their own, and in her noble spirit a kind of inspiration....
She was a person without malice.
Related:
"Everyone is someone, if you love them
Love can make a hero from a chump
Love can make a useless man seem useful
Love can grow a flower from a dump
If you dare to reach out to a stranger
You may find you've found a friend indeed
'Cause everyone is someone if you love them
'Cause love is something everybody needs."
See: Edith Writes A Song
Always brings a tear to my eye.
When the issues of “All in the Family” centered on Edith — as when she went through menopause, beset with hilarious mood swings — she became an emblem of all housewives....
“What Edith represents is the housewife who is still in bondage to the male figure, very submissive and restricted to the home,” Ms. Stapleton, a confirmed if not necessarily outspoken feminist, said in an interview in The New York Times in 1972. (The show ran until 1979, and a continuation, “Archie Bunker’s Place,” that starred O’Connor but not the rest of the cast, lingered until 1983.) “She is very naïve, and she kind of thinks through a mist, and she lacks the education to expand her world.”
Yet as the ’70s went on, and the women’s movement gained a hold in the public mind, Edith gained a measure of strength and self-respect that deepened her character movingly.
In one episode, against Archie’s wishes, she took a volunteer job as a “Sunshine Lady,” providing company and support for the residents of an old-age home, and when Archie tried to force her to quit because he didn’t want her working out of the house, her explosive adamancy took him, and the show’s viewers, by surprise, a triumph for her character that made the episode among the show’s most affecting.
“A question I am most asked by the press is, ‘Do you think Edith would support the ERA?’ ” Ms. Stapleton said in 1978, in accepting an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from Emerson College in Boston. She concluded, “Of course Edith Bunker would support ratification of the 27th Amendment to the Constitution, because it is a matter of simple justice — and Edith is the soul of justice.”
Ms. Stapleton was a singer as well, which might be surprising to those who knew Ms. Stapleton only from “All in the Family,” which opened every week with Edith and Archie singing “Those Were the Days,” Ms. Stapleton lending a screechy half of the duet that was all Edith.
Ms. Stapleton had a long history of charming musical performances. She was in the original casts of “Bells are Ringing” on Broadway in the 1950s and “Funny Girl,” with Barbra Streisand, in the 1960s, in which she sang “If a Girl Isn’t Pretty” and “Find Yourself a Man.” Off-Broadway in 1991, she played Julia Child, singing the recipe for chocolate cake in the mini-musical “Bon Appétit.” On television, she sang with the Muppets....
Ms. Stapleton bowed out of “All in the Family” as a series regular in 1979, but she appeared in several episodes the next year, after the title of the show had been changed to “Archie Bunker’s Place.” The opening episode of the second season of “Archie Bunker’s Place” dealt with the aftermath of Edith’s death.
After “All in the Family,” Ms. Stapleton purposely sought out roles that would separate her from Edith, and in so doing she led a busy and varied, if less celebrated, performing life. She turned down a chance to star as Jessica Fletcher in “Murder, She Wrote.”
But she appeared as a guest on numerous television series, including “Murphy Brown,” and did turns in films (“You’ve Got Mail,” “Michael”) and made several television movies, including “Eleanor: First Lady of the World” (1982) in which she starred as Eleanor Roosevelt.
"Perhaps the most significant work of her later life, however, was Off Broadway. After “All in the Family,” it was Ms. Stapleton’s lot to live in Edith’s wake. In 1977, she was one of 45 International Women’s Year commissioners who convened the National Women’s Conference in Houston, a federally financed gathering of 2000 delegates from the 50 states, for the purpose of helping to form national policy on women’s issues. On the third day of the conference, Ms. Stapleton left the commissioners’ seating area and wandered onto the conference floor among the delegates. She was besieged. “Look, it’s Edith!” delegates and photographers shouted. “Look, it’s Edith!”
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She will live for eternity thanks to film, videotape, and disk.
UPDATE:
"Edith Bunker: High-pitched herald of change" June 05, 2013
It’s hard to imagine a modern TV show with a character quite like Edith Bunker. Portrayed by Jean Stapleton, who died last week at 90, Edith was the working-class wife at the center of “All in the Family,” a sitcom that examined the fraught racial and class politics of the 1970s. Edith wasn’t modern, sassy, or empowered. She also wasn’t one of those hot TV wives that you often see married to sitcom schlubs. She was an artifact of the ’70s, a woman who was loyal to her prejudiced husband, offering only mild resistance in a grating, high-pitched voice. But she was also warm and deceptively wise, having learned a thing or two about life from her years in the kitchen.
The show was an artifact of its time, too, and Stapleton’s broad performance feels jarring compared to today’s more understated and ironic comedic styles. But as portrayed by Stapleton, Edith represented both the unseen virtues and untapped potential of middle-aged housewives in the era of women’s liberation. Stapleton’s ability to add an element of self-awareness to Edith’s submission helped “All in the Family” connect with viewers and become an important cultural touchstone. If Edith could understand Archie Bunker, and sometimes even make him change, then America could, too.
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Once again, the Globe missed the point.
