![]() ![]() You know what I said to him? ‘No, thank you.’ I was scared back then. “He walked up to my front door and handed me the greatest role ever written. ![]() “Tennessee Williams wrote ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ for me,” she says in the highly burnished American English typical of films of the ‘30s and ‘40s. Leaning against a stool, she launches into a long-forgotten chapter of theater history that endured for Bankhead as a heartbreaking memory. Gone is Rhoda’s nasal twang, replaced by Bankhead’s smoky contralto. Lombardo has Bankhead revisit her Technicolor life in the play, and at the moment, Harper is personifying the actress’ regrets in a spare rehearsal room across the street from the theater. Recording a single line of dialogue for the British horror film should have taken five minutes, but instead took eight hours, as the over-60 Bankhead - ailing, drug- and drink-addicted and still entertainingly self-involved - mangled the flow of words in that long-ago session. ![]() Matthew Lombardo’s play was inspired by a tape he discovered of Bankhead’s looping session for 1965’s “Die! Die! My Darling!,” which turned out to be her last big-screen appearance. Harper’s latest role is the outrageous Southern actress Tallulah Bankhead, whom she resurrects in the Pasadena Playhouse’s world-premiere production of “Looped,” opening Tuesday. These days, the actress formerly known as Rhoda sports personas vastly different from the straight-talking New Yorker she created for television’s classic sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and its spinoff, “Rhoda.” Three decades later, Valerie Harper still hears “Hi, Rhoda” when she walks down the street, even though the characters the four-time Emmy Award-winner plays now are far more complicated - real women whose lives were indeed stranger than fiction. ![]()
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