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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarky Oracle!" data-source="post: 97047" data-attributes="member: 57984">A Legend with Legs, Part 2:Two years passed between the final episode of Police Woman (“I just didn’t want to sign another four-year contract”) and her unforgettable appearance in Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill. Dickinson played Kate Miller, a sleek, elegantly dressed, unsatisfied wife who embarks on a daytime tryst with a stranger. The erotic content is far more intense than anything she had done before, and the fact that most of her 20 or so minutes of screen time are acted in silence makes her performance all the more remarkable. Dickinson asked De Palma if he “wanted to put in dialogue in the museum scene, and he said he’d written lines, but when he saw the rushes, he knew that they weren’t needed. And he was right. He knew exactly what he wanted.”The film opens with Dickinson in the shower, slowly pleasuring herself while her clueless husband shaves at the bathroom sink. Except for her eloquent face—and at 48 she was at the peak of her beauty—the scene is played with a body double, but it’s her face that delivers the erotic charge. Later, after unburdening her discontent to Michael Caine, who plays the film’s psychiatrist/psycho-killer, she has that glorious scene in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (actually filmed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art). Dressed resplendently in a white dress, white trench coat, and off-white kid gloves, Dickinson alternately flirts with, runs from, pursues, then loses a handsome stranger in dark sunglasses. She searches for her lost glove, which the stranger has found and uses to lure her into his cab. They end up at his apartment. Next we see her waking up alone and writing a note of appreciation to her mysterious lover. She silently dresses, and it’s De Palma’s genius that the camera watches her, both as voyeur and as lover, as she slowly puts on her clothes. The reverse striptease is excruciatingly intimate, and Angie unself-consciously holds the gaze of the camera.There were some uncomfortable moments on the set, however, because of friction between Dickinson and De Palma’s then wife, Nancy Allen, who stars in the film as a high-priced call girl. “His wife hated me because I asked her to stop smoking in a small room … I mean, hated me. And the director didn’t want to hear about two bitches bickering!”Dressed to Kill was a sensation at the box office, in part because of the controversy over the movie’s mingling of sex and violence. Several feminist organizations, such as Women Against Pornography, picketed it, but the National Association of Theater Owners named Dickinson Female Star of the Year.It’s her favorite of all her film roles, because, as Dickinson says, “I’m good in it, and it’s a great part. I’m sorry I didn’t try to go for an Academy Award for that role. I think I could have won it. But the studio didn’t want to put up the campaign, and I felt that I didn’t want to go for a supporting-actor award, because I’d always thought of myself as the lead, even though by then I wasn’t getting starring roles. I regret it now. Of course, De Palma is to blame for the great performance.”<img src="http://basementrejects.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/dressed-to-kill-shower.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /> Dickinson’s most enduring passion may be poker. “I played every Saturday night instead of going to the Daisy, or whatever was popular at the time,” she says. Regular Sunday-night games at the Sinatras’ included Jack Lemmon and his wife, the Sammy Cahns, and the Gregory Pecks, though Sinatra himself never liked to play. “Frank never played poker,” Dickinson explains. “Frank’s game was the dice. He’d be going great at the crap tables, but he was an impatient man,” and he liked the continual action of craps and baccarat. “Dean Martin was a professional poker player” at one time in his hometown of Steubenville, Ohio, she says, “but he got into a lot of trouble, and they broke his hands.” The reason poker is so popular now, she believes, “is that they play Texas Hold ’Em. You’ve heard of the dumbing down of America? This is the dumbing down of poker.”Johnny Carson, who was a close friend for many years, was “a great cardplayer. He was an amateur magician.” Dickinson was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show, where she ad-libbed her most famous remark. “I had a funny outfit on—funny to Johnny,” she recalls, “and he said, ‘Tell me, do you dress for women, or do you dress for men?’ And I said, ‘I dress for women. I undress for men.’”<img src="http://i103.photobucket.com/albums/m127/tubesteak69/angie_johnny_orson.jpg~original" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /> At one point she and Carson came close to having a romantic relationship, but the timing was never right. And Dickinson has always seemed to prefer men of action. David Janssen, the brooding, hard-drinking star of The Fugitive, was “a great gentleman, a great date, and a great love.” While on the set of Wild Palms, Dickinson found producer-director Oliver Stone highly attractive. “He’s so magnetic, it was unnerving.” She calls it “the John Wayne syndrome—that quiet presence.” Earlier, she had been involved with the director Richard Brooks (Blackboard Jungle, In Cold Blood, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). But sometimes, as she says, “excitement can be a pain in the ass.” According to John Boorman, she and Brooks once went off on a tramp steamer together. “We wanted to be alone,” she told Boorman, “but after three days we couldn’t stand each other. Brooks stayed in the cabin and wrote a script [for Elmer Gantry], which he then won an Academy Award for. And he didn’t even thank me!”Dickinson, who’s an active member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, loves the movies. “I’m one of the few members of my generation who still gets in line for them. I like to see them all.” She believes that a certain femininity is missing in contemporary actresses, with the exception of Nicole Kidman and Charlize Theron. “When they’re too tough,” she says, “it just doesn’t appeal.” Are there any actresses she would rush off to see? “I like Hilary [Swank] very much. She’s extraordinary.” She’s also impressed with relative newcomer Rachel McAdams, especially her performance in Wedding Crashers. “She’s so great,” Dickinson says. “Every once in a while that happens, and you root for her not to f**k up. Charlize Theron does it for me, though—so great in Monster. I would never even dream of looking like her—she’s breathtaking.”As for her own appeal, Dickinson says, “I wasn’t considered beautiful, not to the executives. I think I was just too unusual. I didn’t fit. Besides, it’s hard to define beauty, but I think one of its qualities is a generosity, a reaching out. I think I had that.” She recalls that, in the l950s, “everybody looked alike. Our hair was the same. I looked like Lana Turner sometimes; sometimes I looked like Esther Williams—the dress down to here, the ugliest fucker! It wasn’t until the 60s you were allowed some individuality.”<img src="https://i.pinimg.com/474x/df/c2/0e/dfc20e95198b668d39c382f847aa844c--old-hollywood-classic-hollywood.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />At a recent dinner in Beverly Hills, Dickinson found herself seated next to Clint Eastwood. They were talking about how relieved they were not to be fussed over anymore by countless makeup artists and hairdressers on movie sets. “I’m glad that’s over with,” Eastwood confided to Angie. “I’m not saying I’ll never act again, but I don’t miss that part of it.” Dickinson, however, admitted, “You get so used to being fussed over that when it stops you feel naked just going to the supermarket. You end up obsessed with your looks. If an elevator doesn’t have a mirror in it, I’m finished. I don’t care who you are, when you get to be past 50, it all changes. That’s the way it is. It isn’t wrong—we want to look at young, beautiful things. I don’t want to see two old people screwing,” she says with a laugh.Dickinson guards her time and her privacy and is still coping with the heartbreak caused when her daughter committed suicide on January 4, 2007. Nikki Bacharach, who was 40 when she died, had Asperger’s syndrome, a neurobiological disorder first described in 1944 by a Viennese doctor, Hans Asperger, but not widely recognized until the mid-1990s. It’s characterized by normal and sometimes extremely high I.Q., deficiencies in social skills (stemming from the inability to read nonverbal cues), extreme literal-mindedness, difficulty handling changes in routine, and a tendency to become obsessed with things. Another feature is extreme sensitivity to noise, which especially plagued Nikki, who was tormented by the sounds of the omnipresent helicopters flying over Los Angeles. “We have so many disgusting sounds,” Nikki would complain, asking that the air-conditioning be turned off because she found it too noisy. “It’s horrible and I dread every single day, except Sunday.” “She just went crazy with it,” Dickinson says. “Believe me, we played music, but when the helicopter came over, we jacked up the Pavarotti.” Dickinson even thought about selling her beautiful home in Coldwater Canyon and finding a quieter spot.Some experts consider Asperger’s a high-functioning form of autism, and in fact many people with it do manage careers and families of their own, but Nikki was also hobbled by diminishing eyesight, a result of her premature birth. The greatest trial of her life, Nikki firmly believed, was her hospitalization when she was 14, when her Asperger’s syndrome had not yet been identified. Hospitalization is not a prescribed treatment for the disorder, and Nikki held her father responsible for her 10 years of incarceration. “I don’t want to be unkind to Burt,” Dickinson says, “because I’m very respectful of him, as a person and an artist, as a former husband and as a father to Nikki, but he had no real connection with her. She was too difficult for him, but it was his loss. He put her in a hospital, and it was the worst thing you can do. He had the wrong goal in mind: he thought that she was just a difficult child, and I was just a terrible mother, indulging her. He didn’t know there was actually a syndrome. He thought, Just get her away from Angie’s indulgence and she’ll shape up. But, of course, the doctors didn’t have a clue. He does regret it,” she adds wistfully, “and he has said, ‘I’m terribly sorry. Had I known, I never would have done that.’ Nevertheless, it destroyed her.”Nikki had a difficult time forgiving her father, because holding on to ideas and emotions is part of the syndrome. “Since then, Burt was very supportive,” Dickinson says, and made repeated attempts to move back into his daughter’s life, but Nikki “resented him so much, she wouldn’t let him back in. He kept telling her, ‘I’m sorry.’ But once she got on a thing, it was very hard We were once coming up with titles for a book, and she floored me with the title she came up with: I’ve Never Healed from Anything. Whatever she’d been wounded by, she never healed. It’s a terrible syndrome because they can’t let go. Medication can slow it down a little.”Nikki had her own apartment in Los Angeles but spent a great deal of time living with her mother, skinny-dipping in their pool, watching DVDs at home or going to screenings at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Like her mother, she loved the movies. “I love her career,” Nikki would say, going on to recite dialogue from her favorite Angie Dickinson film, Big Bad Mama.<img src="https://unobtainium13.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/angie-and-shatner.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /> Dickinson was clearly proud of her daughter, and, as she says, “You wouldn’t have wanted to see her gifts ignored.” Like a lot of people with Asperger’s, Nikki was extremely articulate, even lyrical. She once described listening to one of her father’s songs as “going to heaven on a velvet slide.” Dickinson realizes that she “became less viable about the time Nikki needed me so strongly. It wasn’t a sacrifice. Would I have been out working? Yes, I would have been doing plays in Chicago or something like that, if I hadn’t had a daughter who needed me. But I did. I didn’t have the gift of free time.” In the days and weeks after Nikki’s suicide, Dickinson’s close friends helped her to survive her grief. Gregory Peck’s widow, Veronique, introduced her to playwright Tony Kushner at a literary event she hosted. “He read a piece about loss, about a death in his family, and it was the truest thing I’d ever heard. I asked for a copy of it. I miss Nikki so much, but it was her decision. The world was too harsh a place for her.”In some ways, Dickinson’s career has been one of great film moments: teasing John Wayne in Rio Bravo, pummeling Lee Marvin’s chest in The Killers, betraying John Vernon in Point Blank, seducing and being seduced in that great little silent film at the heart of Dressed to Kill. But when asked what she considers her greatest role, she says without hesitation, “I have yet to do it.” Bruce Wagner says, “I was always so moved by how Angie prioritized her life. I will always think of her as a kind of rose, in a luminous black-and-white photo taken at Chasen’s or Romanoff’s. There’s a part of her that’s a phantom, and a part of her that’s very much alive. I don’t know how else to put it.”<a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/bios/sam_kashner/search.html?contributorName=Sam%20Kashner" target="_blank">Sam Kashner</a> is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.<img src="https://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/angie-dickinson-ca-1960-everett.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />These were not the photos used in the Vanity Fair article.</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?