Ann-Margret

Ann-Margret: The Star Who Outlasted Her Own Image

In September 1972 she fell twenty-two feet from a platform during a performance at Lake Tahoe, fracturing her arm, her cheekbone and her jaw, and spending three days in a coma. She had reconstructive surgery on her face. Ten weeks later she was back on stage. If you want one fact that explains why a career built on being looked at survived seven decades, that is the one: Ann-Margret was never the fragile thing the publicity said she was.

From Sweden to Illinois

She was born Ann-Margret Olsson on 28 April 1941 in Sweden — accounts differ on the exact place, some giving Stockholm and others a small fishing village in the far north, near the Arctic Circle. The family emigrated to the United States after the Second World War, arriving in 1946 and settling in Illinois; she was naturalised in 1949.

By her own account she was an introverted child who used singing and dancing as a way of expressing what she could not say otherwise — a detail worth holding on to, because the public persona that later engulfed her was the exact opposite of shy. She worked the local circuit of talent contests and school productions, briefly attended Northwestern University, and then left for California with a jazz band, which is how a Swedish-born Illinois teenager ended up performing in Las Vegas.

George Burns's Gold Mine

In Vegas she auditioned for George Burns, who put her into his act and into major casino rooms. Burns, who had seen every kind of performer over half a century, put it plainly: "George Burns has a gold mine in Ann-Margret... she has a definite style of her own."

The machine moved fast after that. *Life* magazine tagged her as Hollywood's next young starlet. Her film debut in *Pocketful of Miracles* (1961) won her a Golden Globe for New Star of the Year. In 1963 *Bye Bye Birdie* made her a genuine star, and in 1964 *Viva Las Vegas* paired her with Elvis Presley in what remains the most electric musical pairing of his film career — so much so that Colonel Tom Parker is reported to have restricted the commercial release of their duets out of concern that she was overshadowing his client.

The Trap

Being that good at being that kind of star turned out to be a career hazard. The industry decided what she was — the sex kitten, the redhead who moves — and cast her accordingly. Roles that exploited her appearance accumulated. The box office cooled. By the late 1960s the trajectory that *Life* had predicted looked as if it had already peaked, in the ordinary way that starlets peak.

Carnal Knowledge

*Carnal Knowledge*, in 1971, ended that story. Cast against everything the previous decade had established about her, she gave a performance of raw and unglamorous emotional exposure, and the industry that had spent ten years using her as decoration nominated her for an Academy Award. She won the Golden Globe. Four years later she was nominated for a second Oscar, for the film version of *Tommy* (1975) — a role that demanded she be both a rock-opera performer and a woman coming apart.

Two Academy Award nominations in five years, from a standing start of near-total critical dismissal, is one of the sharper reversals in Hollywood history.

What the Performing Actually Is

Because she was marketed as a physical presence, the specifics of her ability get overlooked, so they are worth stating.

She is, first, a trained dancer, and it shows in something more fundamental than choreography: she is rhythmically precise in everything, including dialogue. Watch her opposite Presley and the reason the pairing works is that she matches his musical timing rather than reacting to it.

She is, second, a genuine singer rather than a film star who sings. Her career began in casino showrooms and she went on working them, and a Vegas act has to fill a room nightly on its own merit, with no script, no editing and no co-star to carry the weak stretches.

And she has, third, a quality that only emerged when someone finally asked for it: an absence of self-protection on camera. What makes *Carnal Knowledge* work is that she declines to make her character dignified. The performer who had spent a decade being asked to be desirable turned out to be willing to be seen as desperate, which is a far harder thing and a different skill entirely.

Why Ann-Margret Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that the word is usually applied to her loosely, and that it should be examined rather than repeated. She did not write, direct, compose or originate. She was a performer working inside material other people made, and for the first decade of her career that material was frequently poor.

What is exceptional is a combination that almost nobody sustains: complete command of three separate crafts — dancing, singing and screen acting — at professional level simultaneously, and the capacity to keep working at all three across sixty-odd years. Most triple threats are strong in one discipline and adequate in the others. Burns, an expert witness, identified the thing that matters when he said she had "a definite style of her own": the physical rhythm is unmistakably hers, and it is legible in a musical number, a dramatic scene and a nightclub set alike.

The second exceptional quality is harder to name but easier to prove: an unusual willingness to be re-cast against her own image, at exactly the moment when clinging to that image would have been safer. Two Oscar nominations followed.

The counter-case is that this is stamina and adaptability rather than genius in any strict sense — that she was a superbly gifted entertainer who got two great parts and was equal to them, which is a different claim from being a great artist. Her filmography contains a large amount of forgettable work, some of it in her strongest years. And a substantial portion of her early impact was frankly physical: she was placed on screen to be looked at, and she was extraordinary to look at.

That last point is the one that requires the most honesty. Her stardom began as a matter of presence, not interpretation. What she did with it afterwards — the Emmy in 2010 for *Law & Order: SVU*, the late-career comic revival in *Grumpy Old Men* (1993), the seventy-year working life — is the case for taking her seriously, and it is a strong one. But it is a case about craft, discipline and durability. Those are the right words. Genius is a stretch, and she has never needed the inflation.

Legacy

She married the actor Roger Smith in 1967; he became her manager and steered the reinvention that carried her from starlet to two-time Oscar nominee to character actress. Her name is on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The performer who was supposed to be a moment of the early sixties was still winning awards in the twenty-first century, which is the only rebuttal to typecasting that has ever actually worked: simply refusing to stop.