![]() Her solitude is broken by the arrival of Alex Forrester (Stuart Whitman), a convict who's been confined to a mental institution for the past decade he is now on the run under the advice of his psychiatrist (Edward Mulhare), who has brought up a legal loophole which allows a court to reopen a murder case if the convicted party remains at large for two weeks. In between frequent projects with her husband (who either co-starred with her or directed her), she chose unorthodox films like the twist-filled quasi-western, A Big Hand for the Little Lady (1966), or two years earlier, a swift and tricky thriller called Signpost to Murder (1964).īased on an English play by Monte Doyle that originally featured Margaret Lockwood onstage, the film casts Woodward as Molly Thomas, a married woman waiting for her husband to come back from a business trip abroad. That same year, she was the first actress to earn a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.Īfter this trajectory of roles, the Georgia-born actress began making some very unexpected choices with her career. She quickly entered the list of top Hollywood stars and won consecutive roles in No Down Payment (1957) opposite her Kiss star Jeffrey Hunter, the 1958 version of The Long, Hot Summer with Paul Newman (whom she married the same year, though they had met years earlier as understudies for Picnic on Broadway), a prestigious but troubled 1959 version of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and what is perhaps now regarded as her best film of this period, Sidney Lumet's 1960 adaptation of Tennessee Williams' The Fugitive Kind. ![]() ![]() Little did anyone guess that with her next film, The Three Faces of Eve (1957), she would deliver a searing performance as a woman with a triple personality disorder. ![]() Getting her start at the age of 22 in an episode of the omnibus series Tales of Tomorrow in 1952, she got her big break four years later as one of the leads opposite Robert Wagner in the 1956 adaptation of Ira Levin's tricky and essentially unfilmable novel, A Kiss Before Dying. The so-called golden age of television in the 1950s produced a new, more naturalistic breed of actors, and few proved their mettle time and again more than Joanne Woodward. She accuses Forrester of the murder but later breaks down and informs the police that she and Fleming are lovers and that they arranged Forrester's escape in order to frame him for the murder. The corpse is later found by the police, and Molly identifies the dead man as her husband. After stumbling down a flight of steps, he regains consciousness and finds that the body is missing. In the evening, Forrester discovers a man's body by the mill wheel of Molly's house. Molly tells him of her unhappy marriage, and the two become attracted to each other. Forrester escapes and takes refuge in the home of Molly Thomas, who claims that she is awaiting the return of her husband from a trip to The Hague. ![]() Mark Fleming, Forrester's psychiatrist, informs him of an old law which provides for the reopening of a trial if the prisoner escapes and remains at large for 14 days. Alex Forrester, convicted of murdering his wife, fails to gain his release after spending 10 years in a British asylum for the criminally insane. ![]()
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