“It’s a piece of shit”: The 1998 movie Jessica Lange wants to delete from history
The longer an actor’s career, the more likely it is that they’ll make a few decisions they’ll come to regret, but at least Jessica Lange was brutally honest about the movie she’d rather nobody mention ever again.
In a sign of things to come, Lange made an award-winning screen debut when her performance in the otherwise unremarkable 1976 remake of King Kong landed her a Golden Globe for ‘New Star of the Year – Actress’, and she’s spent the half-century since continually adding new trophies to her cabinet.
Along with her five Golden Globes, the veteran is also a two-time Academy Award winner, a three-time Primetime Emmy victor, and nabbed a Tony for her work on the stage, making her one of her generation’s marquee triple threats who’ve effortlessly conquered cinema, television, and theatre.
However, her track record isn’t unblemished. Beyond all the worthy accolades that Lange has collected over the years, there’s an outlier: the one and only time she was shortlisted for a Razzie, and she may well have won it were it not for the Spice Girls, obviously, who shared the ‘Worst Actress’ prize for Spice Girls.
The alarm bells had been ringing for co-writer and director Jonathan Darby’s 1998 thriller, Hush, for a while. For one thing, the film had been shot two years previously, and after some overwhelmingly negative test screenings, the cast and crew were reconvened for reshoots, only to discover that some turds simply cannot be polished.
A post-Sliding Doors but pre-Shakespeare in Love Gwyneth Paltrow stars as a pregnant woman who moves in with her husband’s mother, Lange, only for the matriarch to grow envious of the bond between her son and his wife, and she attempts to sabotage the happy couple to satisfy her motherly agenda.
As you’d imagine, it’s the worst movie she’s ever been involved with, a box office bomb, and a critical pariah. Decades later, Lange wasn’t in the mood for beating around the bush. “I’ve never been able to keep my mouth shut,” she shared. “So if somebody asks me how I feel about Hush, I’ll say it’s a piece of shit.”
She’s right; it is a piece of shit, and if it wasn’t for Sporty, Scary, Ginger, Baby, and Posh, Lange could well have added ‘Razzie-winning actor’ to her laundry list of honours. Not many people can say the Spice Girls saved them from the most ignominious achievement of a storied screen career, but she can.
It was a minor blip, but one she clearly hasn’t forgotten. Most actors who’ve been around since the ’70s will feel the same about at least one of their credits, and for Lange, Hush marked the ultimate nadir.
