Maude Chardin: Margot Robbie’s “favourite female character”
She might be an A-list star and a multi-time Academy Award nominee, but film and television snobbery isn’t something that should ever be associated with Margot Robbie.
While the actor does know her way around the classics and holds many of them in high esteem, it can’t be overlooked that her personal tastes cover the entire spectrum. After all, she effectively hijacked a conversation with Cillian Murphy to profess her love of Peaky Blinders, outed herself as a metalhead with a soft spot for Bullet for My Valentine, is a long-time Harry Potter fanatic, and named Love Island as a TV show she’ll never be able to get enough of.
That eclectic array of film, television, and music taste has carried through to her own filmography, which began in earnest with the token foray into Neighbours before capturing Hollywood’s attention in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, while Robbie has since gone on to play a disgraced figure skater, the Joker’s love interest, an anthropomorphised rabbit, and a plastic plaything, the latter of which gave rise to an Oscar-nominated cultural phenomenon and billion-dollar smash hit.
With that in mind, it makes a lot more sense that when Robbie was pressed on her favourite movies in an interview with A.Frame, the figure she named as “probably my favourite female character ever to grace the screen”, doesn’t immediately jump out as an obvious contender. There are plenty of roles played by women that endure among the inarguable greats, with the Barbie star and producer adamant that Maude Chardin deserves to be among them.
Hal Ashby’s classic 1971 dramedy Harold and Maude follows the misadventures of the two title characters, with Bud Cort’s Harold Chasen meeting Gordon’s Maude at a funeral, which eventually evolves into a romantic relationship that generates much scorn from friends, family, and even men of the cloth when he signals his intentions to marry his 79-year-old paramour.
Robbie calls the film “weird, and quirky, and beautiful,” something that applies to Maude herself. A free spirit who believes each day should be enjoyed to the maximum, she’s proven herself a survivor, having formerly been both a suffragette and a prisoner at a Nazi concentration camp, even if she refuses to entertain the idea of becoming an octogenarian.
Gordon was recognised with a Golden Globe nomination in the ‘Best Actress – Musical or Comedy’ category, but accolades aren’t always a barometer of a character’s enduring appeal. In a world full of Harolds, there aren’t enough Maudes as it is, with her exuberant approach to the life she has left and opts to end on her own terms, standing out to a modern-day superstar like Robbie as a beacon of cinematic excellence that can’t be matched.
