Diva/Mensch pair for Dec 31, 2025

Happy New Year, everybody!

The Best Actress winners for 1951 make a tidy pair:

Diva: Best Actress in a Musical - - Ethel Merman in Call Me Madam

Mensch: Best Actress in a Play - - Uta Hagen in The Country Girl

Merm, was she ever anything but a diva? It was baked in with that girl. Here she is doing one of the show-stopping numbers in that show, "You're Just In Love." Russell Nype is so nerdy a cute, a perfect foil for the human steamroller known as Merman. And his voice is so reedy and pointed - - my friend Sarah Sjolie Parks would say, "He's got so much forward placement, he could small game at fifty feet." (She said that about me.)

Irving Berlin was such a genius songwriter - - the counterpoint in this song, the way the two melodies go together, it's astonishing.

I can't find any YouTube evidence of Uta Hagen in The Country Girl so I'll give you a photo: