We're all aware of our own aging process. In our head, we go on being 20-something all our lives, and we're taken aback when others perceive us as being -- well, what we are.
When a favorite performer seems to drop from view for years at a stretch, I, for one, go on abstractly thinking: Any day she's going to get the career-rejuvenating role that will bring her back to the fore.
And it brings you up short when she dies, as Hope Lange did last Sunday, and you realize she was 70.
Lange registered pleasantly as the ingenue in "Bus Stop" (1956), supporting Marilyn Monroe and, off-screen, marrying the leading man, Don Murray.
Only a year later, she scored a supporting Oscar nomination as the raped incest victim in "Peyton Place." Her future seemed every bit as promising as that of Joanne Woodward, who won the Oscar that year as lead actress in "Three Faces of Eve."
And, for a while, Lange delivered abundant warmth in pictures such as "The Young Lions" (1958), as Montgomery Clift's faithful girlfriend, and as the most sympathetic of the young office girls skirting Joan Crawford's wrath in "The Best of Everything" (1959).
But something went awry. Over director Frank Capra's objections, Glenn Ford, with whom Lange had become associated in gossip columns, insisted she be his moll in the Runyonesque "A Pocketful of Miracles" (1961). The casting worked against her, as did the picture's disappointing box-office performance.
Her second teaming with Ford, "Love Is a Ball" (1963), was a flop that looks even worse today.
Lange did minor pictures and a lot of TV, including the series "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir," but it wasn't very good, and her luster got lost along the way.
She turned up briefly as Charles Bronson's wife in "Death Wish" (1974), and I hoped it would do for her what it did for him. But it didn't.
And she seemed to be the only one who got no momentum from "Blue Velvet" (1986). Again, she surfaced in a major project in "Clear and Present Danger" (1994), but that didn't lead anywhere, either. And now she's gone.
Lange has such a cashmere warmth about her that I'm certain she would have had a bigger career had she come along in the 1940s and early '50s, when Hollywood played to the homey strengths of actresses such as June Allyson and Debbie Reynolds.
Lange projected intelligence but not aggression. And suddenly, it was time for Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand, Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson.
Values were gained and others lost, and with that loss -- ours -- went much of the interest in Lange.
