Remembering Jill Clayburgh's Groundbreaking Roles - An Unmarried Woman, a Childless Supreme Court Justice

Jill Clayburgh in 1982

The death of  actress Jill Clayburgh on Saturday hit me harder than I'd expected. (I've always known I'd collapse when Diane Keaton died. My high school yearbook -- of which I was editor-in-chief senior year -- features photos of me channeling Annie Hall in a men's shirt/tie/vest combo courtesy of the Salvation Army. But Jill Clayburgh? No photos exist as evidence of my deep connection to her, yet I was moved by her passing.)

Jill Clayburgh is one of those lesser-known female icons who separates the women from the girls -- literally. Women 45+ are having different reactions from women 30 and younger who are largely saying, "Who?" at the news of her death. She was often overshadowed by her contemporaries -- the aforementioned Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, even Sally Field who beat her out for a Best Actress Oscar -- yet she holds a special place of honor in the world of pop culture and women's issues.

If you were  of an age to see her landmark film An Unmarried Woman in 1978, you never forgot her role as Erica, the title character whose comfortable life as a married Manhattanite with a charming husband and teenage daughter is shattered by divorce. Although I was closer in age to Clayburgh's onscreen daughter when the film came out, it gave me a glimpse of womanhood few movies depicted -- i.e., how a woman in mid-life attempts to reclaim her sense of self when the fiction of "happily ever after" comes to an end and she's no longer defined as half of a couple.

The film doesn't always fare well in critics' eyes when viewed through today's more critical lens. Donna Trussell at Politics Daily slammed the film two months ago and still describes aspects of it as "hackneyed" and "trite." Yet its impact on female moviegoers at the time was undeniable. It remains (in retrospect) one of my all-time favorite films and one of the most influential in terms of setting me on the path of exploring gender roles, women's lives and women's issues.

As I Monday-morning quarterback the weekend's news, I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who deeply mourns Clayburgh's passing.

• Betsy Sharkey at the Los Angeles Times: "Clayburgh women....were flawed, vulnerable, feisty, funny, sometimes steely and always smart. They were a better, more beautiful version of what many of us wanted to be, but only slightly.
• Janet Maslin in the New York Times: "It was the "un" in "Unmarried" that established Ms. Clayburgh's creative power....Ms. Clayburgh's shaping of the character was utterly and unmistakably her own, just as surely as its impact on female movie audiences was universal...."My God, you've defined my entire life for me," one weeping "Unmarried Woman" fan told her in 2002, and that experience was apparently not unusual for her."
• Cindy Kroiss at Gather.com: "Jill Clayburgh was smart, when women didn't announce the fact, and she had a not-quite-picture-perfect kind of beauty that set her apart from pin-up queens....[S]he put her unique stamp on every role - drug addict to mathematician. She was an actress who could make women - all different kinds of women - seem as real and capable as the people you knew."

Although An Unmarried Woman tops every obituary you'll see about her, Clayburgh also took on another groundbreaking role in cinema as Ruth Loomis, the nation's first female Supreme Court Justice -- this at a time when none existed -- in the 2001 film First Monday in October. (Clayburgh onscreen preceded Sandra Day O'Connor to the bench in real life by  less than two months.) It's very telling that the role also foreshadowed what subsequent Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan would face during the confirmation process decades later. In a scene in which Clayburgh's character is testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, she refers to her status as a childless woman: ''The F.B.I. is wrong in reporting to you that I have no children. Ideas are my children, and I have hundreds of them.''

Clayburgh continued to work in television (ABC's Dirty Sexy Money) and film until shortly before her death. Her latest movie, Love and Other Drugs, will be released on November 24. Although I'll make a point to see it, I doubt anything Clayburgh does in that film will come close my favorite moment of hers on film. (SPOILER ALERT: I'm revealing the end of An Unmarried Woman)

After refusing to surrender her independence to go away with an artist she's in love with, Erica watches him drive off as he leaves behind one of his paintings -- his parting gift to her. The vivid, open-ended scene is a metaphor for what she's given up and what she's gained: Erica,dressed all in white with a bemused expression on her face, struggles to navigate the crowded streets of Manhattan with an enormous piece of rainbow-hued art, the wind tugging at the canvas and swinging her around, pedestrians stopping and staring, traffic weaving around her as she resolutely makes her own way forward, confident, alone.

_{Photo © Nancy R. Schiff/Hulton Archive/Getty Images}