With her slightly askew beauty and her compelling but unorthodox mix of neuroses and earthy sexiness, Teri Garr was always destined for underappreciation. Usually relegated to small parts and cast more often as screechy second bananas than leading love interests, Garr nevertheless always manages to cast off tremendous light from whatever corner she's been put into, whether she's vacuously rolling in the hay (Young Frankenstein) or staving off the salacious come-ons of Martin Mull (Mr. Mom); and in more serious-minded supporting roles, as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Michael Apted's unfairly forgotten Firstborn, she's played conflicted, angry wives and mothers without the slightest hint of trying to ingratiate herself to the audience. In the few cases where she's been cast in the starring role (One from the Heart), something hasn't exactly clicked, as though she'd rather be waiting in the wings so she can swoop in and steal a scene rather than have to carry an entire film on her slender shoulders.

This is why Garr's simultaneously hefty and vulnerable work in Tootsie still might be her career pinnacle, and it's worth noting that she stands out even in a cast positively brimming with stellar supporting actors (Charles Durning, Jessica Lange, Dabney Coleman, George Gaines, Sydney Pollack), each of whom abscond with at least two scenes. She's so perfectly cast in the role of an unemployed, self-loathing New York stage actress with TV soap aspirations that it makes you wonder how Woody Allen could have possibly overlooked her in this period, a decidedly fecund one for both. In a sense, Garr has the most thankless role in the film, as the sweet, desperate Sandy, jilted and toyed with by Dustin Hoffman's cross-dressing ladies' man Michael Dorsey for nearly the entirety of the film; yet Garr refuses to victimize Sandy, even though Sandy loves to play the victim. There's so much nuance and energy to Garr's scenes that it's easy to forget that she has much less screen time than designated love interest Lange. Lange is complex, maternal, warm, sexually mature, but Garr is having more fun: in a brief cutaway during an early surprise-party sequence, she busts herself out of a locked bathroom door with a plunger in hand, aggravatingly exclaims, "What kind of a party is this?" only two seconds later to ask a fellow reveler, with a smile, if he's having a good time. It's that sort of quick turnaround that marks Sandy, who can morph from ball-buster to puddle of tears in a matter of seconds, and vice versa. Never to be pitied, Sandy is always ready with a quick retort or an ear-piercing scream (most memorably at the film's hilarious wig-removing climax, but also when Michael tells her he's in love with another woman and not, as she had obviously hoped, with another man).

Garr brings so much to the table; it's a performance full of little tics and gestures, yet rather than steal from the Diane Keaton playbook, she makes it her own. I especially love the little inquisitive glance she gives herself, peeking under a bedsheet down at her chest, after mistakenly having sex with longtime friend Michael: "Sex changes things," she says with desolate matter-of-factness, referring to the fact that she thinks she'll never see him again, yet with her naval (and breast) gaze, she gives the line an odd double-meaning, as always bringing it all back to her own neurotic self. Consider also that hilarious little nod-and-shrug of imagined shared empathy Garr's beehived bar waitress gives to Griffin Dunne's hapless downtown wanderer in Scorsese's After Hours after passing him (a total stranger) a tab with the note "HELP! I HATE THIS JOB!" Once again, Garr makes chronic dissatisfaction adorable.

Garr's turned up here and there in recent years, most memorably as "fucking monster" Maxine, Enid's dreaded future stepmom in Ghost World. (She has but one scene in the film, as I can recall, but she reads her lines with sting and sympathy, creating an entire past for her character, providing antagonism, but also refusing to demonize, and making the viewer see the understandable mutual hatred between her and the teenager. ) It's somewhat fitting that Garr lost a supporting actress Oscar to Lange, also for Tootsie, in 1982, as it illustrates that she was even somewhat forgotten in her own best role. Sandy wouldn't have had it any other way.

Despite her memorable work with filmmakers of such high caliber as Robert Altman, Stanley Kubrick, and, briefly, Woody Allen, Shelley Duvall seems to get little respect. Maybe it's the monotone baby-doll vocal delivery, the deer-caught-in-Mac-truck-headlights gaze, the unsteady spaghetti-limbed stance, or, most likely, the fact that she often doesn't prize intelligence as a main character trait, but Shelley Duvall is one of the few 70s icons who also doubles as a punchline. Her too-perfect-for-comfort role as Olive Oyl capping her decade-long winning streak was like an awkward exhalation, as if this is what she was destined to play: a shapeless woman playing a formless sketch, reduced to disembodied ADR voice tricks and flailing rubbery mannerisms. The result seemed to be a decade of toiling away in TV fantasy and children's whimsy, from Time Bandits to Faerie Tale Theatre, even if the latter was an appropriate and charming claim to fame for the younger set (certainly many of those in my generation first saw Duvall perched on her storybook chair, surrounded by mounds of wiggy ringlets, narrating a series of delightfully mounted Grimm costume dramas).

The tendency to write off Duvall as simpering ninny (The Shining), apathetic barnacle (Nashville, Annie Hall), or catatonic woman-child (Thieves Like Us) all breaks down in the face of Altman's 3 Women, which had been both underappreciated and all but unseen by my generation until its Criterion reissue five or so years ago. Yet I had been enamored of its tricks since high school, when I happened upon it on cable's Fox Movie Channel at the wholly apt time of one a.m. I went to bed haunted and bleary-eyed and the next day scanned TV Guide for its next showing, with a blank tape at the ready. Sissy Spacek's half-raging, half-playful performance as Pinky/Mildred was astonishing, yet it came as no shock, considering the versatility on view in Carrie, Coal Miner's Daughter, and Crimes of the Heart. It was Duvall who took me by surprise; yes, she was again ethereal, in her own world, a real "space cadet"--yet as Millie Lamoreaux, the Texan physical therapy worker who takes in Spacek's anonymous, sweetly freckled drifter (and new fellow nursing home attendant) as a roommate, Duvall revealed new depths of melancholy.

This time, her remoteness was there but she was constantly trying to puncture it, to make contact with neighbors, acquaintances, co-workers; she's outcast and socially strained, yet she now had a heightened awareness of her own limitations and frightful difference. Altman, always an expert at zeroing in (often, literally, with his camera) on the small details that make someone either blend in with or stand out from their environment, constantly boils Millie down to a series of memorable symbols and objects (cheese whiz and tuna fish sandwiches with onion powder, a swatch of canary yellow dress eternally caught in her car's driver's side door ) or awkward movements (her wavering cigarette lighting, her meticulous Breck-girl hair maintenance), yet Duvall never allows herself to be just a succession of goofy shtick. By the time Altman's film has descended into a nightmarish, abstract evocation of the two women's souls, split and congealed together, his surprisingly experimental leap is made all the smoother by Duvall's presence; she may have a natural tendency toward the detached, but she's poignant and bitter here, as well. By the end of the film, she's made a drastic transition: she's grounded, has become necessarily maternal, commanding. 3 Women is baffling, heavily symbolic filmmaking, yet Duvall and Spacek sell it, moment for moment; it's all about subtle gradations in their performances, their minute transformations, and eventual metamorphosis. In other words, the kind of stuff impossible without actors attuned to the material; it's one of the finest films of the seventies, and Duvall deserves a lion's share of the credit.

Click here for last week's tribute to Margaret Avery in The Color Purple.

With her twin matriarch roles in this year's Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins and the latest from-nowhere Tyler Perry family-values comedy Meet the Browns, Margaret Avery has suddenly reappeared. Yet that name may not ring bells for many viewers, overshadowed as it was even in her major, Oscar-nominated breakout by behemoths like Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey. Heck, back in 1985, Rae Dawn Chong, in a minuscule role, even got more poster space than Avery in Spielberg's The Color Purple. Yet the film, whose incessant unfair maligning has been going on now for two-plus decades (Empire of the Sun seems to have been widely reassessed....why no cinephilic love for Purple?), is unthinkable without the presence of Avery, whose performance as the identically surnamed "Shug" Avery is one of Purple's most versatile, surprising, and effortless. Yet anecdotes of Avery's tireless, and ultimately defeated, Oscar campaigning (when she was nominated against Winfrey, and eventually lost to Anjelica Huston for Prizzi's Honor) summarily usurped the real story, which should have been that of a sensational breakthrough.

Avery is a wonder, emotionally varied without ever seeming schizophrenic, from her cackling, double-soused introduction (coming out of the rain, lifting her sopping wet head, and exclaiming to Goldberg's Celie, "You sure is ugly!"--certainly one of the most memorable of all screen entrances) to her breakfast-in-the-bathtub hangover to her blowsy Billie Holiday routine in the Juke Joint (where she perfectly lip-syncs to Quincy Jones's terrific period song "Miss Celie's Blues") to her tender, erotic kiss with Celie (yes, yes, it was toned down from the more sexually explicit book, but would we really expect a Hollywood blockbuster circa 1985, or heck even today, to show two black lesbians doing much more than kissing and holding hands?). In the final hour of the film, Avery elegantly wears, but never pushes, the after-effects of hard living, even though she's left it behind for a "respectable" marriage; it's all there, in the lines on her face, in her tired, but indomitable gait. It's not her story, but when she's on-screen, she makes it hers, and Spielberg even gives her her own stirring climax, a reconciliation with her preacher papa, rousingly set to the Jones-penned spiritual "Maybe God's Trying to Tell You Something," that nearly equals Celie's own conclusion for emotional wallop (no mean feat).

Avery inhabits Shug so fully, and has subsequently dropped so far from public view, that the actress and role have become inseparable. I must admit the Averys (Margaret and "Shug") have never left me; Margaret dug into the role with claws outstretched and held on to "Shug" for dear life. And while Whoopi and Oprah have stayed constantly in the public eye, and we've seen them age, expand, and morph into different forms and personalities, Avery has stayed captured on-screen, and remains a sweet, spectacular memory.