Adding to her list of awards a now 60-year-old Jessica Lange was handed her first Emmy on Sunday for her performance in the movie Grey Gardens. Lange played a fictionalized version of the real-life Edith Bouvier Beale for the HBO film. Jessica Lange has been nominated for Emmys twice in the past and has won two Oscars.
Based on Albert and David Maysles’ 1975 documentary, Grey Gardens is about “Big Edie” and her daughter, “Little Edie,” relatives of Jackie Kennedy Onassis who were discovered living in squalor on Long Island in the early 1970s. The documentary chronicles the conditions in which they lived and the heavily codependent relationship between mother and daughter.
The HBO movie further examines the lives of the Beales’, taking from Little Edie’s diaries which follows their earlier lives as a part of Manhattan’s high society to their gradual retreat to their summer home in he Hamptons.
“Grey Gardens” won the Emmy for best made-for-TV movie, and Ken Howard won best supporting actor in a movie or miniseries. Also nominated were Drew Barrymore, who played Little Edie, and Jeanne Tripplehorn, who played Jackie.