In/Significant Gestures— Elaine May, Screen Performance, and Embodied Collaboration

<p>In Elaine May’s professional biography, her role as actor tends to traditionally fall somewhere in line after the fields for which she is most immediately recognized – comic, screenwriter, director. Yet across a range of feature films in particular, May demonstrated a clearly highly developed skill for performing a range of different roles to camera. For a figure whose achievements are associated so readily with language, what becomes apparent when watching May act on film is how much she relies on the unspoken for lasting effect: gestures, facial expressions and movement inform her characterizations often just as much as dialogue and script. This chapter considers not only May’s performance in perhaps her most well-known screen role as Henrietta in her directorial debut A New Leaf, but more also in her numerous collaborations with a range of acclaimed directors where her role was solely as actor.</p>