RIP Mary Grace Canfield

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up7KHbJTmoo&list=PLAfexIpGwftG6aeLXI2aPzTRRGw3gDlVl

I was saddened tonight to hear that actress Mary Grace Canfield has died. Though those who remember her generally do for her ongoing role on "Green Acres," I will always venerate Ms. Canfield for her poignant and ego-less performance as Miss Foley in "Something Wicked This Way Comes" (1983). It is a thankless part: Miss Foley's homeliness is built into it, and rubbed-in in, but in an ultimately humanizing and touching way.

"Our teacher was Miss Foley," the film's narrator, the adult Will Halloway (Arthur Hill), says. "We couldn't believe it, but folks said, once, before we were born, she had been the most beautiful woman in town." Vanity and pipe dreams are the heart of the tale of hellish trickery that is "Something Wicked. . ." and nowhere are they embodied more painfully than in Miss Foley. Once gorgeous, she is reduced to aged spinsterhood, yearning for her lost charms. There is a scene where Foley discovers a crude, incredibly nasty, and devilishly accurate caricature of herself that one of her students has drawn. Every time I see the film, I think of how it must have pained Mary Grace Canfield to look at that drawing, and, every time, I respect her more deeply as an actress.