WHEN we think about it, the most precious art is the one we cannot explain, analyze, or comprehend entirely. There is always something eluding our interpretative grasp, or comprehension. That something is perhaps the very heart and spirit of art; its very special quality which elevates it above all other human endeavours.

For the visual artist, this quality mostly exists outside the artist, in the work as object; but in the creative writer, musician/singer and actor/actress, this creative process is so closely tied to themselves that it is often difficult to see where the artist and their art separate. The artist may then become the assumed voice which writes, which sings, which acts and speaks in certain films.
Insofar as such art is chosen to be created, or participated in by the artist, the self is involved, whether projected positively or reflected negatively.

Remick’s style
Lee Remick, one of the most touching, magically attractive, and brilliant American actresses who rode the superb production and creative crest of Hollywood between the late 1950s and late 1960s, left over a dozen Hollywood films in which she subtly turned the whole film into a narrative for self-explorations of lingering resonance.
If her films are like a creative text written in the third person, Remick’s presence (not simply her ‘role’) becomes a first-person voice distinctly noticeable within it. It is not just a matter of speech, however, with her; it is not speech which dominates Remick’s cinematic importance, but silence as well. Remick’s alternations between silence and speech in her films is the proof that her acting is like a writer’s voice personified, its stylistic identity revealed both in visible movement, sound, silent pauses, and oral precision.
Few actresses have made so much of their presence in films just by standing a certain way, dressing a certain way, sitting, laughing, walking, looking, eating, drinking, talking, or doing something quite ordinary which looks extraordinary just because Lee Remick is doing it.  Remick is the cinematic proof that art exists mostly in the act, not its length of duration, but it its condensed quality, like William Blake’s minimal seeing of eternity in a grain of sand.

Debt to Kazan
Remick’s screen career was indebted to the great film director Elia Kazan, whose film, ‘A FACE IN THE CROWD’ of 1957 launched her screen debut as a Majorette, where, using her professional training as a dancer, her superb sensual rhythm in brief scenes was the first evidence of her power to quickly suggest character visually.
In 1958’s ‘THE LONG HOT SUMMER’, directed by the gifted Martin Ritt, even the light-headed silliness of her role as the young bubbly Southern wife of Anthony Franciosa did not become a content more valuable than the way she sat on a couch in a magenta satin dress, plunged across a bed during a sexual chase, or her beckoning laughter.
Remick’s presence in ‘The Long Hot Summer’ signalled something additional to her role, which was her cinematic interest in adaptations of the unique Noble Prize-winning American Southern writer, William Faulkner’s fiction in films set in the South involving unbiased directors of Afro-American folk, and Remick’s unproblematic presence among them.
Her best screen roles were under conscientious Hollywood directors like Elia Kazan, Otto Preminger, Martin Ritt, Gordon Douglas, and Blake Edwards, most of whose films included Afro- Americans.

Magnetism
Remick’s stylish ability to précis acting to powerful moments, or consecutive scenes which return us to her films repeatedly, advanced with Preminger’s ‘ANATOMY OF A MURDER’ of 1959, where, as the apparent rape victim questioned in court, she takes off her glasses and shakes her hair out in the witness box to visualize a point in a famous scene.
This scene harnessed this otherwise analytical, introverted mystery film into a balanced humane work of art, and made it one of Preminger’s most commercially successful films. A cinematic value was becoming evident: Lee Remick’s presence in any film made it worth seeing.
In 1960, this became fact in one of Hollywood’s best films to date, whether visually, socially, politically, racially, romantically, or dramatically. This was Kazan’s ‘WILD RIVER”, in which Remick lays down one of her  greatest and most touching performances in scene after scene filmed against the film’s Tennessee rural landscape, which she would engage in many films with personalized Faulknerian female roles, even though she was a New England-born Bostonian.
Clearly, this was a conscious literary and social interest on her part, and in ‘Wild River’ her skill at exploring the sensitive, responsive, and conscientious, often hurt character, was reinforced by Montgomery Clift, a uniquely effective male co-star equally concerned with such human qualities, and the ability to render them in film after film.