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Quakers and the Oscars

The Oscars: the preening red carpet shows, the gushing acceptance speeches, the deadliest designer duds (in both senses of the word), I love it all! But what an alien world in which to try to find Quakers!

And yet, there they are -- if you look closely, you will see Quakers talking to Joan Rivers, insisting it's an honor just to be nominated, but clutching the gold statuette nonetheless if they win.

Judi Dench, nominated this year as Best Actress for Mrs. Henderson Presents, became a member of the Religious Society of Friends after attending a Quaker school. Though she was first attracted to Quakerism by the school uniforms, she found a spirituality in Friends that affected her life and her work. To this Oscar winner for Shakespeare in Love, the craft of acting and Friends are natural companions: "Quaker Meetings are entirely to do with everybody else...passing things round...communing with other people. Theatre is live communication with other people. You've got to think that every night there is a whole group out there and they need to be told a story."

Another Oscar connection to Friends this year is the Best Picture nominee Good Night, and Good Luck, which focuses on Edward R. Murrow‘s fight against McCarthyism. Murrow was raised a Quaker in a family of farmers with strong abolitionist history. Michael Wilson, the screenwriter for Friendly Persuasion , would have appreciated this nomination. Though the film version of Jessamyn West's story of a Quaker family received five nominations including Best Picture, Wilson's name was pulled from the ballot because he was blacklisted.

We might smile and nod understandingly at Murrow's relationship to Friends, just as we would at Ben Kingsley, a Quaker actor who won his Oscar for portraying Gandhi. But, just like anything Friendly, Quaker Oscar winners and nominees are impossible to typecast. For example, Ben Kingsley was also nominated for playing a gangster in Sexy Beast and an Iranian colonel in House of Sand and Fog.

And then there's the Quaker actor nominated twice (posthumously) for East of Eden and Giant -- James Dean. Raised a Friend in the Quaker town of Fairmont, Indiana, Dean is buried in the meeting house cemetery there. The no-nonsense Quakers in that town have little sympathy for the cult that still inspires a pilgrimage their town on the anniversary of his death.

F. Murray Abraham gives us the key to this seeming incongruity of Quakers playing monarchs and gangsters and oil tycoons and even homicidal composers. Abraham, who won an Oscar for playing Salieri in Amadeus, attended Friends meeting for many years, with his wife, a member. He said, "The Quakers believe God resides in each person. Even before I discovered Quakerism, I was always looking for that sense of humanity in the characters I played and trying to draw on that thing in myself that would reach everyone."

Are the Oscars no place for a Quaker? David Lean's Quaker parents would have agreed emphatically. As a boy, the future Oscar-winning director of Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge Over the River Kwai had to sneak out of his house to see movies because his parents thought movies inconsistent with Quaker tradition.

They might have understood their son's devotion better if they'd read this reflection from Mark Lotto in the New York Observer that speaks to my condition as an movie fan and Oscar watcher: "[This is] what we're hoping for when we go to the movies: that they'll hit us like a hammer to the knee, that we'll laugh suddenly or cry suddenly or jump or shout. Movies may not change lives, but now and again, someone reminds us how to get lost in the screen…The best movies are like Quaker meetings, and the audience is involuntarily overwhelmed and totally overcome."

— Terry Matz