Jessica Walter has accumulated 161 credits in films and TV throughout her 70-year career as an actress. If that number were only 160, she would still have been the best type of actor: a safe pair of hands that gets a consistent job by supporting individual episodes of long-running shows. The spectrum of series in which Walter has appeared over the years has been impressive: Flipper, Columbus, Hawaii Five-O, Quincy, Knot’s Landing, Magnum and Law and Order are just a few. She would show up for a single episode, rate a little and leave.
However, she will be remembered for a show above all else. Like Lucille Bluth in Arrested Development, Walter got the role for which she was born: a beautifully written and brilliantly wicked character that she elevated to iconic status.
Arrested Development was nothing less than a star-making machine. Almost everyone involved in the series has reached new heights. He turned Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, Michael Cera and David Cross into movie stars and launched the career of Alia Shawkat, now leading the cult comedy Search Party. Even the program’s longtime directors, the Russo Brothers, ended up making the greatest film of all time.
However, Lucille was undoubtedly the heart of the show. Even more than Michael de Bateman, the common man trapped in the middle of his terrible war relatives, Lucille kept things under control. An ever-present, consistent and responsible parental figure. Whenever any of her adult children seemed to be sneaking in the door, she used an arsenal of psychological tactics – intimidation, guilt, reverse psychology, flattery – to keep them in place. There is no doubt that Lucille Bluth is an incredibly bad mother. But you cannot deny that she knows her children well. She smothers Buster (“He’s become too big a man to brush his mother’s hair”). She attacks Lindsay with thinly veiled criticisms of her weight (“You want your belt to buckle, not your chair”). She “doesn’t care” for Gob. She knows exactly which buttons to push to do the most damage, which at least means she is an observer. Lucille is the reason why the Bluths are the Bluths. There would be no Arrested Development without it.
About the past year, a lot of love has been shown by Moira Rose, the equally eccentric matriarch from Schitt’s Creek. Lucille was Moira before Moira, equally wealthy and out of touch, but with no identifiable smooth edges. And yet, it was still possible to identify with her. See Lucille’s meme blizzard that went into action when it was announced that Walter had died. They all show a woman of a certain age who has simply stopped listening to the rules. She’s drunk. She is disdainful. She is known to be cruel. There is a freedom in Lucille that I think everyone envies a little bit. This was his masterstroke. She was not friendly, but she had an aspiration.
Even more impressive was that when Arrested Development returned in its reduced form on Netflix, Walter became the star. The rest of the cast made a lot of noise about having to fit the meeting around their recently occupied schedules in Hollywood, but Walter – along with Shawkat – seemed to be the only one who wanted to dedicate himself to the series. This rewarded her in kind. Netflix episodes are uneven, drowned in a complicated plot that just distracts from the jokes, but Walter did an incredible job on them. She left Lucille more monstrous than ever, while locating an acting frequency that makes you feel sorry for her.
Walter’s work on Arrested Development is now somewhat colorful by a painful 2018 New York Times interview in which, prompted by the growing accusations about co-star Jeffrey Tambor, she detailed an incident where she claimed he yelled at her on set . Upon hearing this, her castmates disagreed and talked about her as much as they could on record, while she cried. The final Arrested Development series was easily the worst, but hearing about the seemingly toxic work environment made it even more difficult to watch.
However, Lucille Bluth’s character was above those ugly disputes. She was the classic sitcom monster: drunk, overdressed and blinking in the least natural way that a human has ever blinked. We were lucky to have it.