Monsters and angels

Think of the female characters that people the plays of Tennessee Williams and you generally think of delicate waifs, butterflies broken on the wheel of misfortune.

Yet look at the famous women who have played them and what you see are hard-living, serial wives with a taste for strong liquor. No surprise, then, that Trevor Nunn has continued the tradition by choosing Glenn Close to appear as Blanche DuBois in his premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire at the National Theatre this week. The twice divorced actress may have an exemplary private life - but she is still best known as the scary bunny boiler in Fatal Attraction.

Streetcar is the one about the ageing Southern Belle - Blanche DuBois - desperately seeking refuge with her sister in a rough quarter of New Orleans. A 38-year-old Jessica Tandy originally created the part of Blanche on Broadway in 1947, appearing opposite Marlon Brando as the boorish (but smouldering) Polish wife-beater Stanley Kowalski. On the opening night Tandy won a halfhour standing ovation, and the production went on to run for two years.

The New York Times praised her as 'trim' and 'agile', and commended her 'lovely voice and quick intelligence'. Only twice married, Tandy was obviously a comparatively stable individual. Perhaps that's why she didn't get to star opposite Brando in the 1951 Elia Kazan film adaptation of the play. Instead Vivien Leigh won that role, which in turn won her a second Oscar as a Southern belle (after Gone With The Wind).

Leigh began playing Blanche on stage in Laurence Olivier's 1949 production at the age of 36. In one Evening Standard report she was described as having 'the power to send shudders of horror down our spines' and 'to change those shudders into pity by odd flashes of tenderness'. However, Leigh suited the part not just because of her innate ability, delicate beauty or previous Oscar - there was also a dark symmetry with her own mental illness and fragile health that lead to her premature death, aged 53. It is said that Williams fancied 43-year-old party animal Tallulah Bankhead for Blanche, but it wasn't until ten years after the original production in 1956 that she actually appeared, in a poorly received production that ran in Florida and New York.

Critics balked at Bankhead's strong character and mannerisms which seemed at odds with the fragile persona that Blanche affects. Faye Dunaway was another Hollywood great to have had a pop at the part, in an LA production in 1973 which seems to have drifted into an historical side-street called obscurity. The most recent attempt by a Hollywood actress involved Jessica Lange, directed by Peter Hall in 1997. Reviews were appreciative, if not ecstatic. Despite being the daughter of semi-itinerant hippies, she may simply not have been nuts enough.

Elsewhere in the Williams repertoire, girlabout-town Ava Gardner, whose exquisite good looks belied the reality of a hard-living party girl, picked up the role of the middle-aged sexual predator in the film of Night Of The Iguana (1964). Thrice-married Gardner played the role opposite the magnificently crapulent Richard Burton, who was himself typecast as a disgraced and defrocked preacher in Mexico.

But perhaps the most notorious actress of all to play one of Williams's women was Bette Davis. This, too, was in Night Of The Iguana, in the 1961 Broadway production. Four-times married, Davis was the woman who miaowed, 'I adore playing bitches' and who was ambiguously judged to be 'suitably loud and raucous' by The Times.

In the midst of which it would be a crime to forget the godknowshow-many-times-married Elizabeth Taylor. Her fame, while at work at least, hinged on two performances in film adaptations of Tennessee Williams for which she was Oscar-nominated - Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer. In the former she was the extremely flamboyant Cat, who starts out with an attention-seeking prolixity, before she breaks down into silence. Likewise, in the latter she played the dangerously beautiful, mentally unstable young girl used as boy-bait for the gay son of a wealthy woman played by Katharine Hepburn.

The one thing all these women have in common, along with a reputation for not exactly being bashful, is a love of emotional brinkmanship. The more successful ones allied this energy to what Trevor Nunn calls 'a tragic sense and understanding'.

This is something he believes 55-year-old Glenn Close exhibited when she played the faded screen idol Norma Desmond in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard. And even nearly 20 years after his death, all these roles and all these women are clearly projections of Williams's own weakness for catty, melodramatic camp, pickled in dipsomania and despair.

After all, this was the man who wrote in his play Camino Real, 'we're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.' Next week, Glenn Close becomes the latest guinea pig in the laboratory of Tennessee Williams.