Barbara Loden
Barbara Loden (1932–1980) was an American actress and filmmaker whose sole feature as director, Wanda (1970), has come to be recognised as a landmark of American independent cinema. Born in North Carolina and self-taught, she moved to New York as a teenager to work as a model and chorus-line dancer, became a regular on The Ernie Kovacs Show, and joined the Actors Studio. She appeared in films by her second husband, Elia Kazan — including Splendor in the Grass — and won a Tony Award for the 1964 Broadway premiere of After the Fall. Wanda, which she wrote, directed, and starred in, is a quietly devastating cinéma vérité portrait of a passive coal-miner's wife who drifts into the orbit of a small-time crook; one of the very few American features directed by a woman released theatrically at the time, it won the International Critics' Prize at the 1970 Venice Film Festival.