Fannie Flagg
Fannie Flagg is an actor, born 1944.
Two careers, and the second one is the good one. Flagg was a comedian and an actress first, born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1944, and for most of the 1970s her main job was being funny on television, including a long run as a panelist on Match Game between 1973 and 1982. She played Stoney in Five Easy Pieces in 1970, Amy in Stay Hungry in 1976, Nurse Wilkins in Grease in 1978. Small parts, all of them, and she was reliably the sharpest thing in a two-minute scene.
Then she wrote a novel. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe came out in 1987, she adapted it herself for the 1991 film, and the adaptation earned her an Academy Award nomination. Game-show regular to Oscar-nominated screenwriter is not a normal route, and there is no visible apprenticeship in between.
The book is the real reason to be interested in her, and its qualities are hers: patient, funny in a low register, willing to take old women seriously as subjects, moving between two eras without ever making a fuss about the mechanism. She took a small part as a teacher in the film of her own novel, which is a very Flagg thing to have done.
The book credits attached to this page are omnibus anthology volumes rather than her own titles, so her novels are worth chasing under her name.
Movies (7)
TV (3)
Books (2)
Where to start with Fannie Flagg
Fried Green Tomatoes is the whole case for her, and read the novel on either side of it, because the film smooths off edges the book leaves rough. Flagg wrote both, and she appears on screen as a teacher, which is easy to miss.
For the performer, Five Easy Pieces is the surprise. It is a sour, serious American classic and there she is as Stoney, right at the start of the run of small comic parts that fed her for a decade.
Match Game is where a whole generation actually knew her from, and it explains her timing better than any film role does. Grease and Stay Hungry are the two-scene versions of the same gift, and Crazy in Alabama puts her back among the material she writes about best.