Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Warner Bros., Chenault Productions, 1966)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, February 11) I ran the 1966 film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, directed by Mike Nichols (his first film) from a screenplay by Ernest Lehman (who also produced for the first time) based on Edward Albee’s famously caustic play about two couples from an Eastern college who meet at a party, get together afterwards and play nasty games on each other from 2 a.m. until sunrise. The older couple are called George and Martha (character names Albee apparently got from George and Martha Washington) and are played by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor – both of whom in later years said that making this film started the breakup of their real-life relationship. Apparently they spent days at the studio bitch-fighting in their roles in the story, and then continued bitch-fighting when they got home. The showing was introduced by Alicia Malone, who mentioned that the stage version had starred Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill (I remember Hill as a good but rather milquetoast actor whom Hagen probably ate alive!) but when Jack Warner bought the movie rights, the people he had in mind were Bette Davis and James Mason. That would have turned the opening scene – in which Martha declaims the line, “What a dump!,” and can’t remember the name of the “goddamn Bette Davis movie” it came from – into a truly bizarre in-joke. (The film was Beyond the Forest, shot in 1949 and released in 1950. It was Davis’s last film as a Warner Bros. contract player and one she truly loathed. When her biographer, Whitney Stine, told her that Beyond the Forest was “that goddamn Bette Davis movie” mentioned in the opening of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Davis said, “That is the only distinction Beyond the Forest ever had or ever will have!”) The gimmick is that even though they’re already pretty drunk by the time they get home, Martha has unilaterally invited another, younger couple from the party, Nick (George Segal) and Honey (Sandy Dennis), to stop by for a few more rounds of drinking and psychological abuse. Martha is the daughter of the president of the college – the fictitious New England college town where this is set is called, appropriately enough given the historical disasters that befell the original Carthage, “New Carthage” – and got her husband George an assistant professorship in history there.

Nick is a biology professor and Honey is a typical Sandy Dennis drip who forced Nick to marry her because she was, or at least appeared to be, pregnant. Later it turns out it was just an “hysterical pregnancy” – one in which a woman’s belly swells up but without an embryo or fetus inside – but by that time they’re a couple and more or less stuck with each other. The four ill-matched protagonists spend the wee hours of the early morning playing vicious “games” with each other, including “Hump the Hostess” and “Get the Guests,” and in the middle of all this Martha threatens to tell Nick and Honey about their long-lost son. It’s his 16th birthday that day and he’s off seeking his own fortune, but George tells Martha she’s never to speak of him to third parties. Later, at the low point of the night, after they’ve been to a roadhouse and back (a jaunt Lehman added to the script, since Albee’s play stayed at George’s and Martha’s home throughout, and for some reason a copy of the cover of Bob Dylan’s fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, turns up on the roadhouse wall) and Martha has done a sexually suggestive dance with Nick (one which Geoffrey Shurlock, head of the Production Code Administration, questioned and tried to get the filmmakers to remove) while the couple who run the roadhouse, who seem to be the only sane adults in the movie, try to close up and get rid of their rowdy guests, George tells Martha that their son is dead.

He tells a cock-and-bull story about having received a telegram to that effect, and when Martha demands to see it, George says, “I ate it.” Ultimately it turns out that there is no son; Martha could never have children, and the two invented this fantasy child as a means of trying to keep their rather pathetic relationship together. (This may be why Albee named the characters after George and Martha Washington, who also couldn’t have children. In their case, the fault wasn’t Martha’s but George’s; he had a chronically low sperm count, and while there was a young man at the time who called himself “George Washington, Jr.” he was really Martha’s son by her previous husband. It’s arguable that George Washington’s low sperm count may have been the key factor that kept the U.S. from becoming a monarchy – at least until the ascension of Donald Trump!) Ultimately the sun comes up, Nick and Honey return to their place much the worse for wear, and George and Martha call at least a tentative truce when George says, “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” and Martha quietly says, “I am.” Earlier in the play Martha had sung the words, “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” to George as a joke, and in the original play she sang them to the tune of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” from Walt Disney’s 1933 Academy Award-winning cartoon The Three Little Pigs. But when the film was made, Walt Disney – who was still very much alive – refused the filmmakers permission to use his film’s copyrighted song, so Martha sang it to the tune of “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush,” which was in the public domain.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? has the initial appearance of a horror film – as my husband Charles, who got home from work in time to watch the last half-hour, said, it’s basically an old-dark-house melodrama – and the house and its environs have an appropriately Gothic flair. The cinematographer was Haskell Wexler, who would later go on to a short-lived career as a director, specializing in Left-leaning films like his first as director, Medium Cool, which he shot himself against the backdrop of the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was nominated for 13 Academy Awards – only the second (and last) film in Academy history to be nominated for every category for which it was eligible – and won five: Best Actress for Taylor, Best Supporting Actress for Dennis. Best Cinematography for Wexler, Best Black-and-White Art Direction and Best Costume Design. The set decorator was an enigmatic figure named George James Hopkins, who was apparently the more-or-less long-term partner of Gay director George Cukor until they broke up in the late 1940’s (and some Cukor biographers say the slow decline in the quality of his films, enlivened occasionally only by a rare Born Yesterday or My Fair Lady on his résumé, was due to his heartbreak over the breakup). Mad magazine did a marvelous spoof called Who In Heck is Virginia Woolf? In which they did such great touches as having the characters declaim things like, “Through these games we permeate the phantasmagoria of base rot that permeate our souls!” That’s what George says, and when Martha asks, “What does that mean?,” George said, “It means this is an art film, so the censors will have to let us talk dirty.” Later on there are strings of what are called “special characters” these days to take the place of swear words, until at one point one asks the other, “%$?” Later they explain, “That’s just asking how much of the gross income from this film we’re getting.”

And the ultimate joke in Mad’s satire was they had the mysterious “son” turn out to be real and alive after all. His name is “Lance” and he’s such a perfect picture of Hollywood squareness, including showing up with an equally bland and boring girl whom he says he’s taking to the school dance after they meet his folks. This finally brings George and Martha to their senses, as they are both so repelled by Lance’s goody-two-shoes manner they unite forces and get back together just to throw him out. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton both got Academy Award nominations for their performances, only she won but he didn’t – and she was reportedly quite upset that he was snubbed. (Burton is a charter member of the Academy Awards’ Wall of Dishonor: incredibly great and important stars – including Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, Peter Sellers, Marlene Dietrich, Ava Gardner, Natalie Wood, Janet Leigh, Montgomery Clift, and my choice for the all-time greatest movie actress, Barbara Stanwyck – who never won competitive Oscars.) In past viewings of this film I’ve been sympathetic to her force-of-nature performance, but this time around I found myself admiring Burton more. Harry and Michael Medved once called Burton the worst actor of all time – I think what they meant was the gap between his potential and his actual achievement – and one thing they ridiculed about him was his tendency to speak “even the most trivial lines as if they were painfully gorged out of his inner regions.” In this film Burton actually attempts understatement (maybe on his own, maybe due to Nichols’ direction) and becomes a figure of real pathos even as he’s telling bizarre anecdotes, like how he allegedly killed his parents, and daring both the other characters and the audience to believe him. We really feel sorry for him being married to this crazy woman whom he can’t leave because that would mean her dad would fire him from his teaching job as well. Mad magazine ridiculed the casting of Taylor – “You wouldn’t want your mother to look like her! Your girlfriend, yeah, but not your mother!” – but she’s also quite good even though I once got into an argument with my mother about her. My mom said, “Elizabeth Taylor can’t act!” “What do you mean?” I answered. “She was great in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” My mom fired back, “Of course she was great in Virginia Woolf. She was playing herself!”