Often playing smaller and supporting roles, the divine Rhoda Gemignani floated throughout the background scenes of many a cinema buff’s childhood. Terror tykes might know her best, though, for her portrayal of the Real Estate Agent in the original Ghostbusters film.
Nicely, in the mid-70s, Gemignani was given the chance to play a character of dramatically gothic proportions on The Forgotten Room, an episode of the classic detective show Kojak. There, as a lusty widow named Katrina Patropoulos, she embraced all of the desperate, almost Southern characteristics of the role. Obviously inspired by Anna Magnani’s Serafina from Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo, Gemignani shines like a diva personified throughout the various mechanics of the straightforward plotline. Short-handedly here, the long ignored Patropoulos falls into a passionate affair with a handsome stranger (George Pan Andreas) – one who has an unfortunate propensity for killing prostitutes.
As many of Williams’ female characters seem to be the prototype for the troubled divas of such films as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? & their ilk, career-wise, it would have been nice to see Gemingnani go full throttle in a celluloid escapade of that caliber. As that was not to be, her work in this primetime caper will have to be the dreamy stand-in for all that could have, wonderfully, been.
Until the next, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!
Big Gay Horror Fan 