JILL TIDINGS

RIP to the charming Jill Clayburgh, best known for the 1978 Women’s Lib classic An Unmarried Woman, passed on at 66 after a twenty-plus-year struggle against leukemia.

The Wife & I had just watched Clayburgh the other night, opposite Walter Matthau in the stodgy, corny civics-lesson comedy First Monday in October, from 1981. As a conservative first female Supreme Court Justice—a fiction at the time, though about to come true with startling near-accuracy that same year—who locks rhetorical horns with the liberal Matthau, she seemed oddly miscast; too young, to begin with. But she has a self-conscious primness in the role that is very beguiling just the same.