In this episode of Private Life, the actress Holland Taylor reads Renata Adler’s essay “The Perils of Pauline,” an expansive assessment of Pauline Kael’s film criticism from the Review’s August 14, 1980, issue. Taylor has been working on films, television, and Broadway since the 1960s. She is a nine-time Emmy nominee, winning once, in 1999, for her role as a judge on The Practice. She was nominated for a Tony Award in 2013 for playing Texas governor Ann Richards in Ann. 

Renata Adler is a journalist and film critic who was a staff writer at The New Yorker for four decades. Her books include A Year in the Dark (1969); Toward a Radical Middle (1970); Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker (1999); and the novels Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983), which were both reissued by NYRB Classics. 

Last week’s episode was an interview with Lucy Sante that discussed Adler’s essay and film criticism. You can read “The Perils of Pauline” and other essays with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963.