Melinda Dillon: A mom for all ages

Melinda Dillon may not be a household name. Well, she is in my household, but not in the world at large in the strictest sense of that term. 

The actress was in blockbusters and beloved family movies, award grabbers and cult films. But she's perhaps best known as Ralphie's mom from A Christmas Story or the mother of the little boy who gets abducted in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. 

That characterization doesn't do Melinda justice, though. If you scour social media in the wake of the news surfacing that she passed away on Jan. 9 at age 83, you'll see virtually every genre and so many film and television projects referenced. Dillon's work touched a lot of people, maybe in ways they didn't realize until they heard she had died.

Melinda's acting style was refreshingly honest. You get the feeling no one else could have played a part the way she did. No reaction was stock, no line just thrown away. She didn't look and perform like any other actress, her presence always came across as unique and refreshing.

That's what made the part of Jillian Guiler so perfect for her. On the surface it may not look like a complicated role, but there's a lot more going on than was on the page. We don't find out a lot about Jillian's back story, she wears what looks like a wedding ring but her husband/Barry's father is never brought up. She has a close encounter on a road after chasing her son down through the forest by their home, and she starts feeling the same intangible things Roy Neary does afterward. The difference being that the aliens want her son ... and they take him. 

The scene at the Guiler home when Barry is abducted is downright petrifying -- especially to those people who watched at a tender age when they could not discern between what's real and what's reel. Just about every day on social media, I see posts by people who say they were scarred for life by that spectacle -- the appliances in the home feverishly cranking as the spaceship lands to take her son away.

So it's quite understandable that Jillian is not filled with the same sense of wonder as Neary, instead she expresses a measure of wariness about following the impulses she is having to their conclusion. In Roy, she finds someone she can count on when the rest of her world doesn't make any sense.

All of this is conveyed by Dillon through minimal dialogue. We see it in her face, in her mannerisms, like when she's in a hotel room watching footage of the alleged contamination in Wyoming. Jillian gets her first look at the real Devils Tower while searching for Barry and there's a palpable combination of wonder and relief. When Jillian and Roy scale the hill and see the real mountain, we understand what she's feeling to our very core. That makes the moment when she's reunited with her son all the more powerful. We feel as relieved as Jillian does and can revel in the fact that she did whatever she had to in order to make that happen. 

We've been through the ringer with Jillian and Melinda by the end when she's laughing through her tears while snapping pictures of the awesome spectacle at the end. For her work, Dillon picked up the first of two Academy Award nominations -- she lost to Vanessa Redgrave (Julia.) So it was kind of an easy call for me to cosplay as sunburned Jillian when I had the chance to meet Richard Dreyfuss at a comic con. (I got his seal of approval for doing so, by the way.)

Melinda was nominated for an Oscar in 1982 for her unforgettable role as Paul Newman's longtime friend in Absence of Malice. (Maureen Stapleton won that year for Reds.) But as impressive as those two nods were, Dillon could have been feted much more than she was. Her filmography is laden with performances of distinction, and that's why the news of Melinda's passing hit me very hard.

The fact that she starred in my all-time favorite movie made me a fan of hers for a lifetime. That beginning was the impetus for following her career for four decades -- for going back to see the work she had done before -- like Bound for Glory (which got her hired for Close Encounters) and Slap Shot -- to my tuning into movies and television shows that came afterward just because she was in them.

Through the years, Dillon quietly helped anchor films that the world treasured -- like A Christmas Story and Harry and the Hendersons. Her penchant for playing moms left indelible impressions on a world of kids like me. And as the years went on, she got to nurture that ability -- the mothers got more complex, fallible even, but in their hearts, we understood their priorities and sometimes outlandish behaviors through Dillon. Roles in Magnolia and Law and Order: SVU exemplified this ability to a T. When directors needed someone who could convey emotions on any and every level, they turned to Melinda. (Lou Diamond Phillips said as much on Twitter about their movie Sioux City upon hearing the news.)

For all these reasons, it became one of the joys of my life when I finally made it to Devils Tower and scaled the same hill as Dillon and Dreyfuss four decades earlier and voiced Jillian's line -- "I can't believe it's real" -- while feeling like I was experiencing a comparable level of emotion as they had. I wish I could have told her all of this in person, but now I'm sending it out in the ethers in hopes that she can still perceive it now.