IMDb RATING
6.4/10
1.7K
YOUR RATING
A Broadway actress fresh out of rehab navigates sobriety, her career, demanding daughter, and supporting her troubled friends' personal crises.A Broadway actress fresh out of rehab navigates sobriety, her career, demanding daughter, and supporting her troubled friends' personal crises.A Broadway actress fresh out of rehab navigates sobriety, her career, demanding daughter, and supporting her troubled friends' personal crises.
- Nominated for 3 Oscars
- 2 wins & 8 nominations total
Michael A. Ross
- Paul
- (as Michael Ross)
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaJames Coco became the first actor to be nominated for both an Academy Award and a Razzie for the same performance. Coco won neither award. The only people to repeat this have been Amy Irving for Yentl (1983) and Glenn Close for Hillbilly Elegy (2020).
- GoofsIn one of the opening scenes when Marsha Mason's character is leaving the "Betty Ford Clinic" of the time, there is an employee, Sandy, who passes her by the stairs says good-bye but addresses her as Mrs. Simon instead Mrs. Hines the character's real name.
- Alternate versionsNBC edited 24 minutes from this film for its 1984 network television premiere.
- SoundtracksHeart
from Damn Yankees (1958)
Music and Lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross
Performed by Kristy McNichol (uncredited) and Nancy Nagler (uncredited)
Featured review
Comedy-drama from writer Neil Simon, an expansion of his unsuccessful play "The Gingerbread Lady", has Marsha Mason playing an alcoholic Broadway star just checking out of rehab and back into reality when her estranged teenage daughter tells her she wants the two to be roommates. Fairly lively, bitchy film full of wisecracks and tears becomes flabby in the second and third acts, mostly due to poor editing which might have eliminated the dross (and a few side-plots that lead nowhere). Mason performs one too many dramatic monologues on the telephone, and there's six minutes of wasted film involving two college guys trying to pick up Mason and daughter Kristy McNichol at a health food restaurant. The movie has been designed to show off Mason's range (her vulnerability, her wiseass humor, her pathos, etc.). She's striking walking around New York City in her cape, less so when she's sniffling or giving an actors' seminar on the phone. Mason matches up perfectly with McNichol, but 17-year-old Kristy is shunted off to the side (and I disliked the padded sequence where she gets drunk like mamma). There are some fine moments here, but the picture gets off to a really bad start with an excruciating scene between James Coco and a Hispanic delivery boy. Simon takes one cheap shot after another, and yet the film isn't really about alcoholism at all, it's about masochistic behavior. **1/2 from ****
- moonspinner55
- Jul 6, 2007
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Details
- Release date
- Country of origin
- Language
- Also known as
- Neil Simon's Only When I Laugh
- Filming locations
- Production companies
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
Box office
- Gross US & Canada
- $25,524,778
- Gross worldwide
- $25,524,778
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