Memorable movie nuns

Doubt, which opened Dec. 12, promises to guarantee Meryl Streep a record-breaking 15th Oscar nomination. She plays a fierce nun who suspects priest Philip Seymour Hoffman of harboring a non-ecclesiastical yen for an altar boy.

Sister Meryl is only one of many actresses who have donned the nun’s habit. Others range from the predictable (Deborah Kerr) to the outrageous (Joan Collins). Among them: Susan Sarandon won the 1995 Oscar for playing a modern real-life nun with progressive ideas in Dead Man Walking. She befriends convicted killer Sean Penn and remains at his side even when he walks the proverbial Last Mile. Terrific performance in a terrific film.

Jodie Foster was the fire-breathing nun who made The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (2002) seem dangerous indeed. Despite Foster’s emphatic performance, the film received only a limited release.

Christopher Durang’s play Sister Mary Explains It All wasn’t even considered movie material but was made into a TV movie in 2001 with Diane Keaton as unsympathetic Sister Mary. Ironically, in 1987, Keaton had directed her first film, a documentary named Heaven, which explored various people’s views of the Sweet Hereafter.

What about Mrs. Robinson as a Mother Superior? Anne Bancroft, The Graduate’s suburban sexual aggressor, played a worldly Mother in 1985’s Agnes of God. She confesses that her former husband and their children never forgave her when she decided to enter a convent.

Vanessa Redgrave probably played the most ferocious nun of all in 1971’s The Devils. A hunchback, she had lust in her heart for priest Oliver Reed and engineers his downfall. When he’s (very graphically) burned at the stake, her joy is downright fiendish.

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