Gorgons – Monologue (Mildred)

All monologues are property and copyright of their owners. Monologues are presented on MightyActor for educational purposes only .

A monologue from the play by Don Nigro

MILDRED (fifties)

Mildred, an actress in her fifties, shows up at her rival Ruth’s door very late at night after she’s just been forced to hand over to her the Best Actress Oscar at the Academy Awards

and then listen to a long self-promoting and falsely humble acceptance speech in which Ruth thanks half the people on the planet but neglects to mention Mildred.

Mildred and Ruth have made a horror movie to­gether as a last attempt to keep their careers alive, and Ruth has somehow managed to fight her way to the award.

Mildred, who considers herself a much more serious actress, is furious, and a bit drunk.

Congratulate you? You think I’ve come here to congratulate you? What kind of bizarre, sick fantasy world are you living in, anyway? I don’t want to sit on the sofa. I want to sit on your face.

You thank half the population of the civilized world, including a one-eyed Bulgarian grip who smells like a fart factory, your cat, Mr Poopy, and your stupid f***ing cockatoos, and you don’t even bother to mention my name?

I want to thank Dopey and Sneezy and Bashful and Grumpy, and that left-handed soda jerk in Fresno, the hobo who sh*ts on my lawn, Spike Jones, the Bobbsey Twins, Herbert Hoover—

You mentioned every other person on the planet but me. You somehow screw me out of getting a nomination—all right, I can deal with that, you campaigned for it, I didn’t—

you put ads in the paper, I didn’t, you’ve slept with the nominating committee, I didn’t—I can understand that. Then you win—that I don’t understand, but after all, these people are not mental giants,

these are movie people, they have the brains of a kumquat and the morals of hyenas, but I can deal with that too, just barely, but I can deal with it. It’s an occupational hazard to be periodically shat upon by cretins.

But then, to have to go out there with a straight face and actually hand you the damned thing, and then stand there behind you smiling like an idiot and listen to you thank Coo Coo the cross-eyed makeup girl,

your three-legged dog Tootsie and half the population of Madagascar—and then you don’t even have the common decency to mention my name? You knew exactly what you were doing.

You memorized that speech like it was the Gettsyburg Address. You cho­reographed every move like Nijinsky, down to the little tear that rolled down your cheek at the end. You practiced it in front of the mirror for weeks.

And you did it all on purpose just to humiliate me. You rope me into doing this cockamamie piece of crap, nearly kill me in the pro­cess, win the f***ing statue, presented to you by four or five hundred people you’ve fornicated with over the last century and a half,

and then you don’t even have the decency to mention my name along with Mr Poopy? I don’t think you even have a cat. And do you know what the worst part is? The worst part is that I had finally allowed myself to believe that you were—

that we had somehow, after all the shrieking and the backbiting, managed to connect, somehow, to understand one another, to actually, God help me, establish a sort of friendship. I’ve never had a friend.

Isn’t that pathetic? In my whole wretched life, I’ve never really had a friend to call my own. And yet, by the end there, I actually felt like you and I had bonded in some significant way,

that perhaps only two old battle-axes like us could ever really understand what it took to become us, what we gave up to get to this place, the loneliness and the stored up resentment and jealousy and terror over all the years.

I thought we actually, on some level, understood each other, communicated to one another in a relatively honest way. But it was all bullsh*t, wasn’t it? It was all acting. It was acting. Ruth, you were acting. How COULD you?

Read the play here

Scroll to Top