An Unmarried Woman

An Unmarried Woman is a 1978 American comedy-drama written and directed by Paul Mazursky, starring Jill Clayburgh as Erica Benton, a Manhattan woman who rebuilds her life after her husband leaves her for a younger woman.¹ The film was a commercial and critical success, earned three Academy Award nominations, and won Jill Clayburgh a share of the Best Actress award at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival.^{2 • 3}

Origins and production

The title. Mazursky conceived the story idea between 1974 and 1975, after one of his wife's friends, who was divorced, bought a house and was instructed to sign "an unmarried woman" next to her name on the deed. He felt the phrase would make a strong title while also indicating a stigma attached to single women.¹ He then interviewed women in his circle who had experienced upheavals in long-term marriages, conversations that formed the basis of the script; he said he did not want to create a guide to women's liberation, believing men could also identify with the story, and emphasized that the cheating spouse was not essential to the plot.¹

Casting and shooting. Mazursky wrote the script in May and June of 1976 and spent about six months in New York preparing, looking for locations in SoHo.⁷ Production began on 5 April 1977 in New York City.¹ He chose Jill Clayburgh over better-known actresses after she read for him on two earlier films and then impressed friends who saw her in the television film Hustling; he later said she turned out to be better than he could have expected.⁸ The end credits carry the dedication "For Betsy," in honor of Mazursky's twenty-fifth wedding anniversary with his wife.¹

The crew included cinematographer Arthur Ornitz, editor Stuart H. Pappé, production designer Pato Guzman, and composer Bill Conti.¹ The critic Richard Brody, writing in The New Yorker, described the film's documentary-style geographical specificity, a catalog of Manhattan locations, and Mazursky's choreographic staging of his characters in motion.⁹

Reception and significance

The film was a hit with 1978 audiences and was praised for Clayburgh's performance, though some critics, including feminists, complained that the character of Saul was too much of a romantic fantasy.² At Cannes it received the Award for Best Actress (ex-aequo), shared by Clayburgh with Isabelle Huppert for Violette; the film was also in competition for the main prize.^{3 • 10} In the United States it earned Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay, and five Golden Globe nominations for 1979: Best Motion Picture (Drama), Best Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Director, and Best Actress in a Motion Picture (Drama), with no wins.^{2 • 11} The domestic box office was $24,000,000.⁵

A feminist landmark. The film is grouped with the women's pictures made in the wake of post-1960s feminism, alongside Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) and The Turning Point (1977), and it updated the genre by turning the heroine's unwedded status into a positive growth experience.² The Criterion Collection describes it as candidly addressing sex, intimacy, loneliness, and divorce from an unabashedly feminist perspective, asserting that a woman's most important relationship is the one she has with herself.⁴ The San Francisco Chronicle called it "the defining feminist film of the decade and one of the most important women's vehicles in popular American cinema."¹² Feminist film criticism has also offered reservations: one essay noted that it is "simply too easy to make a film about the liberation of an upper-class career woman with a lucrative position in the fashionable art world," and grouped the film with Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore as the two Hollywood films generally singled out to represent feminism.¹³

The film also marked a turning point in Clayburgh's career, bringing her first Academy Award nomination.¹⁰ A 2011 article in American Journal of Psychoanalysis placed the film alongside Eat, Pray, Love (2010) and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) as movies whose protagonists grow through the process of divorce, each achieving a level of autonomy that seemed unattainable within their marriage.¹⁴ The Criterion Collection released a 4K restoration on Blu-ray as Spine #1032, with a 2005 audio commentary from Mazursky and Clayburgh and new interviews with Michael Murphy and Lisa Lucas.⁴

References

1. An Unmarried Woman (1978), AFI Catalog
2. An Unmarried Woman, American Film Institute (synopsis by Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide)
3. An Unmarried Woman, Festival de Cannes
4. An Unmarried Woman (1978), The Criterion Collection
5. An Unmarried Woman (1978), The Numbers
6. An Unmarried Woman, film review, Spirituality & Practice
7. Interview: Paul Mazursky, Film Comment (Mar-Apr 1978)
8. Paul Mazursky: "An unmarried woman…", RogerEbert.com
9. An Unmarried Woman, The New Yorker (Richard Brody, 2015)
10. An Unmarried Woman: The Business of Being a Woman, The Criterion Collection (Angelica Jade Bastién, 2020)
11. Unmarried Woman, An, Golden Globes Awards Database
12. An Unmarried Woman, Austin Film Society
13. Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, Indiana University Press
14. Psychological tasks associated with divorce: Eat, Pray, Love (2010), An Unmarried Woman (1978), and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), American Journal of Psychoanalysis

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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