You Go, Frau Blucher!

In all of American cinema, is there a more emotionally-devestating shot than the one in The Last Picture Show of Cloris Leachman–it’s taken from high above, so as to make a banquet of her humility–sitting on her bed, having been stood up by her much younger lover? I can’t think of one.

So it was doubly thrilling to hear that, career-wise, Leachman has been having the last laugh recently. According to Page Six, Mel Brooks told Leachman last year that, at 81, she was too old to play Frau Blucher–the role she’d created in Brooks’s film, Young Frankenstein–in the Broadway adaptation. (Brooks told Variety, “We’re afraid the show…could kill [her]…We don’t want her to die onstage.”)

But on Monday the Broadway gossip site billymasters.com reported that, now that Leachman has been wowing the country with her moves on the reality dance show, Dancing with the Stars, Brooks has reached out to her again about incarnating Blucher.

Will Cloris entertain the notion? According to Page Six, she’s letting Mel sweat.