An Unmarried Woman

An Unmarried Woman (1978) is a drama you can watch online on iFILM, written and directed by Paul Mazursky. Erica has been married sixteen years — Manhattan apartment, teenage daughter, job at a SoHo gallery. Then her husband pulls her aside on a street corner and starts crying, and she realizes he has been seeing someone else.

What follows is not a tidy recovery story. Erica works through anger, confusion, therapy sessions that don't fix anything quickly, and a string of encounters with men who want different things from her. Jill Clayburgh plays her without making Erica saintly or pitiful; Alan Bates is Saul, a London painter who unsettles her in ways the marriage never did. Kelly Bishop, Michael Murphy, and Cliff Gorman fill out a convincing New York world around them.

Clayburgh took the Best Actress prize at Cannes in 1978, and the film landed three Oscar nominations including Best Picture. Forty-odd years later it holds up — a frank portrait of a woman figuring out who she is when the wife role disappears. Stream An Unmarried Woman online on iFILM.