Post by Rhonda on Mar 14, 2006 15:22:14 GMT -5
Maureen Stapleton, Oscar-Winning Actress, Is Dead at 80
By ROBERT BERKVIST
Published: March 13, 2006
Maureen Stapleton, who created a gallery of pugnacious, sometimes profane but always vulnerable heroines on Broadway, in movies and on television and who won an Academy Award for her fiery performance as the anarchist Emma Goldman in "Reds," Warren Beatty's 1981 epic about the Russian Revolution, died today at her home in Lenox, Mass. She was 80.
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Associated Press
Maureen Stapleton holds her Oscar for best performance by a supporting actress in "Reds" at the 54th Annual Academy Awards in Los Angeles on March 30, 1982. Stapleton died today. She was 80.
Forum: Movies
The cause was chronic pulmonary disease, said her son, Daniel Allentuck.
Ms. Stapleton had one the most honored acting careers of her generation. Her Academy Award for "Reds" came on her fourth nomination for an Oscar. She also won two Tony Awards and an Emmy among many nominations.
Ms. Stapleton's story embodied the classic theatrical cliché. A small-town girl nurtured on long afternoons at the movies, she came to New York in 1943 with dreams of becoming a star in the theater. She worked at a variety of jobs — salesgirl, hotel clerk, artists' model — while attending acting school. Then, not long after her theatrical baptism in summer stock and a few small roles on Broadway, fortune smiled.
It was 1950. Tennessee Williams had written a play called "The Rose Tattoo" and he wanted the renowned Italian actress Anna Magnani to play the lead role, that Serafina delle Rose, an earthy Sicilian-American widow looking for love. But Magnani declined, fearing that her English was inadequate for Broadway. Other actresses were auditioned, without success. Harold Clurman, who had directed Ms. Stapleton in Arthur Laurents's "Bird Cage," earlier that year, suggested to the producers that they give her an audition. After repeated callbacks, she was told she had the part.
A friend of hers from acting school, Eli Wallach, was cast opposite her as Alvaro Mangiacavallo, the simple but loving truck driver who revives the widow's spirit in a tumultuous courtship.
"The Rose Tattoo" opened at the Martin Beck Theater in February 1951. Brooks Atkinson, writing in The New York Times, called the performance "triumphant" and praised her ability to convey not only the coarseness of the plainspoken Serafina, but also her moments of exaltation. The play ran for 300 performances, then toured for six months.
"The Rose Tattoo" fulfilled Ms. Stapleton's childhood dream of becoming a star and also earned her a Tony Award. But the stress of her first major role also brought her face to face with the demons that would pursue her throughout her career. She began to drink, although she always maintained that she only drank after a performance. (She routinely vomited before curtain time.) She also became convinced that someday, someone in the audience was going to kill her.
Ms. Stapleton's growing paranoia led her to seek out a psychotherapist after the show ended its tour, but a cure for her ills — she also had a lifelong fear of elevators and airplanes — proved elusive. One therapist was to treat her for 14 years.
Despite her problems with alcohol and bouts of anxiety, her life seemed to be on a positive track. She had married Max Allentuck, general manager for the producer Kermit Bloomgarden. They had a son, Daniel, and a daughter, Katherine. When word came that Williams was ready with a new play, "Orpheus Descending," she was told once again that he wanted Magnani to play the heroine, a frustrated Italian-American storekeeper in a small Southern town whose world is torn apart by a handsome newcomer. But Magnani declined again, and the role went to Ms. Stapleton.
The play opened on Broadway in March 1957 and drew mixed reviews, but Ms. Stapleton won raves in the lead role of Lady Torrance, Williams's gritty, sex-starved heroine. Cliff Robertson played Val Xavier, the handsome interloper.
The following year she kept audiences laughing in the S.N. Behrman comedy "The Cold Wind and the Warm," in which she played a freewheeling matchmaker. She received her first Emmy nomination for her work in a television adaptation of "All the King's Men." Then Hollywood beckoned, and in her very first film, an adaptation of Nathaniel West's "Miss Lonelyhearts" (1959), she was nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actress, playing a deceitful man-eater.
In 1959 she and Mr. Allentuck were divorced, and she began a relationship with the playwright David Rayfiel, whom she eventually married. But guilt and anxiety over her divorce drove her further into alcoholism and indulgence. Her weight ballooned. Liquor, like theatrical makeup, was a fixture in her dressing room. "The curtain came down and I went into the vodka," she told an interviewer. She later said that in many ways she had been reliving a painful childhood.
Lois Maureen Stapleton was born on June 21, 1925, in Troy, N.Y. She remembered her father, John, as "a prodigious drinker" who had endless, ugly battles with her mother, Irene, until they separated when Maureen was a child. She was an unhappy, overweight girl who spent hours at the movies where she would "dream myself right onto the screen." She fantasized about someday becoming a Jean Harlow or a Barbara Stanwyck.
When she was old enough to work, her goal was to save $100 so she could move to New York City and become an actress. In 1943 she left Troy for Manhattan, where she and a friend shared a $45-a-month apartment.
"I was 17 years old, I weighed 180 pounds and I had a hundred bucks in my pocket," she remembered. "I was invincible."
She enrolled at the New School, where she studied acting with Herbert Berghof. In 1947 she joined the Actors Studio, but eventually grew impatient with some of the excesses of Lee Strasberg's Method approach to acting. Even so, she remembered the Studio as "a special working place." Her colleagues included Montgomery Clift, Julie Harris, Marlon Brando, Ann Jackson and Mr. Wallach, and her apartment became an actors' hangout. It was in some ways the happiest time of her life.
Once established on Broadway and in films and television, she was rarely idle. She appeared on Broadway with Jason Robards in Lillian Hellman's "Toys in the Attic" in 1960 (Atkinson found her "comic, disarming, awkward and pathetic all at once") and in the film version of "Orpheus," retitled "The Fugitive Kind." Tennessee Williams got his wish, however, and Anna Magnani played Lady Torrance on screen while Ms. Stapleton had to settle for a lesser role. Ms. Stapleton had an earlier disappointment when Magnani won an Academy Award for best actress as the earthy Serafina in the 1955 film version of "The Rose Tattoo."
By this time, she was married again, to David Rayfiel, but her drinking was out of control. She was hospitalized for detoxification, after which she voluntarily entered a psychiatric facility for further treatment. Her second marriage lasted three years. A few months after her divorce she returned to the role that had made her a star, appearing as Serafina opposite Harry Guardino in a revival of "The Rose Tattoo" at the City Center.
In 1967, she won an Emmy for her work in "Among the Paths to Eden," an adaptation of a story by Truman Capote about a spinster and a widower. (When an interviewer asked her if she minded being regularly cast as an older woman — something that began early in her career — she merely shrugged and said, "I was born old.")
A year later she was cast opposite George C. Scott in Neil Simon's comedy, "Plaza Suite," staged by Mike Nichols. She and Mr. Scott played three different warring couples to hilarious effect, and her performances brought her another Tony nomination.
The awards and nominations kept coming. She was nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actress for "Airport" (1970); she won a best-actress Tony that same year for her portrayal of an alcoholic down-and-out singer in Mr. Simon's laughing-through-tears drama "The Gingerbread Lady"; she and her co-star, Charles Durning, received Emmy nominations for "Queen of the Stardust Ballroom," in which they played a couple who warm to romance when they meet at a dance hall.
Another Oscar nomination, for supporting actress, followed her work in Woody Allen's "Interiors." In 1981, she was nominated for a Tony for "The Little Foxes," in which she played opposite Elizabeth Taylor. In his review in The Times, Frank Rich called her "a wonder" and added, "such is this actress's talent that she can conjure abject terror out of silence and thin air." It turned out to be her last appearance on Broadway.
But her movie career continued, perhaps most memorably as the dedicated anarchist Emma Goldman in Warren Beatty's 1981 "Reds." The performance won her the Oscar for best supporting actress. In all, she won two Tonys, an Emmy and an Oscar.
Her film credits also included "Cocoon" (1985) and its sequel, and "Nuts" (1987), in which she played the mother of a high-priced call-girl (Barbra Streisand).
When her grandchildren were born, Ms. Stapleton moved to Lenox to be near family, namely her daughter, Katharine Allentuck Bambery, her grandson Max and her granddaughter Alexandra, all of whom survive her. In addition to her son, Daniel, of Manhattan, Ms. Stapleton is survived by a brother, John, of Troy. (She was not related to the actress Jean Stapleton, as many moviegoers have thought.)
In Lenox she doted on her grandchildren and continued to accept the occasional role, playing a woman dying of ovarian cancer in the television drama "Last Wish" (1992) and appearing opposite Armin Mueller-Stahl in the 1994 film "The Last Good Time." She did poetry readings to raise money for her local library.
She also wrote her autobiography with Jane Scovell in 1995, in which she looked back on a life in the theater with a few regrets but a lot of satisfaction. She loved "the challenge and the opportunity to leave reality behind and become someone else," she wrote.
When the curtain went up, or the cameras rolled, she said, "I did the best I could."
By ROBERT BERKVIST
Published: March 13, 2006
Maureen Stapleton, who created a gallery of pugnacious, sometimes profane but always vulnerable heroines on Broadway, in movies and on television and who won an Academy Award for her fiery performance as the anarchist Emma Goldman in "Reds," Warren Beatty's 1981 epic about the Russian Revolution, died today at her home in Lenox, Mass. She was 80.
Skip to next paragraph
Associated Press
Maureen Stapleton holds her Oscar for best performance by a supporting actress in "Reds" at the 54th Annual Academy Awards in Los Angeles on March 30, 1982. Stapleton died today. She was 80.
Forum: Movies
The cause was chronic pulmonary disease, said her son, Daniel Allentuck.
Ms. Stapleton had one the most honored acting careers of her generation. Her Academy Award for "Reds" came on her fourth nomination for an Oscar. She also won two Tony Awards and an Emmy among many nominations.
Ms. Stapleton's story embodied the classic theatrical cliché. A small-town girl nurtured on long afternoons at the movies, she came to New York in 1943 with dreams of becoming a star in the theater. She worked at a variety of jobs — salesgirl, hotel clerk, artists' model — while attending acting school. Then, not long after her theatrical baptism in summer stock and a few small roles on Broadway, fortune smiled.
It was 1950. Tennessee Williams had written a play called "The Rose Tattoo" and he wanted the renowned Italian actress Anna Magnani to play the lead role, that Serafina delle Rose, an earthy Sicilian-American widow looking for love. But Magnani declined, fearing that her English was inadequate for Broadway. Other actresses were auditioned, without success. Harold Clurman, who had directed Ms. Stapleton in Arthur Laurents's "Bird Cage," earlier that year, suggested to the producers that they give her an audition. After repeated callbacks, she was told she had the part.
A friend of hers from acting school, Eli Wallach, was cast opposite her as Alvaro Mangiacavallo, the simple but loving truck driver who revives the widow's spirit in a tumultuous courtship.
"The Rose Tattoo" opened at the Martin Beck Theater in February 1951. Brooks Atkinson, writing in The New York Times, called the performance "triumphant" and praised her ability to convey not only the coarseness of the plainspoken Serafina, but also her moments of exaltation. The play ran for 300 performances, then toured for six months.
"The Rose Tattoo" fulfilled Ms. Stapleton's childhood dream of becoming a star and also earned her a Tony Award. But the stress of her first major role also brought her face to face with the demons that would pursue her throughout her career. She began to drink, although she always maintained that she only drank after a performance. (She routinely vomited before curtain time.) She also became convinced that someday, someone in the audience was going to kill her.
Ms. Stapleton's growing paranoia led her to seek out a psychotherapist after the show ended its tour, but a cure for her ills — she also had a lifelong fear of elevators and airplanes — proved elusive. One therapist was to treat her for 14 years.
Despite her problems with alcohol and bouts of anxiety, her life seemed to be on a positive track. She had married Max Allentuck, general manager for the producer Kermit Bloomgarden. They had a son, Daniel, and a daughter, Katherine. When word came that Williams was ready with a new play, "Orpheus Descending," she was told once again that he wanted Magnani to play the heroine, a frustrated Italian-American storekeeper in a small Southern town whose world is torn apart by a handsome newcomer. But Magnani declined again, and the role went to Ms. Stapleton.
The play opened on Broadway in March 1957 and drew mixed reviews, but Ms. Stapleton won raves in the lead role of Lady Torrance, Williams's gritty, sex-starved heroine. Cliff Robertson played Val Xavier, the handsome interloper.
The following year she kept audiences laughing in the S.N. Behrman comedy "The Cold Wind and the Warm," in which she played a freewheeling matchmaker. She received her first Emmy nomination for her work in a television adaptation of "All the King's Men." Then Hollywood beckoned, and in her very first film, an adaptation of Nathaniel West's "Miss Lonelyhearts" (1959), she was nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actress, playing a deceitful man-eater.
In 1959 she and Mr. Allentuck were divorced, and she began a relationship with the playwright David Rayfiel, whom she eventually married. But guilt and anxiety over her divorce drove her further into alcoholism and indulgence. Her weight ballooned. Liquor, like theatrical makeup, was a fixture in her dressing room. "The curtain came down and I went into the vodka," she told an interviewer. She later said that in many ways she had been reliving a painful childhood.
Lois Maureen Stapleton was born on June 21, 1925, in Troy, N.Y. She remembered her father, John, as "a prodigious drinker" who had endless, ugly battles with her mother, Irene, until they separated when Maureen was a child. She was an unhappy, overweight girl who spent hours at the movies where she would "dream myself right onto the screen." She fantasized about someday becoming a Jean Harlow or a Barbara Stanwyck.
When she was old enough to work, her goal was to save $100 so she could move to New York City and become an actress. In 1943 she left Troy for Manhattan, where she and a friend shared a $45-a-month apartment.
"I was 17 years old, I weighed 180 pounds and I had a hundred bucks in my pocket," she remembered. "I was invincible."
She enrolled at the New School, where she studied acting with Herbert Berghof. In 1947 she joined the Actors Studio, but eventually grew impatient with some of the excesses of Lee Strasberg's Method approach to acting. Even so, she remembered the Studio as "a special working place." Her colleagues included Montgomery Clift, Julie Harris, Marlon Brando, Ann Jackson and Mr. Wallach, and her apartment became an actors' hangout. It was in some ways the happiest time of her life.
Once established on Broadway and in films and television, she was rarely idle. She appeared on Broadway with Jason Robards in Lillian Hellman's "Toys in the Attic" in 1960 (Atkinson found her "comic, disarming, awkward and pathetic all at once") and in the film version of "Orpheus," retitled "The Fugitive Kind." Tennessee Williams got his wish, however, and Anna Magnani played Lady Torrance on screen while Ms. Stapleton had to settle for a lesser role. Ms. Stapleton had an earlier disappointment when Magnani won an Academy Award for best actress as the earthy Serafina in the 1955 film version of "The Rose Tattoo."
By this time, she was married again, to David Rayfiel, but her drinking was out of control. She was hospitalized for detoxification, after which she voluntarily entered a psychiatric facility for further treatment. Her second marriage lasted three years. A few months after her divorce she returned to the role that had made her a star, appearing as Serafina opposite Harry Guardino in a revival of "The Rose Tattoo" at the City Center.
In 1967, she won an Emmy for her work in "Among the Paths to Eden," an adaptation of a story by Truman Capote about a spinster and a widower. (When an interviewer asked her if she minded being regularly cast as an older woman — something that began early in her career — she merely shrugged and said, "I was born old.")
A year later she was cast opposite George C. Scott in Neil Simon's comedy, "Plaza Suite," staged by Mike Nichols. She and Mr. Scott played three different warring couples to hilarious effect, and her performances brought her another Tony nomination.
The awards and nominations kept coming. She was nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actress for "Airport" (1970); she won a best-actress Tony that same year for her portrayal of an alcoholic down-and-out singer in Mr. Simon's laughing-through-tears drama "The Gingerbread Lady"; she and her co-star, Charles Durning, received Emmy nominations for "Queen of the Stardust Ballroom," in which they played a couple who warm to romance when they meet at a dance hall.
Another Oscar nomination, for supporting actress, followed her work in Woody Allen's "Interiors." In 1981, she was nominated for a Tony for "The Little Foxes," in which she played opposite Elizabeth Taylor. In his review in The Times, Frank Rich called her "a wonder" and added, "such is this actress's talent that she can conjure abject terror out of silence and thin air." It turned out to be her last appearance on Broadway.
But her movie career continued, perhaps most memorably as the dedicated anarchist Emma Goldman in Warren Beatty's 1981 "Reds." The performance won her the Oscar for best supporting actress. In all, she won two Tonys, an Emmy and an Oscar.
Her film credits also included "Cocoon" (1985) and its sequel, and "Nuts" (1987), in which she played the mother of a high-priced call-girl (Barbra Streisand).
When her grandchildren were born, Ms. Stapleton moved to Lenox to be near family, namely her daughter, Katharine Allentuck Bambery, her grandson Max and her granddaughter Alexandra, all of whom survive her. In addition to her son, Daniel, of Manhattan, Ms. Stapleton is survived by a brother, John, of Troy. (She was not related to the actress Jean Stapleton, as many moviegoers have thought.)
In Lenox she doted on her grandchildren and continued to accept the occasional role, playing a woman dying of ovarian cancer in the television drama "Last Wish" (1992) and appearing opposite Armin Mueller-Stahl in the 1994 film "The Last Good Time." She did poetry readings to raise money for her local library.
She also wrote her autobiography with Jane Scovell in 1995, in which she looked back on a life in the theater with a few regrets but a lot of satisfaction. She loved "the challenge and the opportunity to leave reality behind and become someone else," she wrote.
When the curtain went up, or the cameras rolled, she said, "I did the best I could."