Actress Piper Laurie, who played sensitive and intense roles, dies at the age of 91
Her agent, Marion Rosenberg, confirmed her death, but the cause of death has not been released.
Laurie, who was adept at immersing herself in her roles, also played one of Hollywood’s most notable disappearances. She largely disappeared from screens for 15 years between the two best performances of her career, The Hustlers (1961) and Carrie (1976), both nominated for Academy Awards. it was done.
She then returned to acting, earning a string of Emmy nominations for her roles in the hit miniseries “The Thorn Birds” and “Twin Peaks.” She also won an Oscar for Child of a Lesser God (1986), in which she played a woman who resents her deaf daughter, played by Marlee Matlin.
Laurie’s decision to abandon the movie capital for a quiet life sculpting marble and baking bread in upstate New York has its roots in a traumatic, Gothic childhood in which she couldn’t handle the pressures of show business. be.
She spent her high school years training at a prestigious theater company in Los Angeles. But more than her precocious talent for Tennessee Williams, it was her red hair, pin-up good looks, and husky voice that earned her a contract with Universal International Studios at age 18. She was called Piper Laurie by fanciful reporters who thought her real name, Rosetta Jacobs, was too ethnic.
Within a few years, she became one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actresses, but she also spent her life starring in sex-and-sand costume dramas and light films opposite Tony Curtis, Rock Hudson, and Ronald Reagan. I thought of it as a gilded prison locked in a farce. Francis the Talking Mule.
Universal International rejected her request to play a more complex role. During that time, she posed as Miss Mud Bath and Miss Milk Bath and endured endless cheesecake photo shoots. At her lowest point, she was pressured to eat countless daffodil and carnation salads in front of reporters as a publicity stunt. “I was a girl who ate flowers,” she lamented to the world.
Angry and embarrassed, and over the pleas of her parents and agent, she quit her lucrative contract in 1955 to take a chance on Broadway, but then the name Piper Laurie became a joke. I noticed something that resonated with the producers. .
After being unemployed for most of a year, she won the hearts of television producers with her determination to shake off her reputation as a “glamorous slut” and “harem cutie.” She played country girls and traumatized young women and appeared in live television productions of George Bernard Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra” and Maxwell Anderson’s “Winterset.”
Her range and ambition are as great as that of a hopelessly alcoholic wife in Days of Wine and Roses (1958), directed by John Frankenheimer and co-starring Cliff Robertson in the anthology series Playhouse 90. There was no role that showed this.
To prepare for the role, Ms. Laurie attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, visited New York’s Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, and frequented Bowery Street taverns, filled with what she described as “almost a ballet scene” of drunks. I observed his body movements.
New York Times television critic Jack Gould wrote, “Miss Laurie’s performance was gruesome, but it always evoked deep sympathy.” “Her interpretation of the young wife as just one facet of the tremors of delirium, the moments of weakness and anxiety in her character that flit about the room, and her charm when sober, is a crowning achievement. Miss Laurie is rising to the forefront of the most talented young actresses.”
A similarly well-calibrated series of television performances, by filmmaker Robert Rossen, follows a pool shark named Fast Eddie Felson (Newman) and a troubled young woman who develops a tragically misplaced love for him. (Ms. Rowley) led to “Hustlers,” a dark study.
For Laurie, being nominated for the Best Actress Oscar should have been a moment to savor. Rather, deep in the throes of her mood swings, exacerbated by her amphetamine addiction, she was in an inconsolable state of misery. Although she stayed home during the Academy Awards ceremony, she said she was relieved when the Oscar went to Sophia Loren for the war drama “Two Women.”
Laurie said she continued to receive offers for films (“mainly The Sad Girl and The Lame Girl”), but had no interest in being stereotyped again. She settled in Woodstock, New York with her new husband, theater and film critic Joe Morgenstern, and began to wean herself from her drug addiction, adopted her daughter, and developed her newfound artistic and culinary interests. concentrated on the pursuit of
She said one of the proudest moments of her life was when Dillbread was profiled in the Times’ food section in 1972. Four years later, Brian De Palma approached her about making Carrie, based on the Stephen King book about a shy high school girl who uses her telekinesis to take revenge on her tormentors.
Lowry said she thought the script was “ridiculous” but accepted the role because of De Palma’s appeal and the agreed-upon $10,000 fee. She treated the film as a satire, and played the final skewering scene with kitchen tools as a moment of religious ecstasy. To her surprise, the film was a huge hit and earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress (losing to Network’s Beatrice Straight).
“I was a housewife and mother living in the woods of Woodstock, and then all of a sudden Hollywood invited me and I got paid to go on this vacation and get nominated for an Oscar, and it was just amazing.” It’s fun. ” she told the Television Academy Foundation.
This role marked the 44-year-old Laurie’s return as an up-and-coming actress. She showed her mature confidence in films such as Tim (1979), playing an older woman who falls in love with an intellectually disabled but beautiful young gardener (Mel Gibson’s film debut). I was letting go.
Her prolific work in television films included the Right to Die drama The Case of Karen Ann Quinlan (1977), in which she played the mother of a young woman in a coma. In The Bunker (1981), she played Magda Goebbels, a fanatical Nazi who confronts Hitler, played by Anthony Hopkins. In “The Thorn Birds” (1983) she played the disabled Anne Mueller. And in “The Promise” (1986), she starred as the ex-girlfriend of James Garner’s middle-aged bachelorette.
She won an Emmy for her supporting role in The Promises, but many say her most captivating television performance came in David Lynch’s spooky series Twin Peaks (1990). Ta. She played Catherine Martel, a sly factory owner who is said to have died in a fire, but returns to spy on the town disguised as Japanese businessman Mr. Tojamura.
Lynch and Ms. Lowry conspired to hide from the cast the true identity of the new actor, who wore heavy makeup and spoke in a deep, unintelligible accent, credited as Fumio Yamaguchi. Laurie said the most difficult part of the ruse was not bursting into laughter as everyone on set became fascinated by the supposedly respected Japanese actor.
She was born January 22, 1932 in Detroit. Her father, a furniture salesman, was often absent. She once described her mother, who was prone to outbursts, as a “frustrated, uninhibited woman with a great sense of humor, but she had no outlet for it.” She also gave her two daughters amphetamines to control their weight.
Laurie became debilitated by shyness, developed an anxiety disorder, and was almost mute. At the age of five, she was taken by train to Southern California and placed in a children’s sanitarium to keep her older sister, who had asthma, company. Her only visitor was an old man who occasionally brought her gum. If she had been on her best behavior, Ms. Laurie would have been allowed to appear on the radio for 15 minutes on Saturday mornings.
“Three years of no touching, no hugging creates a different kind of person,” she told the Television Academy Foundation.
Her parents eventually settled in Los Angeles, where Ms. Laurie took language lessons and became fascinated by the power of language and the actors who conveyed it. “It was very clear: the beauty, creativity, and especially courage of the theater and the actors was what I wanted,” she wrote in her memoir, “Learning to Live Out Loud.” .
Lowry made her screen debut in Louisa (1950) opposite President Reagan, with whom they had a brief relationship after playing his daughter. A few years later, she broke off her engagement to hotel heir G. David Shine, but not so much because of his relationship with red-hater Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.). , as they enjoyed their newfound professional and sexual freedom.
“The idea of marrying David, or marrying anyone else, felt like death,” she wrote. “I still believed that my creative life was ahead of me.”
Her marriage to Morgenstern ended in divorce. Her survivors include her daughter, Anna Morgenstern;
Ms. Lowry played author Zelda Fitzgerald and toured for years with her one-woman show. Her greatest fulfillment has been her role as a character actress, both in film and television. She won Emmy Awards for various shows, including her medical drama “St. Paul.” She played a stroke patient in “She’s Elsewhere,” and the cringe-worthy role of Christine Baranski’s terrifyingly strict mother on conservative radio in the sitcom “Frasier.”
Reflecting on why she became an actress, Laurie told the Chicago Tribune: She’s in one bed and I’m in the other bed. And I desperately asked questions about what it was like to be her. I’ve always had a burning curiosity, a desire to understand what it’s like to be someone else. ”
