(13 January 1930 - 27 November 2023)
The American actress Frances Sternhagen, who has died aged 93, was showbusiness royalty, gracing many fine stage plays, high-profile movies and popular TV shows. She was showered with awards – Tonys, Drama Desk, Primetime Emmys, Obies, etc, and was indeed an actress for all seasons who enjoyed a 60-year plus career. Frances Hussey Sternhagen was born in Washington DC to father John, a tax court judge, and his wife Gertrude, a former World War I nurse. Frances was educated in Maclean, Virginia, before gaining a place at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York where she was elected head of the drama club. She graduated at the Catholic University of America in Washington and studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York.
She began teaching acting, singing and dancing at a children’s academy before her 1948 debut in The Glass Menagerie at Bryn Mawr. After working for the Washington Arena Stage, she made her Broadway debut in 1955 playing Miss T. Muse in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth and was also in Jean Anouilh’s Thieves’ Carnival off-Broadway. Later work included Neil Simon’s The Good Doctor, for which she won a Tony, and she played in Equus, Angel, a musical of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel, The Heiress and Morning’s at Seven. She did Steel Magnolias on Broadway and revivals of Albee’s Seascape and O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. In her time she was Nora in A Doll’s House, Lavinia in T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, Widow Quin in Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, Paulina in Gorky’s Enemies and Laura in Strindberg’s The Father. She created the leads in both On Golden Pond and Driving Miss Daisy, but was not cast for either film version.
For the cinema, Sternhagen made her debut in Up the Down Staircase for Robert Mulligan in 1967. She appeared with George C. Scott in Paddy Chayefsky’s scurrilous screenplay for The Hospital, was in Billy Wilder’s underrated Fedora with William Holden, Robert Wise’s Two People with Peter Fonda, and Alan J. Pakula’s comedy Starting Over with Burt Reynolds. She was superb in Outland, Peter Hyams’ sci-fi thriller in which she and Sean Connery investigate odd deaths on Jupiter’s Io moon. In Misery, from Stephen King’s book, she played Deputy Virginia, and was in Stephen King’s sci-fi horror The Mist. Sternhagen made countless films, including Independence Day, Bright Lights, Big City, Pakula’s See You in the Morning, Brian De Palma’s Raising Cain, and Julie and Julia, Nora Ephron’s biopic of the chef Julia Child (Meryl Streep) and the aspiring cook Julie Powell (Amy Adams), with Sternhagen as the cookery writer Irma Rombauer.
Television called in 1956 and and she appeared in 21 episodes of ER as Millicent ‘Gamma’ Carter, grandmother to Noah Wyle’s John Carter, and in Cheers she was mum to John Ratzenberger’s Cliff, while in ten episodes of Sex and the City she played Kyle MacLachlan’s awful mother Bunny MacDougal. In The Simpsons she voiced Mrs Bellamy, and did 15 episodes of The Closer, a police procedural series.
Frances Sternhagen was married to the actor Thomas A. Carlin who she met at graduate school. They were married from 1938 until his death in 1991. They have four sons, Paul, Tony, Peter and John, and two daughters, Amanda and Sarah.
MICHAEL DARVELL
