(22 January 1932 - 14 October 2023)
The American actress Piper Laurie, who has died aged 91, began her career as a contract artist with Universal Studios. Chosen for her attractive, youthful appearance, she was at first used just as decoration in minor roles, opposite the likes of Tony Curtis, Rock Hudson, Donald O’Connor and Ronald Reagan, who she dated before he married Nancy Davis. Piper Laurie, as she became, was born Rosetta Jacobs in Detroit to a Polish-Russian family of Jewish descent, father Alfred, a furniture dealer, and his wife Charlotte. She was a shy child, so she took elocution lessons and studied acting for three years. Eventually she auditioned at Universal and had minor film parts from 1949.
Her first film was Louisa, a comedy with Ronald Reagan, with Spring Byington in the title role. She continued in B-movies with the actors mentioned above, including The Milkman, Frances Goes to the Races, The Prince Who Was a Thief, No Room for the Groom, Has Anybody Seen My Gal? and Son of Ali Baba, all typical Hollywood factory product of the time. She made a Western with Tyrone Power, The Mississippi Gambler, and more Westerns and the odd musical or comedy, but by 1957 she had had enough of second features and resigned from Universal and went over to MGM for Until They Sail for director Robert Wise. It was a war drama set in New Zealand, but in spite of its co-starry cast of Jean Simmons, Joan Fontaine and Paul Newman it flopped.
Piper Laurie then took a four-year break until she was cast in The Hustler, Robert Rossen’s classic pool drama with Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason and George C. Scott. Laurie played an alcoholic who shacks up with Newman, and was nominated for an Academy Award and a Bafta, while the film had another eight nominations. At Bafta it won best film and best foreign actor for Newman. Having been in a smash-hit film, Laurie nevertheless retired and married a film critic – as you do – before waiting fifteen years for her cinema comeback. She and her husband Joe Morgenstern, who she had met on The Hustler, moved to New York. Back there she was on the police series Naked City, three medical dramas, Ben Casey, The Eleventh Hour and Breaking Point, plus some TV movies as well as stage work on Broadway and later on a tour of The Last Flapper, her one-woman show about Zelda Fitzgerald.
Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976) was the first film to get her back to Hollywood and proved to be the start of a more productive time in her career. She was the religious fanatic of a mother of the title character (Sissy Spacek), a bullied teenager with extraordinary kinetic powers. Based on Stephen King’s novel, it was a very fine horror film in which Laurie showed how good she was. Both she and Spacek were Oscar-nominated. Then Laurie had the title role in Ruby, a supernatural horror movie, followed by Tim (1979), an Australian drama in which an older woman falls for a younger, mentally-impaired man (Mel Gibson). After Disney’s Return to Oz – Laurie played Aunt Em – she was up for best supporting actress in Children of a Lesser God in which she played a janitor in a deaf school. Marlee Matlin won the best actress Oscar while Laurie was among four other nominees.
Piper Laurie kept busy in both films and television during the rest of the 1980s and 1990s, and on TV played the wife of Joseph Goebbels in The Bunker, was in three episodes of The Thorn Birds and appeared in St Elsewhere, Murder, She Wrote, The Twilight Zone and Matlock. She had a good time in 27 episodes of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks as the very weird Catherine Martell and her alter ego Mr Tojamura.
With her husband Joe Morgenstern, Laurie adopted a daughter, Anne Grace Morgenstern. After twenty years together they divorced in 1982 and Laurie moved back to Hollywood and continued working in films and television until 2018. Piper Laurie was also a talented sculptor who worked in marble and clay. She published a memoir in 2011 called Learning to Live Out Loud.
MICHAEL DARVELL
