June 21, 1925– Maureen Stapleton is one of those great character actors that I am crazy about. I loved the film version of the musical Bye Bye Birdie (1963) as a child, & I still do. Stapleton played Dick Van Dyke’s mother & was Oscar nominated, even though, at 36 years old, she was only half year older than Van Dyke. When she was asked her if she minded being regularly cast as an older woman she merely shrugged & said:
“I was born old.”
At the finish of filming Bye Bye Birdie there was a wrap party & the director, producers & the cast including stars Van Dyke & Janet Leigh, each gave speeches extolling the extraordinary talents of newcomer Ann-Margret. When it was her turn, Stapleton announced:
“I guess I’m the only person in the room who doesn’t want to fuck Ann-Margret.”
It is one of the oldest stories in the show biz book. The small-town girl spends her afternoons at the movie theatre, she moves to NYC dreaming of becoming a star on the Broadway stage. She works takes employment as a retail salesperson, hotel clerk, artists’ model, just to afford acting school. She finds work in summer stock & then small roles in Broadway shows. Then she gets that special big break, & what a break! She lands the lead role in the new play by celebrated gay writer Tennessee Williams. fresh off A Streetcar Named Desire.
Williams had written The Rose Tattoo for Italian actress Anna Magnani to play the lead role, but Magnani declined. Other actors were auditioned, but didn’t fit the bill for the character of Serafina delle Rose, an earthy Italian-American widow looking for love. Magnani had said no feeling that her English was not proficient enough for Broadway. Influential director Harold Clurman, who had directed Stapleton in small part in an play by gay writer Arthur Laurents’ earlier that year, 1950, suggested that Williams & company give her an audition. After a set of grueling callbacks, she won the role.
She became a muse for Tennessee Williams with The Rose Tattoo. Stapleton’s performance was a triumph & she won the Tony Award. It played for 300 performances & then toured for 6 months. Stapleton went on to rave reviews for Williams’ The Glass Menagerie & Orpheus Descending. In the next decade she was a favorite of Neil Simon who wrote Plaza Suite for her, bringing her another Tony nomination. In 1971 she won another Tony Award for Simon’s The Gingerbread Lady about an alcoholic actor & partially based of Stapleton’s own life.
Stapleton liked to drink a bit, although she claimed that she only indulged after a performance. Suffering stage-fright & self-doubt, she always vomited just before curtain time. Booze was as much fixture in her dressing room as stage make-up & wigs. Stapleton:
“The curtain came down & I went into the vodka!”
She was also convinced that someday, somehow, someone in the audience was going to kill her. She also had a lifelong terror of elevators & flying. She was in & out of therapy most of her adult life.
Stapleton had plenty of awards for her mantle. She won an Emmy for Among The Paths To Eden (1967), adapted from a short story by gay writer Truman Capote. She was nominated for an Oscar for Airport (1970) the same year that she won the Tony for The Gingerbread Lady. She received Emmy nom for Queen Of The Stardust Ballroom (1975) in which she & Charles Durning played an older couple who warm to romance when they meet at a dance hall. Stapleton received another Oscar nomination for my favorite of her roles in Woody Allen‘s shockingly unfunny Interiors (1978), a fascinating but excruciating study of an extremely dysfunctional family in NYC, led by the humorless parents played by E.G. Marshall & Geraldine Page, both wearing various shades of beige. Into the picture saunters saucy Stapleton in a bright red dress to steal patriarch Marshall away from the family, much to the horror the very beige daughters played by Diane Keaton & Mary Beth Hurt.
In 1981, she was nominated for another Tony for Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes in which she held her own opposite Elizabeth Taylor. I bet there was some liquor in those dressing rooms.
I only saw Stapleton on the stage one time, in Juno & The Paycock with Jack Lemmon & Walter Matthau at the Mark Taper in LA, in 1974, a truly memorable night at the theatre with jaw-dropping talent. I remain inspired by her work in that Sean O’ Casey play, proof that you don’t have to be traditionally pretty to be a star.
When Stapleton won the Academy Award for her small but powerful role as anarchist Emma Goldman in Warren Beatty‘s excellent Reds (1981), she gave what I consider the best acceptance speech of all time:
“I want to thank everybody I ever met in my entire life.”
Minutes after winning her Oscar, a reporter asked her how it felt to be recognized as one of the greatest actresses in the world. Stapleton:
“Not nearly as exciting as it would be if I were acknowledged as one of the greatest lays in the world.”
When they asked her if she had expected to win, she answered:
“Yes, because I’m old & tired & I lost 3 times before.”
I cannot recall another actor with such a down-to-earth personality, completely devoid of pretension. When asked the key to good acting, Stapleton stated:
“As far as I’m concerned, the main thing is to keep the audience awake.”
Maureen Stapleton took her final curtain call in 2006. In her 1995 memoir she says of her career:
“I did the best I could.”
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