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Posted: |
May 11, 2015 - 7:22 PM
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By: |
msmith
(Member)
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Elizabeth Wilson, an actress who distinguished herself onstage, on television and in films like “The Graduate” and “9 to 5” in supporting roles that were often meaty but rarely glamorous, died on Saturday in New Haven. She was 94.
Her death was confirmed by Elizabeth Morton, a close friend whom she considered a daughter.
Ms. Wilson knew from an early age that she wanted to be an actress, but she was never very interested in being a star.
“In the 1940s,” she told Connecticut magazine in 2012, “I was doing something called the Equity Library Theater in New York, when a movie company came to see the play I was in and offered me a contract. But the deal was, my nose was too big and they wanted me to have surgery. My jaw was crooked, and I’d have to have that fixed, too. And they didn’t like my name; it was too common. I was to change these things, and they’d sign me to a multiyear contract.
“I don’t know how I managed to do this, but I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ Imagine! I can’t believe I had the wisdom.”
By all accounts, she was always content to be a character actress, more recognizable by face than by name. That face — equally capable of projecting snobbery, sadness and a winning eccentricity — was seen often in a career that lasted almost 70 years.
She won a Tony Award in 1972 for her portrayal of a blinded Vietnam War veteran’s emotionally wounded mother in David Rabe’s harrowing antiwar drama, “Sticks and Bones.” She won Obie Awards for her parts in “Taken in Marriage” in 1979 and “Anteroom” in 1986.
She was nominated for an Emmy for her role as the rich but helpless mother of a woman (Lee Remick) plotting to kill her father in the based-on-a-true-story mini-series “Nutcracker: Money, Madness and Murder” (1987).
Mothers were a particular specialty. There was something about her appearance and manner — the fact that she stood an imposing 5-foot-10 may have had something to do with it — that led directors to cast Ms. Wilson, who never had children, as mothers almost from the start of her career.
She was still in her 20s when she first played a mother, in a production of “Springtime for Henry” that toured Japan after World War II under the auspices of the U.S.O.
On screen, she played the often befuddled mother of Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock in “The Graduate” (1967), the patrician mother of Ralph Fiennes’s Charles Van Doren in “Quiz Show” (1994) and the scheming mother of an impostor (Christopher Lloyd) claiming to be Uncle Fester in “The Addams Family” (1991). (In the end the impostor is revealed as the true Fester.)
Onstage, her roles included Mrs. Peachum, whose daughter marries the notorious Mack the Knife, in a 1976 revival of “The Threepenny Opera.” Her last maternal role, as the mother of Bill Murray’s Franklin D. Roosevelt in “Hyde Park on Hudson” (2012), was also her last role of any kind.
Probably her best-known film performance, and certainly her most substantial, was not as a mother but as Roz, the memorably untrustworthy office snitch and the nemesis of the downtrodden workers played by Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, in the 1980 hit “9 to 5.”
Elizabeth Welter Wilson was born on April 4, 1921, in Grand Rapids, Mich., to Henry Dunning Wilson, an insurance agent, and the former Marie Ethel Welter. She moved to New York after high school and studied with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse.
When she couldn’t find work in her early years in New York, Ms. Wilson worked with the Barter Theater in Abingdon, Va., where she met the actor Fritz Weaver, with whom she was for a time romantically involved.
Her first Broadway role was a spinster schoolteacher in “Picnic” in 1953. (She would play the same part in the movie version two years later.) Her last was a resident of a home for retired actresses in the 1999 revival of Noël Coward’s “Waiting in the Wings,” which was also Lauren Bacall’s Broadway farewell.
She played one of four aging sisters in the acclaimed 1980 production of “Morning’s at Seven” and a woman fleeing an unspecified danger in the 1996 revival of Edward Albee’s “A Delicate Balance,” a performance that Vincent Canby of The New York Times called “simultaneously pathetic and menacing,” adding, “You can’t ask for more.”
Ms. Wilson’s early film roles included the bitter personal secretary of a doomed movie star in “The Goddess” (1958) and a dowdy waitress in the Alfred Hitchcock classic “The Birds” (1963).
Her television career began with the 1955 Rod Serling drama “Patterns” and ended with an episode of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” in 2002. She was Edith Bunker’s cousin in a 1975 episode of “All in the Family”, Barnard Hughes’s wife on the sitcom “Doc” (1975-76) and was in the very first episode of "Dark Shadows" in 1966 playing the part of Mrs. Hopewell.
She was a favorite actress of Mike Nichols, who after directing her in “The Graduate” cast her in his films “Catch-22” (1970), “The Day of the Dolphin” (1973) and “Regarding Henry” (1991), and on Broadway in his 1973 revival of “Uncle Vanya.”
Ms. Wilson is survived by a sister, Mary Muir Wilson, with whom she had been living in Branford, Conn., and several nieces and nephews.
She never married, although she told an interviewer in 2013 that she had “met a lot of interesting gentlemen in the work situation,” two of whom (she did not name them) she was “madly in love with.”
“But in those days,” she added, “if a woman married, they had to quit what they were doing and stay home and raise a family. I didn’t want to do that and now, thank God, you don’t have to.”
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THANK YOU, msmith, for this wonderful tribute to a great actress.
I have always enjoyed Elizabeth Wilson's appearances in many films, and you have given her a fabulous memorial here.
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Wonderful character actress.
I remember her especially in the Mike Nichols flop, DAY OF THE DOLPHIN, when she has just heard everything is lost, then walks down an aisle in an office, reacting pleasantly to all, but inside falling to pieces. Amazing work.
It's not often that actors get to have memorable moments like this.
Though her general appearance was more or less befuddled, she brought a dignity to her roles that made them believable. Check out her helpful mother in LITTLE MURDERS.
Glad she had a life she felt proud of.
More power to her.
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Thank you, John, I was just about to point that out.
(Personal aside -- did you get that e-mail I sent you a few weeks ago?)
In the New England spring of 1973, I was employed as a production assistant for the second time on a Frank Perry picture, MAN ON A SWING. (The first, as some of you may remember, had been THE SWIMMER.) Actually, this time I was more of a direct assistant to Mr. Perry, as opposed to the general production. I had the pleasure of driving Ms. Wilson from her Connecticut home to the "studio" where the interiors were being shot in the gymnasium of the Norwalk armory. I hadn't thought about this until today, but I seem to remember Perry's enthusiasm about his brainstorm of suddenly casting her, at the last minute, in a role which had originally been planned for a man. (NON SEQUITOR: I long for the politically incorrect days when I could have simply said "actor" and it would have been understood that I was referring to a male. To this day, I find absolutely nothing demeaning or condescending in the simply factual word "actress." You hire an actor to play Tarzan, and you hire an actress to play Jane. But I digress.)
Ms. Wilson was called in for just one crucial scene in which she, a head scientist/professor, and her colleagues interrogate Joel Grey's psychic who is fast becoming a murder suspect. She definitely fulfilled the director's hope that she would bring an extra added dimension to the sequence, her quietly probing questions causing Grey's character to become increasingly rattled and agitated. At this time, or shortly before, Ms. Wison shared the Broadway stage with an all-star cast -- Julie Christie, George C. Scott, Nicol Williamson, Lillian Gish -- in the Mike Nichols revival of UNCLE VANYA mentioned in the obituary above. I distinctly remember remarking on this production to Mr. Perry and his referring to those particular players as "a bunch of heavyweights." Ms. Wilson certainly deserved being rated in that category.
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I think I remember her from "Apple's Way" on TV in the 70's.
I always liked her wherever I saw her.
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