Piper Laurie, three-time Oscar nominee, known in particular for her role in the film Carrie (1976), by Brian De Palma – she played the mother of the heroine played by Sissy Spacek – died early, Saturday October 14, at his home in Los Angeles. She was 91 years old.
Arriving in Hollywood in 1949 as Rosetta Jacobs, Piper Laurie – a new name she hated – quickly secured a contract with Universal-International and a series of starring roles with Ronald Reagan, Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis, among others.
She made her debut at age 17 in 1950 in Louise, as Ronald Reagan’s daughter, and then appeared alongside Francis, the talking mule, in Francis at the Races (1951). She made several films with Tony Curtis – with whom she formed a romantic relationship – including The Thief of Tangier (1951), No Room for the Groom (1952), The Son of Ali Baba (1952) and The Bolides de l Hell (1954).
Fed up, she broke her $2,000-a-week contract in 1955, swearing that she would not work again unless she was offered a decent role. She moved to New York and focused on television.
Her performances earned her Emmy nominations and paved the way for a return to cinema, notably in the acclaimed role of Paul Newman’s girlfriend in The Hustler (1961), for which she received her first Oscar nomination.
“I was disenchanted.”
Then she turned her back on comedy, married film critic Joseph Morgenstern, had a daughter, Ann Grace, and settled on a farm in Woodstock, New York.
She later said that the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War influenced her decision to change her life. “I was disenchanted and looking for an existence that would be more meaningful to me,” she recalled, adding that she never regretted the move.
It was when she decided to return to film sets in the early 1970s that director Brian De Palma contacted her to play Sissy Spacek’s mother in Carrie, adapted from Stephen King’s novel. The film was a big success; Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie are both Oscar nominees.
Her desire to be an actress rekindled, Piper Laurie resumed a busy career that spanned several decades. She received a third Oscar nomination for Children of Silence in 1986. On television, she appeared in series such as Matlock, Arabesques, Frasier and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks in the 1990s and played the mother of George Clooney in Emergency.
