At the other end of the spectrum, I saw her do Lady Macbeth at Stratford CT in the late 60s.
You'd think she'd have worked more, especially when she hit character-actor age -- there's always call for those gin-soaked-voice women.
R.I.P. Carrie Nye
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July 17, 2006
Carrie Nye, 69, Williamstown Festival Actress, Is Dead
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Carrie Nye, a stage, film and television actress and a fixture at the Williamstown Theater Festival, died Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 69.
The cause was lung cancer, said her husband, the television host Dick Cavett.
Ms. Nye, known for her dry wit and Mississippi drawl that inevitably attracted comparisons with Tallulah Bankhead, made her Broadway debut in 1960 in “A Second String,” an adaptation of a novel by Colette. Five years later she was nominated for a Tony Award for playing a society lady in the musical “Half a Sixpence.”
Other Broadway productions included “A Very Rich Woman,” a play written by Ruth Gordon, and a 1980 revival of “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” Among her Off Broadway credits were Michael Cacoyannis’s 1963 production of “The Trojan Women” and a 1972 production of Tom Stoppard’s “Real Inspector Hound.”
But the core of her acting career was in regional theater. She came to the Williamstown Theater Festival in northern Massachusetts a few years after it opened, in 1955, and continued to return throughout the 1960’s and 70’s, playing the leading roles in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “The Skin of Our Teeth” and “Nude With Violin.” With the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn., Ms. Nye performed “Troilus and Cressida” at the Kennedy White House.
She continued acting in Off Broadway and regional theater in the 1980’s and 90’s, performing in plays by Ibsen, Chekhov and Tennessee Williams with the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival in Madison, the Adelphi Festival Theater in Garden City, N.Y., and the Phoenix Theater Company in Purchase, N.Y.
Along with her theater work, Ms. Nye also acted in many television movies, including a two-part 1973 movie starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor called “Divorce His” and “Divorce Hers,” an experience she later described hilariously in an essay in Time magazine.
Ms. Nye had the opportunity to play Ms. Bankhead in the 1980 television movie “The Scarlett O’Hara War,” for which she was nominated for an Emmy.
She continued her three-pronged career in the 1980’s, acting in films that included “Creepshow” and “Hello Again,” in regional and Off Broadway productions and, briefly, on the soap opera “The Guiding Light,” before her character fell into a pit of quicksand. (Ms. Nye told Time magazine that her preferred death for her character was “to be impaled on a hatpin.”) She returned to “The Guiding Light,” as a different character, in 2003.
In a 2003 interview with The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, Ms. Nye was asked to name the favorite role of her career. “None of them,” she said. “I only became an actress so I wouldn’t have to cook or make a bed.”
Carolyn Nye McGeoy was born on Oct. 14, 1936, in Greenwood, Miss., the daughter of a bank president and a homemaker. She attended Stephens College in Columbia, Mo., and then went to the Yale Drama School, where she met Mr. Cavett. After Ms. Nye graduated, in 1959, she and Mr. Cavett went to Williamstown for the summer theater festival. They married in 1964; her husband is her only immediate survivor.
In the 1960’s, Mr. Cavett and Ms. Nye rented and then bought Tick Hall, a Stanford White house in Montauk, at the tip of Long Island. After it burned in 1997 Ms. Nye enlisted architects and preservationists to build an exact reproduction of the house, down to the doorknobs, a feat that was recorded in the 2003 documentary, “From the Ashes: The Life and Times of Tick Hall.”
Carrie Nye, 69, Williamstown Festival Actress, Is Dead
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
Carrie Nye, a stage, film and television actress and a fixture at the Williamstown Theater Festival, died Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 69.
The cause was lung cancer, said her husband, the television host Dick Cavett.
Ms. Nye, known for her dry wit and Mississippi drawl that inevitably attracted comparisons with Tallulah Bankhead, made her Broadway debut in 1960 in “A Second String,” an adaptation of a novel by Colette. Five years later she was nominated for a Tony Award for playing a society lady in the musical “Half a Sixpence.”
Other Broadway productions included “A Very Rich Woman,” a play written by Ruth Gordon, and a 1980 revival of “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” Among her Off Broadway credits were Michael Cacoyannis’s 1963 production of “The Trojan Women” and a 1972 production of Tom Stoppard’s “Real Inspector Hound.”
But the core of her acting career was in regional theater. She came to the Williamstown Theater Festival in northern Massachusetts a few years after it opened, in 1955, and continued to return throughout the 1960’s and 70’s, playing the leading roles in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “The Skin of Our Teeth” and “Nude With Violin.” With the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn., Ms. Nye performed “Troilus and Cressida” at the Kennedy White House.
She continued acting in Off Broadway and regional theater in the 1980’s and 90’s, performing in plays by Ibsen, Chekhov and Tennessee Williams with the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival in Madison, the Adelphi Festival Theater in Garden City, N.Y., and the Phoenix Theater Company in Purchase, N.Y.
Along with her theater work, Ms. Nye also acted in many television movies, including a two-part 1973 movie starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor called “Divorce His” and “Divorce Hers,” an experience she later described hilariously in an essay in Time magazine.
Ms. Nye had the opportunity to play Ms. Bankhead in the 1980 television movie “The Scarlett O’Hara War,” for which she was nominated for an Emmy.
She continued her three-pronged career in the 1980’s, acting in films that included “Creepshow” and “Hello Again,” in regional and Off Broadway productions and, briefly, on the soap opera “The Guiding Light,” before her character fell into a pit of quicksand. (Ms. Nye told Time magazine that her preferred death for her character was “to be impaled on a hatpin.”) She returned to “The Guiding Light,” as a different character, in 2003.
In a 2003 interview with The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, Ms. Nye was asked to name the favorite role of her career. “None of them,” she said. “I only became an actress so I wouldn’t have to cook or make a bed.”
Carolyn Nye McGeoy was born on Oct. 14, 1936, in Greenwood, Miss., the daughter of a bank president and a homemaker. She attended Stephens College in Columbia, Mo., and then went to the Yale Drama School, where she met Mr. Cavett. After Ms. Nye graduated, in 1959, she and Mr. Cavett went to Williamstown for the summer theater festival. They married in 1964; her husband is her only immediate survivor.
In the 1960’s, Mr. Cavett and Ms. Nye rented and then bought Tick Hall, a Stanford White house in Montauk, at the tip of Long Island. After it burned in 1997 Ms. Nye enlisted architects and preservationists to build an exact reproduction of the house, down to the doorknobs, a feat that was recorded in the 2003 documentary, “From the Ashes: The Life and Times of Tick Hall.”