R.I.P. Sada Thompson
Never saw Family, or any of her stage work, but she was wonderful in Indictment: The McMartin Trial, and especially in Lincoln. I saw Lincoln (based on Carl Sandburg's bio) probably twenty years ago, but I've never forgotten hers and Hal Holbrook's performances. Wish someone would put it out on DVD. Maybe it'll get released when Spielberg's film comes out next year.
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Big Magilla
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She was very good in her Emmy winning role in Family as were James Broderick, Kristy McNichol, John Beal and the rest of the cast. I think it was on after Dynasty at one point. I lost interest in it after a while.
She had a very good part as Virignia McMartin, the grandmother of the family accused of child molestation in the TV mini-series Indictment:The McMartin Trail in the mid-nineties. She was nominated for an Emmy for it but lost to co-star Shirley Knight who played her daughter.
Edited By Big Magilla on 1304717860
She had a very good part as Virignia McMartin, the grandmother of the family accused of child molestation in the TV mini-series Indictment:The McMartin Trail in the mid-nineties. She was nominated for an Emmy for it but lost to co-star Shirley Knight who played her daughter.
Edited By Big Magilla on 1304717860
I watched it once. That was enough.Mister Tee wrote:I saw her do Gamma Rays off-Broadway. For some reason, her defeated "I hate the world, Matilda" line reading has stuck in my head these 40 years later.
I had alot of affection for her afterward, though I can't say it was enough to ever get me to watch Family.
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
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Mister Tee
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Big Magilla
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NY Times
May 5, 2011
Sada Thompson, Actress Known for Maternal Roles, Dies at 83
By BRUCE WEBER
Sada Thompson, a Tony- and Emmy-winning actress
known for her portrayals of archetypal mothers,
from the loving family caretaker and the
world-weary, had-it-with-the-kids older woman to
the brutalizing harridan and mythical adulteress
and murderess, died Wednesday in Danbury, Conn. She was 83.
The cause was lung disease, said her daughter, Liza Sguaglia.
Ms. Thompson had an unusual stage career in that
she became a star in New York but was not often
on Broadway. She made her name in the 1950s as
Off Broadway came to prominence, in plays like
“The Misanthrope” and Chekhov’s “Ivanov,” and
throughout her career she performed in regional theater productions.
But when she was on Broadway, she made an
impression. She won a Tony in 1972 for playing
four separate parts three daughters and their
aged mother in the four vignettes that
constitute George Furth’s “Twigs,” directed by
Michael Bennett. Her tour de force performance
was widely praised, but Ms. Thompson returned to
Broadway only twice more, in short-lived shows.
By then she had established herself as “one of
the American theater’s finest actresses,” as
Walter Kerr described her in The New York Times.
She had distinguished herself on Broadway in
Edward Albee’s sardonic “American Dream,” in
which she played Mommy, the cartoonishly
overwhelming wife of a spineless husband, and in
Samuel Beckett’s bitterly comic “Happy Days.”
Here she played Winnie, a woman facing inevitable
doom she spends the first act buried up to her
waist and the second act up to her neck with determined good cheer.
“Yet beneath these bright superficials,” Clive
Barnes wrote in The Times, “Miss Thompson was
able to suggest something a good deal deeper,
every so often permitting the enamel to crack,
the brightness to darken, and letting us glimpse
the piteous fears of mortality in Winnie’s heart.”
Away from Broadway, her repertory expanded and
her reputation grew. In 1970, in what was
probably her star-making performance, she opened
Off Broadway in “The Effect of Gamma Rays on
Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds,” Paul Zindel’s
melodrama about a slatternly, self-deluding and
tormenting mother of two troubled daughters and
the elderly boarder she cares for to pay the rent.
In the summer of 1971 she appeared at the
American Shakespeare Festival Theater in Stratford. Conn., as Christine Mannon, the Civil War-era equivalent of the vengeful Clytemnestra, in “Mourning Becomes Electra” by Eugene O’Neill.
After “Twigs,” Ms. Thompson spent much of her
time working in movies and especially on
television. She played the country worrywart
mother, Mrs. Webb, in the 1977 television film of
Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” with Hal Holbrook as the stage manager.
Most notably, from 1976 to 1980 she starred as
Kate Lawrence, the matriarch of an
upper-middle-class family in Pasadena, Calif., in
a landmark show, created by Jay Presson Allen, who had adapted “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” for the stage, and produced by Mike Nichols. Its title “Family” announced its intention: to be a simple presentation of the fundamental unit of American life. It largely
succeeded, melding ordinary daily conflicts with
the heightened drama necessary for television entertainment.
“Family” dealt straightforwardly with issues like
the marital problems of the Lawrences’ eldest
daughter (played at the time by Meredith
Baxter Birney); the discovery by the teenage son
(Gary Frank) that his long-time best friend was
gay; and the distress of the youngest daughter
Kristy McNichol) on overhearing her mother saying that
she sometimes wished she hadn’t had her.
“ ‘Family’ represents an extremely difficult
television project in that it is trying to
salvage the familiar stuff of soap opera for the
less superficial probings of the contemporary
drama,” John J. O’Connor wrote in The Times
during its first season, adding that Ms. Thompson
and James Broderick, who played her husband,
“achieved a remarkable combination of low-keyed
intensity and powerful impact.”
Ms. Thompson was nominated for an Emmy four times
in the show’s five seasons, winning in 1978.
Sada Carolyn Thompson was born in Des Moines on
Sept. 27, 1927. When she was a girl, her family
moved to Fanwood, N.J., where her father, Hugh,
became an editor of Turkey World and other farm
journals. Sada discovered the power of
storytelling when her mother, Corlyss, took her
to the movie “The Man Who Played God,” and she
was turned toward acting when her parents took
her to the Cole Porter musical “Red, Hot and Blue.”
“That was it,” Ms. Thompson recalled in 1971. “To
me it was total enchantment. I had to be part of it.”
She graduated with a drama degree from the
Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh
(now Carnegie Mellon University), and she and
some fellow students started a summer stock
company in Mashpee, Mass. Eventually she and
Donald Stewart, whom she met at school and
married, moved to New York, where her first
professional credit was in 1953, in the original
reading of “Under Milkwood,” Dylan Thomas’s
poetic rendering of life in a Welsh town, directed by Thomas himself.
“His idea of rehearsals was to hear one reading
and say, ‘Perfect, let’s go out for a beer,’ but
he was a kind, courteous gentleman,” she once said.
Ms. Thompson lived in Southbury, Conn. In
addition to her daughter, of Burbank, Calif., her
survivors include her husband, a former executive
for Pan American Airlines, and a brother, David, of Gloversville, N.Y.
Her career was peppered with performances in
classic works in far-flung theaters. She starred
with Elizabeth Taylor in Lillian Hellman’s “Little Foxes” in
London, toured Scandinavia with the Scandinavian
Theater Company in Wilder’s “Skin of Our Teeth”
and played Lady Macbeth at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego.
“I’d miss not being able to tell a story every
night,” she once said, describing why she was
loath to give up the stage or the screen. “That
really thrills me, that is the greatest!
Thousands of years ago, when some caveman told
his family about the fight he had that day with a
dinosaur, and, in the telling, became the
dinosaur, and became himself in the fight well, there’s your first actor.”
May 5, 2011
Sada Thompson, Actress Known for Maternal Roles, Dies at 83
By BRUCE WEBER
Sada Thompson, a Tony- and Emmy-winning actress
known for her portrayals of archetypal mothers,
from the loving family caretaker and the
world-weary, had-it-with-the-kids older woman to
the brutalizing harridan and mythical adulteress
and murderess, died Wednesday in Danbury, Conn. She was 83.
The cause was lung disease, said her daughter, Liza Sguaglia.
Ms. Thompson had an unusual stage career in that
she became a star in New York but was not often
on Broadway. She made her name in the 1950s as
Off Broadway came to prominence, in plays like
“The Misanthrope” and Chekhov’s “Ivanov,” and
throughout her career she performed in regional theater productions.
But when she was on Broadway, she made an
impression. She won a Tony in 1972 for playing
four separate parts three daughters and their
aged mother in the four vignettes that
constitute George Furth’s “Twigs,” directed by
Michael Bennett. Her tour de force performance
was widely praised, but Ms. Thompson returned to
Broadway only twice more, in short-lived shows.
By then she had established herself as “one of
the American theater’s finest actresses,” as
Walter Kerr described her in The New York Times.
She had distinguished herself on Broadway in
Edward Albee’s sardonic “American Dream,” in
which she played Mommy, the cartoonishly
overwhelming wife of a spineless husband, and in
Samuel Beckett’s bitterly comic “Happy Days.”
Here she played Winnie, a woman facing inevitable
doom she spends the first act buried up to her
waist and the second act up to her neck with determined good cheer.
“Yet beneath these bright superficials,” Clive
Barnes wrote in The Times, “Miss Thompson was
able to suggest something a good deal deeper,
every so often permitting the enamel to crack,
the brightness to darken, and letting us glimpse
the piteous fears of mortality in Winnie’s heart.”
Away from Broadway, her repertory expanded and
her reputation grew. In 1970, in what was
probably her star-making performance, she opened
Off Broadway in “The Effect of Gamma Rays on
Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds,” Paul Zindel’s
melodrama about a slatternly, self-deluding and
tormenting mother of two troubled daughters and
the elderly boarder she cares for to pay the rent.
In the summer of 1971 she appeared at the
American Shakespeare Festival Theater in Stratford. Conn., as Christine Mannon, the Civil War-era equivalent of the vengeful Clytemnestra, in “Mourning Becomes Electra” by Eugene O’Neill.
After “Twigs,” Ms. Thompson spent much of her
time working in movies and especially on
television. She played the country worrywart
mother, Mrs. Webb, in the 1977 television film of
Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” with Hal Holbrook as the stage manager.
Most notably, from 1976 to 1980 she starred as
Kate Lawrence, the matriarch of an
upper-middle-class family in Pasadena, Calif., in
a landmark show, created by Jay Presson Allen, who had adapted “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” for the stage, and produced by Mike Nichols. Its title “Family” announced its intention: to be a simple presentation of the fundamental unit of American life. It largely
succeeded, melding ordinary daily conflicts with
the heightened drama necessary for television entertainment.
“Family” dealt straightforwardly with issues like
the marital problems of the Lawrences’ eldest
daughter (played at the time by Meredith
Baxter Birney); the discovery by the teenage son
(Gary Frank) that his long-time best friend was
gay; and the distress of the youngest daughter
Kristy McNichol) on overhearing her mother saying that
she sometimes wished she hadn’t had her.
“ ‘Family’ represents an extremely difficult
television project in that it is trying to
salvage the familiar stuff of soap opera for the
less superficial probings of the contemporary
drama,” John J. O’Connor wrote in The Times
during its first season, adding that Ms. Thompson
and James Broderick, who played her husband,
“achieved a remarkable combination of low-keyed
intensity and powerful impact.”
Ms. Thompson was nominated for an Emmy four times
in the show’s five seasons, winning in 1978.
Sada Carolyn Thompson was born in Des Moines on
Sept. 27, 1927. When she was a girl, her family
moved to Fanwood, N.J., where her father, Hugh,
became an editor of Turkey World and other farm
journals. Sada discovered the power of
storytelling when her mother, Corlyss, took her
to the movie “The Man Who Played God,” and she
was turned toward acting when her parents took
her to the Cole Porter musical “Red, Hot and Blue.”
“That was it,” Ms. Thompson recalled in 1971. “To
me it was total enchantment. I had to be part of it.”
She graduated with a drama degree from the
Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh
(now Carnegie Mellon University), and she and
some fellow students started a summer stock
company in Mashpee, Mass. Eventually she and
Donald Stewart, whom she met at school and
married, moved to New York, where her first
professional credit was in 1953, in the original
reading of “Under Milkwood,” Dylan Thomas’s
poetic rendering of life in a Welsh town, directed by Thomas himself.
“His idea of rehearsals was to hear one reading
and say, ‘Perfect, let’s go out for a beer,’ but
he was a kind, courteous gentleman,” she once said.
Ms. Thompson lived in Southbury, Conn. In
addition to her daughter, of Burbank, Calif., her
survivors include her husband, a former executive
for Pan American Airlines, and a brother, David, of Gloversville, N.Y.
Her career was peppered with performances in
classic works in far-flung theaters. She starred
with Elizabeth Taylor in Lillian Hellman’s “Little Foxes” in
London, toured Scandinavia with the Scandinavian
Theater Company in Wilder’s “Skin of Our Teeth”
and played Lady Macbeth at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego.
“I’d miss not being able to tell a story every
night,” she once said, describing why she was
loath to give up the stage or the screen. “That
really thrills me, that is the greatest!
Thousands of years ago, when some caveman told
his family about the fight he had that day with a
dinosaur, and, in the telling, became the
dinosaur, and became himself in the fight well, there’s your first actor.”