CLORIS LEACHMAN

(30 April 1926 - 27 January 2021)

Many filmgoers may not have known the American actress Cloris Leachman, who has died aged 94, until she won an Oscar and a Bafta for Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show in 1971. She had, however, been in films and on TV since 1947. She appeared in the opening scenes of Robert Aldrich’s thriller Kiss Me Deadly (1955) as a woman on the run. Early on she was in youth theatre in Des Moines and eventually studied under Elia Kazan at the Actors’ Studio. Many stage productions came her way (Shakespeare, O’Neill, Miller, Kern, Rodgers & Hammerstein). She also made many TV shows from 1948 including the Actors’ Studio, Kraft Theatre, Suspense, Matinee Theatre and Lassie series. Further films included The Chapman Report with Jane Fonda, Lovers and Other Strangers with Gig Young, WUSA with Paul Newman and The People Next Door with Eli Wallach. After John Milius’s Dillinger, Bogdanovich used her for his Henry James adaptation of Daisy Miller. She specialised in weird or wicked women, so Mel Brooks cast her as Frau Blǖcher in Young Frankenstein, Nurse Diesel in High Anxiety, and Madame Defarge in History of the World: Part 1. She was the star of Jonathan Demme’s Crazy Mama and repeated her role of Ruth Popper in Bogdanovich’s Texasville, his sequel to The Last Picture Show. She appeared with Meryl Streep in Wes Craven’s Music of the Heart and Diane Keaton directed her in Hanging Up. She worked with Adam Sandler in James L. Brooks’ Spanglish and Peter Segal’s The Longest Yard. With nearly 300 entries on her cv, she was working right up to the time of her death and still has a number of films awaiting release. Last year she top-billed the Canadian drama Jump, Darling (2020), as a woman resisting the embrace of a local nursing home and who plays host to her grandson from the city, a rookie drag queen. Apart from an Oscar and a Bafta in 1972, she secured a Golden Globe and Primetime and Daytime Emmys among her awards. She married the producer-director George Englund in 1953. They divorced in 1979 and he died in 2017. They have five children, Adam, George Jr, Morgan, Dinah and Bryan, who died in 1986.

MICHAEL DARVELL