Piper Laurie

Laurie's professional start was, by her own account, a gilded cage. Universal Studios signed her around 1950 and cast her in a string of lightweight pictures — the kind of roles designed to fill a slot, not build a legacy. She didn't stay. Leaving the studio system to escape typecasting, she took time away from Hollywood before staging one of the more remarkable second acts the industry has seen (Wikipedia). The comeback landed hard. Her nomination for Best Supporting Actress for *The Hustler* (1961), opposite Paul Newman — that pool-hall world of chalk dust and quiet desperation — announced that a different kind of actress had arrived. She wouldn't receive another nomination for fifteen years, but when Brian De Palma cast her as the terrifyingly devout Margaret White in *Carrie* (1976), the performance earned her a second Oscar nod and became the role most casual viewers still associate with her name first. A third nomination followed for *Children of a Lesser God* (1986), making her one of a very small group of performers to collect three Academy Award nominations across three separate decades (Wikipedia). Television gave her some of her richest work. Her portrayal of Kirsten Arnesen in the original TV production of *The Days of Wine and Roses* is cited among her early dramatic highlights (Wikipedia), and her Emmy win came via the television film *Promise*. Then came *Twin Peaks* — David Lynch's surrealist soap opera — where her Catherine Martell, scheming and imperious, earned her a Golden Globe Award for the 1990–1991 run (Wikipedia). She also appeared in *Frasier*, demonstrating a lighter comic touch that sometimes got overlooked given how well she did menace. Her stage work included Broadway productions of *Mornings at Seven* and *The Glass Menagerie*, and she remained a working actress into her final years.