Frances Sternhagen

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Frances Sternhagen bigraphy, stories - American actress

Frances Sternhagen : biography

January 13, 1930 –

Frances Hussey Sternhagen (born January 13, 1930) is an American actress. Sternhagen has appeared on and off Broadway, in movies, and on TV since the 1950s.Joy, Cara. Broadway.com, November 22, 2004

Stage career

Sternhagen started her career teaching acting, singing and dancing to school children at Milton Academy in Massachusetts, and she herself first performed in 1948 at a Bryn Mawr summer theater in The Glass Menagerie and Angel Street. She went on to work at Washington’s Arena Stage from 1953–54, then made her Broadway debut in 1955 as Miss T. Muse in The Skin of Our Teeth. The same year she had her Off-Broadway debut in "Thieves’ Carnival" and her TV debut in "The Great Bank Robbery" on "Omnibus" (CBS). By the following year she had won an off-Broadway Obie Award for "Distinguished Performance (Actress)" in The Admirable Bashville (1955–56).

She has won two Tony awards, for "Best Supporting Actress (Dramatic)": in 1974 for the original Broadway production of Neil Simon’s The Good Doctor based on Chekhov stories (which also won her a Drama Desk Award for "Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play"); and in 1995 for the revival of The Heiress, based on the Henry James novella. She has been nominated for Tony awards five other times, including for her roles in the original Broadway casts of Equus (1975) and On Golden Pond (1979), both later made into Oscar-nominated movies with other actresses, as well as for Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1972), the musical Angel (1978) which was based on Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, and the 2002 revival of Paul Osborne’s Morning’s at Seven.

Her best-known Off-Broadway role was her feisty portrayal of the title character in 1988’s Pulitzer prize-winning drama Driving Miss Daisy which was originated by Dana Ivey at Playwrights Horizons in New York. Sternhagen took over the role after the show moved to the John Houseman Theatre and played it for more than two years. (Jessica Tandy later won an Academy Award playing Daisy in the 1989 movie.)

Off-Broadway awards include two nominations for the Drama Desk Award for "Outstanding Actress in a Play" in 1998, for a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night at the Irish Repertory TheatreLefkowitz, David. Playbill.com, March 22, 1998 and in 2005, for the World War I drama Echoes of the War.

She also won Distinguished Performance Obie Awards for The Room and A Slight Ache (1964–65). In 1998 she won the Dramatists Guild Fund’s Madge Evans & Sidney Kingsley Award for Excellence in Theater. She starred in the 2005 revival of Edward Albee’s Seascape, produced by Lincoln Center Theater at the Booth Theater on Broadway. She had also appeared in the original Broadway production of Edward Albee’s All Over in 1971, with Colleen Dewhurst and Jessica Tandy. Her previous Broadway role was in the summer 2005 production of Steel Magnolias with Marsha Mason, Delta Burke, Christine Ebersole, Lily Rabe and Rebecca Gayheart.

Film roles

Sternhagen made her film debut in 1967’s New York City high school drama Up the Down Staircase, which starred Sandy Dennis. hollywood.com, accessed August 27, 2011 She has worked periodically in Hollywood since then. She had character roles in the 1971 Paddy Chayefsky’s classic The Hospital, in Two People (1973) and in Billy Wilder’s Fedora (1978). She appeared in Starting Over (1979) which starred Burt Reynolds; with Sean Connery in Outland (1981); and with Michael J. Fox in Bright Lights, Big City (1988). She played Farrah Fawcett’s mother in See You in the Morning (1989), Richard Farnsworth’s wife in Misery (1990), and John Lithgow’s psychiatrist in Raising Cain (1992). Sternhagen starred in Frank Darabont’s suspense/thriller The Mist, released on November 21, 2007.