SPRINGFIELD, Mass. – Actress Maureen Stapleton, whose subtle vulnerability and down-to-earth toughness earned her dramatic and comedic roles on stage, screen, and television, died Monday. She was 80.
The longtime smoker died from chronic pulmonary disease in the Berkshire hills town of Lenox, where she had been living, said her son, Daniel Allentuck.
Stapleton, whose unremarkable, matronly appearance belied her star personality and talent, won an Academy Award in 1981 for her supporting role as anarchist-writer Emma Goldman in Warren Beatty’s “Reds,” about a left-wing American journalist who journeys to Russia to cover the Bolshevik Revolution.
She was one of the few actresses to also win an Emmy and a Tony as well as an Oscar.
“There are many roads to good acting,” Stapleton, known for her straightforwardness, said in her 1995 autobiography, “Hell of a Life.” “I’ve been asked repeatedly what the ‘key’ to acting is, and as far as I’m concerned, the main thing is to keep the audience awake.”
Stapleton was nominated several times for a supporting actress Oscar, including for her first film role in 1958’s “Lonelyhearts”; “Airport” in 1970; and Woody Allen’s “Interiors” in 1978.
In television, she earned an Emmy for “Among the Paths to Eden” in 1967. She was nominated for “Queen of the Stardust Ballroom” in 1975; “The Gathering” in 1977; and “Miss Rose White” in 1992.
Brought up in a strict Irish Catholic family with an alcoholic father, Stapleton left home in Troy, N.Y., right after high school. With $100 to her name, she went to New York and began studying at the Herbert Berghof Acting School and later at the Actor’s Studio, which turned out the likes of Marlon Brando, Paul Newman and Julia Roberts.
At age 24, she became a success as Serafina Delle Rose in Tennessee Williams’ Broadway hit “The Rose Tattoo,” and won a Tony Award. She appeared in numerous other stage productions, including “The Gingerbread Lady,” for which she won her second Tony in 1971.
Stapleton led a chaotic personal life, which her autobiography candidly described as including two failed marriages, numerous affairs, years of alcohol abuse and erratic parenting for her two children.
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