SISSY SPACEK
AT EVERY POINT IN HER NEARLY 50-YEAR CAREER, THIS OSCAR WINNER HAS HAD HER PRIORITIES STRAIGHT
The Oscar-winning star of Coal Miner’s Daughter balanced stardom and motherhood by fleeing Hollywood for a farm in Virginia.
Sissy Spacek is still a down-home girl, even at age 70. “For 40 years I have lived on a farm in Virginia and I’ve raised my children there,” the actress tells Closer in her soft Texas twang. “I’m able to get away from all the noise and work on my garden in my pajamas.” Even with an Oscar and numerous other awards in her trophy case, her home life keeps her grounded. “The cows don’t care” about movies, she admits with a chuckle.
While it’s hard to believe that the fresh-faced girl who played the telekinetic prom queen in 1976’s horror classic Carrie qualifies for Social Security, Sissy likes to look on the bright side of getting older. “People treat you with more respect. They open doors for you. Plus, you have the courage to really say what you believe,” says the mother of actresses Schuyler Fisk, 37, and Madison Fisk, 31. “I believe that as long as you have your health, it’s a really great time of life, the best time.”
FAMILY FIRST
Sissy has always stayed true to her humble roots in Quitman, Texas, where she grew up with her mom and agricultural agent dad. Hollywood couldn’t change her, perhaps because she’d already learned a hard lesson at 17 when her brother Robbie, 18, died from leukemia. “I think it made me brave,” she’s said. “I had experienced something profound.”
From that young heartbreak, through Sissy’s early musical aspirations and into an acting career that took off with the cult classic
Badlands in 1973 (where she also met her husband of 46 years, Jack Fisk) and never slowed, Sissy has been more concerned with “the human experience” than celebrity. “It is really important to live a full and normal life,” she says, “because it is what life is really about.”
Sissy, born Mary Elizabeth but nicknamed by her two older brothers, reveled in the love of her family. “My father was so important to who I am,” she says. But when her brother Robbie died, that became “the defining event of my whole life,” she’s said. “You’ve experienced the ultimate tragedy. And if you can continue, nothing else frightens you.”
In fact, she’s likened her grief to “rocket fuel,” because after Robbie’s death, her mother “wanted all of us to be better through what we had experienced.” Sissy seized her chance and left home a year later to become a singer.
Her cousin Rip Torn had found success acting, but Sissy loved music. At 19 she recorded an album using the name Rainbo, but it didn’t take off. She tried modeling, appeared as an extra in Andy Warhol’s film Trash, and in 1973 landed the role of disaffected teen Holly opposite Martin Sheen’s murderer in Badlands, the film that changed her career — and her life — forever. “That was really the beginning for me. It was where I realized film was art,” she tells Closer.
“I’ve learned that it’s the simplest things that mean the most.” — Sissy
She realized something else, too. The film’s production designer Jack Fisk “was pretty darn cute!” They fell madly in love and wed in 1974.
From that point, “every day was some new adventure,” she recalled. Sissy made a splash in Carrie, starred in Robert Altman’s
3 Women, and in 1981 won an Oscar for embodying Loretta Lynn in the acclaimed biopic Coal Miner’s
Daughter. Both country girls, Sissy and Loretta were kindred spirits. “We had an instantaneous friendship,” Sissy has said, and they’ve remained so close that Sissy accepted a CMT Lifetime Achievement Award for her friend in 2018 while Loretta was recovering from a stroke. “From the moment we met, she’s been my cheerleader, my sister, my best friend,” Sissy raved.
THE RIGHT CHOICES
As down-to-earth as she is, Sissy has always stood out. The New York
Times called her 2001 Oscar-nominated turn as In the Bedroom’s grieving mother “as devastating as it is unflashy.” Most recently, she played Robert Redford’s girlfriend in 2018’s The Old Man & the Gun and a mother with dementia in another Stephen King project, Castle Rock, on Hulu. She’s always chosen projects carefully, and put her husband, Jack, and their daughters’ well-being first. “With Jack, me and our two daughters, everything we do is fun and it’s creative,” she says. And even though she’s now an emptynester, she couldn’t be happier to be at home with her beloved. “He’s got a wonderful sense of humor and he’s the most creative person I’ve ever met,” she gushes.
Beautiful and trim, with her silky blond hair just barely giving way to gray, Sissy is proud of each movie she’s made. “The great thing is that I’ve explored being an ingenue, and a young mother and middle-aged women — each time, it’s like starting over, because you’re such a different person than you were when you were 14, or 29, or 45,” she’s said. “You have the same heart and soul. But you have a much broader overview of life.”
And that broader view, of the hard times and the good, allows her to appreciate every moment. “I shouldn’t ever complain about anything because I’ve had all the most important things in life,” she tells Closer.
“With my parents, my family and my hometown and the community I live in now…. It’s the human experience and we are all human, after all.”
“I’ve always had a balance in my work life and my
home life.”
— Sissy