Carlin Glynn, actor whose comeback led to a Tony
Carlin Glynn, a stage actor who, after a long hiatus spent raising a family, stepped back into the footlights, sang onstage for the first time, and walked away with a Tony Award for her performance as the madam in the 1978 hit “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” died July 13 at her home in upstate New York, in the Hudson Valley. She was 83.
Her daughter Mary Stuart Masterson, also an actor, said the cause was lung cancer.
Ms. Glynn’s breakout performance, at 38, came about almost by accident. Her husband, actor and director Peter Masterson, had read a 1974 article in Playboy by Larry King about the closing of a Texas bordello and saw the ingredients for a musical. He and King began working on a script and brought in Carol Hall to create the music.
For the early readings, Ms. Glynn, though she had been largely out of the acting business for at least a dozen years, covered the role of Mona Stangley, the strong-minded but sensitive madam at the center of the story. She was still holding down the role in a workshop production mounted by Peter Masterson and his collaborators at the Actors Studio in 1977. And when the musical opened off-Broadway in April 1978. And when it moved to Broadway that June.
“I initially worked on the play only to help out,” Ms. Glynn told The New York Times in 1978. “Peter was hesitant to force his wife on his collaborators. Finally, all four of the organizations who wanted to take the show to Broadway wanted me to stay in the part. So then I stopped worrying about nepotism.”
It was her Broadway debut, and she won the Tony for best featured actress in a musical. She played the role for almost two years on Broadway and for another six months in a production in London. Michael Billington of The Guardian, reviewing her there, wrote, “Carlin Glynn endows the madam with the refined good breeding and slight romantic forlornness of the head of a very classy, fee-paying American girls’ school.”
Although “Best Little Whorehouse” was Ms. Glynn’s only Broadway appearance, her acting career continued for decades. She appeared in productions by Second Stage and Signature Theater Company in New York, Hartford Stage in Connecticut, the Alley Theater in Houston, the Goodman Theater in Chicago, and more. She also landed roles in more than 20 television series and films, including “Continental Divide” (1981), “Sixteen Candles” (1984), “The Trip to Bountiful” (1985, directed by Peter Masterson) and “Judy Berlin” (1999).
The Tony Award, she told the Times in 1979, was a game changer for her.
“It means I’ve been invited to hundreds of places by people who offer to send their cars to pick me up,” she said. “It also means I’m not just the girl who does the Texas madam in a musical; I’m someone who’s considered an actress.”
Carlin Elizabeth Glynn was born Feb. 19, 1940, in Cleveland to Guilford and Lois Wilkes Glynn. Her father worked at Union Carbide but, when Carlin was 9, moved the family to Texas, where he had bought a gas station in Centerville, north of Houston.
Later the family moved to Houston, where, at Lamar High School, Ms. Glynn first met Tommy Tune, who years later would choreograph “Best Little Whorehouse” as well as direct it with Peter Masterson.
Ms. Glynn and Peter Masterson met when both were apprenticing at the Alley Theater. They married in 1960 and settled in New York. Both became members of the Actors Studio, but Ms. Glynn spent much of her time taking care of their three children while Peter Masterson built his career. She acted in the occasional television commercial, was cohost of a syndicated television program called “Today’s Health” in the mid-1970s, and had a small role in the 1975 film “Three Days of the Condor.”
A film version of “Best Little Whorehouse” was being planned when, in the 1978 Times interview, Ms. Glynn said she would love to play Mona on screen, though she acknowledged, “I probably won’t be asked.” She was right; a bigger marquee name, Dolly Parton, got the part. The movie came out in 1982.
Peter Masterson died in 2018. In addition to her daughter Mary Stuart, who starred in such films as “Some Kind of Wonderful” (1987) and “Fried Green Tomatoes” (1991), Ms. Glynn is survived by another daughter, Carlin Alexandra Masterson; a son, Peter Masterson; a brother, Philip Glynn; and six grandchildren.
Mary Stuart Masterson recalled spending weekends backstage at “Best Little Whorehouse” watching her mother from the wings. One night Ms. Glynn started a song an octave too high but smoothly acknowledged the mistake mid-song, not only slipping in the impromptu lyric “I think I’m off key,” but also doing so in a spot where it rhymed.
“The audience was in the palm of her hand after that,” Masterson said by email. “Well, they already were. She had a kind of authority onstage that you can’t learn. She always made everyone feel they were in good hands.”