Actress often teamed with husband Wallach
Famous stage couple was the toast of Broadway for more than 50 years
Anne Jackson, a Tony Award-nominated theatre actress who often appeared onstage with her husband, Eli Wallach, in comedies and classics, died of natural causes on April 12 at her home in Manhattan, said her son, Peter Wallach.
Born Sept. 3, 1926 in Millvale, Pa., she was 90.
Jackson and Eli Wallach were a formidable acting duo, starring in a series of plays, including George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara in 1956 and a hugely successful run of Luv, directed by Mike Nichols, in the mid-1960s.
A bench in New York City’s Riverside Park is dedicated to them.
“A lot of people say, ‘Sorry for your loss,’ ” said Peter Wallach.
“Actually, the part I don’t accept is the loss part because it was a gift. My parents gave this tremendous gift, which they gave to the world and they gave to their children.”
Jackson and Wallach played a married couple together as recently as 2003 on the NBC medical drama ER.
At the 2010 American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Governors Award honouring Wallach, Jackson introduced her husband: “Can I be honest about something?” she asked. “I taught him everything he knows.”
Jackson, who played a psychiatrist in the classic horror movie The Shining, earned a best featured actress Tony nomination in Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night in 1956. She also returned to Broadway in the mid-1990s in The Flowering Peach and played Grandma Kurnitz in Lost in Yonkers.
She and the Tony-winning Wallach acted together onstage in such plays as Harlequinade, The Typist and the Tiger, Twice Around the Park and Down the Garden Paths in 2000.
The couple met when Wallach appeared in the 1946 Equity Library Theater’s This Property is Condemned by Tennessee Williams. The only other performer in the show happened to be Jackson. They married in 1948. He died in 2014.
Peter Wallach, a film animator, recalled growing up in a happy home. The children never really knew if their parents were actually arguing or if they were just rehearsing.
“Even sometimes when they’d fight, they would kind of step back from the fight and go, ‘Wow, that was a really good Tennessee Williams performance I just gave!’ ” he said.
“They always forgave each other so quickly because they were both actors.”
Jackson and Wallach loved New York and were friends with everyone from Harry Belafonte to Igor Stravinsky to Groucho Marx.
Though the couple also acted independently, Jackson told The Associated Press in 1989: “We do have a lot of fun working together. We’re both quite good character actors.”