San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Theater, screen actress worked with sons, husband
“I was out of town, and all I did was cry. That made it very clear to me that I wanted to be home with the kids.”
Eileen Ryan, on why she scaled back her acting career
Eileen Ryan, a stage, television and film actor who paused her career to raise her sons, actors Sean and Chris Penn and musician Michael Penn, then later racked up dozens of acting credits, sometimes working with her sons and her husband, director Leo Penn, died last Sunday at her home in Malibu. She was 94.
Her family announced her death through a spokesperson.
Ryan was in her late 20s and appearing in “The Iceman Cometh” at Circle in the Square in New York City’s Greenwich Village in 1956 when she met Leo Penn, who stepped into a role being vacated by Jason Robards. They married soon after.
Her career was going well at that point; she had already made her Broadway debut in “Sing Till Tomorrow” in 1953 and would return to Broadway in 1958 in “Comes a Day.” But she prided herself on making her own decisions — “I don’t think anybody could have felt stronger than I did about controlling my own destiny,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1986 — and soon she made a difficult one, scaling back her acting.
The choice, she said, began to be clear when she had a job that took her away from home and had to leave Michael, then a baby, with her husband.
“I was out of town and all I did was cry,” she told the Times. “That made it very clear to me that I wanted to be home with the kids.”
The family moved to the West Coast, and she still performed occasionally in the 1960s and ’70s; she appeared in episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” “Bonanza” and other shows, some of them directed by Leo Penn, who, although blacklisted in the 1940s and ’50s, emerged to become a prolific television director.
But, she said in 1986, for a long stretch her most important performance came in a supporting role in a home movie made by young Sean Penn and his neighbor Emilio Estevez, a son of actor Martin Sheen.
“I was a background mother screaming from the kitchen,” she said.
Ryan went back to acting more regularly with her appearance in the 1986 film “At Close Range,” a crime drama in which she played the grandmother of characters played by her sons Sean and Chris. Two years later she played the mother of Sean Penn’s character in the movie “Judgment in Berlin,” a drama directed by Leo Penn whose stars also included Sheen.
Ryan and her husband also returned to the stage, starring in “Remembrance,” a drama by Irish playwright Graham Reid staged in 1997 at the Odyssey Theater in Los Angeles, with Sean Penn as producer.
Leo Penn died in 1998. Ryan continued to act, accumulating more than two dozen additional TV and film credits, most recently in the 2016 movie “Rules Don’t Apply,” directed by Warren Beatty.
Eileen Rose Annucci was born Oct. 16, 1927, in the Bronx borough of New York. Her father, William, was a lawyer and a dentist. Her mother, Rose (Ryan) Annucci, was the source of the surname Eileen later adopted for her acting career.
That career, or at least the aspiration to it, started early. As a child growing up in New York she would stage plays in the courtyard of her apartment complex.
“I remember beating up all the little boys in my apartment building so they’d be in my plays,” she said.
She earned a bachelor’s degree at New York University, then embarked on an acting career, putting her on a path to meet Leo Penn.
Once she restarted her career in the 1980s, among her first credits was Ron Howard’s comic drama “Parenthood” (1989). She played one-half of an older couple; the male half was played by Robards, the man whose departure from “Iceman” decades earlier had allowed her to meet Leo Penn.
Ryan’s son Chris died in 2006. In addition to her other sons, she is survived by three grandchildren.