Character actress, teacher found success in midlife

Suzanne Shepherd, an influential New York acting teacher who found success in midlife as a character actress, including memorable turns as the mothers of Edie Falco’s character on “The Sopranos” and Lorraine Bracco’s character in “Goodfellas,” died Friday at her home in New York City. She was 89.

Her daughter, Kate Shepherd, said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and kidney failure.

After establishing herself as a stage actress and director, Suzanne Shepherd became well known as an acting instructor — her students included Gregory Hines, Bebe Neuwirth and Christopher Meloni — before she began acting in film and on television when she was in her mid-50s.

She began her big-screen career with two 1988 romantic comedies: “Working Girl,” in which she secured a role from its director, her old friend Mike Nichols, appearing alongside Melanie Griffith and Harrison Ford; and “Mystic Pizza,” playing an aunt of Julia Roberts’ character. She would accumulate about 40 film and television credits in the decades to come, with maternal roles a signature.

In Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” (1990), Shepherd turned in a fiery performance as a protective suburban Jewish mother who is horrified when her daughter Karen (Bracco) starts dating Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), a charming young associate of Italian American mobsters from Brooklyn. “You’re here a month, and sometimes I know he doesn’t come home at all,” her character seethes to Karen in a memorable scene in the family’s living room. “What kind of people are these?”

Her other films include the John Candy comedy “Uncle Buck” (1989), the Tim Robbins psychological thriller “Jacob’s Ladder” (1990) and the 1997 film version of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” starring Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain.

Shepherd earned a place in television history in 2000, when she made the first of 20 appearances on David Chase’s celebrated HBO series “The Sopranos,” playing Mary DeAngelis, the mother of Carmela Soprano (Falco) and the mother-in-law of Mafia boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini).

“She used to say, ‘I played everybody’s mom,’” her friend Carl Capotorto, a television writer and actor who also appeared on “The Sopranos” as Little Paulie Germani, said in a phone interview. “She knew that actresses at a certain age, you’re the mother. She really loved to work, so she didn’t mind: ‘Mother, grandma, whatever. Put me on a set.’” Her perseverance reflected the same drive and determination that she tried to instill in her acting students.

“Acting is about wanting, wishing, needing something desperately,” Shepherd said in a 2016 instructional video. “If you win you win, and if you lose you win, because you get something both ways. But you fight to the death to get what you want.”

Sadie Gertrude Stern was born Oct. 31, 1934, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the youngest of three children of David Stern, a jukebox and vending machine distributor, and Dora (Mendelson) Stern, a skilled cook who would later prepare feasts for the cast and crew of her daughter’s productions. Sadie adopted the name Suzanne at 13 because she preferred the sound of it, Kate Shepherd said.

After graduating from Battin High School in Elizabeth, she received a bachelor’s degree in English from Bennington College in Vermont in 1956.

Early in her career, she gained invaluable experience, and connections, by performing with Nichols, Alan Alda, Elaine May and others as a member of the influential Chicago improvisational troupe the Compass Players. One of the company’s founders was David Shepherd, whom she married in 1957.

Suzanne Shepherd worked as both a stage actress and a director in the ensuing years. She developed a long and fruitful collaboration with South African playwright Athol Fugard starting in the 1970s. She directed several of his plays, including “Blood Knot,” starring Danny Glover, at the Roundabout Theater in New York in 1980, and “A Lesson From Aloes,” starring Glover and Joan Allen and presented by the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago in 1985.

Along the way, Shepherd earned an outsize reputation in acting circles as a protégée of her old teacher Sanford Meisner, one of the most celebrated acting instructors of the 20th century.

She was an exponent of the Meisner technique, which trains actors to respond viscerally and not intellectually, paying particular attention to the performances of the other actors. She taught at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater in New York, where Meisner was the director for decades, as well as at the New York University film school and elsewhere.

“You’ve got to look at the material as if you’re filleting a fish,” she said in the 2016 video, voicing one of her acting tenets. “You’ve got to take off the words and see what’s at the bones underneath.”

In addition to Kate Shepherd, an artist, Suzanne Shepherd is survived by her sister, Elaine Zheutlin, and a granddaughter, Isabelle Shepherd. Her marriage to David Shepherd ended in divorce in 1966. (He died in 2018.) Her son, Evan, died in 2011, and her grandson, Ewen McManus, died in 2021. Her second husband, Carroll Calkins, whom she married in 1996, died in 2006.

She worked regularly in her final years. In 2017 she portrayed Michelle Pfeiffer’s ailing mother in the film “Where Is Kyra?”

In her final film, “The Performance,” Shepherd played the mother of Jeremy Piven’s character, a Jewish American tap dancer whose troupe is scouted to perform for Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.

Recently, Capotorto said, Shepherd had told him: “There are plenty more mothers to play. I want to play them all.”

Shepherd