The actress who went from starlet to acclaim
Piper Laurie 1932–2023
Piper Laurie didn’t choose her stage name, but she chose the projects that eventually brought her accolades. At 17, the husky-voiced actress with the pinup good looks signed a contract with Universal-International. The studio thought her name, Rosetta Jacobs, was too Jewish, and gave her a Waspier one and cast her in sexualized roles. After seven years of that, in 1956 she rebelled and broke her contract. Five years later, she earned an Oscar nomination for playing a depressed alcoholic in The Hustler. She went on to earn two more nominations as well as an Emmy win and multiple nominations for roles on TV shows such as Twin Peaks and The Thorn Birds. “If I’d continued in Hollywood, doing those old, insipid parts,” she said in 1959, “I think by now I would have killed myself.”
Born in Detroit to an absent father and a mother who fed her amphetamines to keep her weight down, Laurie had “a traumatic, gothic-tinged childhood,” said The Washington Post. At age 5, she was sent to a sanatorium for three difficult years to accompany her asthmatic sister. An “unusually anxious” girl terrified of speaking in public, she was given elocution lessons that led to acting, said The New York Times. Her studio deal placed her opposite the likes of Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, and Ronald Reagan— to whom, she later said, she lost her virginity. By the time she’d freed herself from her contract and earned her first Oscar nod, she was struggling with an amphetamine addiction. She moved to New York to focus on TV and plays, making her Broadway debut in 1965.
Laurie “informally retired” from Hollywood for more than a decade, said Variety. She decamped to Woodstock, N.Y., to raise a daughter and study sculpting. When she was 44, her career took off again with a second Oscar nomination, for playing the abusive mother in Carrie. A third nomination, for Children of a Lesser God, followed in 1986, and she worked steadily for the next four decades. She credited her break from acting with honing her talent. “I found my true voice through other things, not through the acting that I thought had defined me for so long,” she said in 2016. “Being a mother and a stone carver really helped me to find my voice.”