Piper Laurie, Carrie and Twin Peaks Actor, Dead at 91
The post Piper Laurie, Carrie and Twin Peaks Actor, Dead at 91 appeared first on Consequence.
Piper Laurie, the actor known for portraying Carrie’s unstable, evangelical mother and Packard Sawmill head Catherine Martell in Twin Peaks, has died at age 91. Her manager confirmed the news to CNN, but did not provide a cause of death.
Born Rosetta Jacobs on January 22nd, 1932, the young actor changed her name to Piper Laurie after signing to Universal Studios at age 17. She experienced early success in the Golden Age of Hollywood: she portrayed Ronald Reagan’s daughter in Louisa (and even engaged in a brief romance with the soon-to-be president), and worked alongside Donald O’Connor, Tony Curtis, and Rory Calhoun in Francis Goes to the Races, Son of Ali Baba, and Ain’t Misbehavin’, respectively.
Though she could count those names on her resume, Laurie felt unfulfilled by the roles she was given. She bristled at Hollywood’s one-dimensional depictions of women. “Every role I played was the same girl, no matter whether my co-star was Rock Hudson or Tony Curtis or Rory Calhoun,” she told The New York Times in 1977. “She was innocent, sexual, simple — the less intelligent, the better, and complexity was forbidden — and always slender.”
Those frustrations prompted Laurie to step away from the starlet machine and move to New York City, where she sought work in theater and television. She wouldn’t appear in a feature film for several years, save for 1961’s The Hustler, where she played Paul Newman’s girlfriend. She was nominated for an Academy Award for her role.
Laurie’s career was reignited in 1976, when she portrayed Margaret White in Carrie. As the titular character’s fanatically religious, unstable mother, the role finally gave Laurie the opportunity to portray a flawed, well-rounded character. She received her second Oscar nomination for the film. 10 years later, she received another for Children of a Lesser God.
On Twin Peaks, Laurie portrayed Catherine Martell, the scheming head of the small town’s sawmill. Her battle for ownership over the mill against her sister-in-law, Josie, and her affair with fellow hustler Ben Horne, were essential to the soap opera theatrics that made David Lynch’s series such a perplexing, genre-bending experience. She was nominated for an Emmy Award during both seasons of the show’s original run.
Laurie guest starred on several notable 1990s television shows, including Frasier, Matlock, and Will & Grace, and returned to film in the 2000s. She last appeared in the 2018 feature White Boy Rick.
Piper Laurie, Carrie and Twin Peaks Actor, Dead at 91
Carys Anderson
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