THEATER & FILM
As a teenager growing up in the Boston area, I was drawn to theatre companies like the Poet’s Theater in Cambridge where Olympia Dukakis shone on stage, and the many house productions put on at Harvard. I began acting in community theatre, in school productions and in summer stock from the age of fifteen. This was the world I wanted to enter and make my life work.
Film roles followed in the early ‘70s.
Every month I plan to write an anecdote about my life in theatre and film, with pictures, stories of hardship, triumph and the experiences I loved best.
Links to IMDB, and other sources on the Internet for more information on the films and plays I have been part of.
Early Actress
I was lucky because shortly after I arrived in New York City in 1961 I was cast in an off-off Broadway production of Love for Love with a charismatic young Frank Langella as the lead, Valentine. My first off Broadway play soon followed. I stood by for the role of Lina Sczcepanowska in George Bernard Shaw’s witty treatise on the “modern woman,” Misalliance, at the Sheridan Square Playhouse with the lovely Frances Sternhagen as Hypatia. Lina was a tour de force character whom I got to play a number of times. She has one of the longest monologues Shaw ever wrote for a woman and here I was performing it at the tender age of 22. The hardest part was picking up one of the hefty male characters afterward and exiting with him over my shoulder every night in a fireman’s carry. Still, I must have acquitted myself well enough because I was offered work off Broadway, on Broadway and in regional theatres from then on.
