According to her management, Piper Laurie, the well-known actress most remembered for her eerie depiction of the controllingly religious mother in “Carrie” and for her role as Paul Newman’s hopeless girlfriend in “The Hustler,” passed away at the age of 91.
Marion Rosenberg, Laurie’s manager, confirmed to CNN that Laurie passed away early on Saturday in Los Angeles. There was no given cause of death.
According to Rosenberg, Laurie will be regarded as “one of the finest actresses of her generation and a superb human being.”
According to Turner Classic Movies, Piper Laurie is “one of the most celebrated and formidable actresses of the last half-century.” Turner Classic Movies is a division of Warner Brothers Discovery, just like CNN. Her “full-blooded performances as flawed, often ferocious women” were complimented by the network.
Despite her start in Hollywood as a teenage starlet in the 1950s, Laurie took a long break from the business after growing disillusioned with the way the business treated her as a young actress and the unoriginality of the roles presented to women. When she reappeared almost ten years later, she made a name for herself right away by compellingly embodying multidimensional, occasionally troubled, women.
Recall this, colleagues and critics: Laurie was nominated for an Oscar for her compelling roles in “Carrie” (1976) and “The Hustler” (1961). Her portrayal of a repentant mother in “Children of a Lesser God” (1986) earned her a third nomination.
She received two Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe for her portrayal of a spiteful mill owner on television’s “Twin Peaks.”
In her biography “Learning to Live Out Loud,” Piper Laurie, who was born Rosetta Jacobs in Detroit in 1932, stated that when she started acting professionally, a manager encouraged her to take on the name Piper Laurie.
At the age of seventeen, Piper Laurie signed a contract with Universal International, which is now Universal Studios. She acted opposite Ronald Reagan, Tony Curtis, Newman, and Rock Hudson.
Life would not educate me that it was acceptable to struggle for what I desired for a very long time. According to her memoir, “At seventeen, I still believed that working hard and being a good person was enough.”
She remembered the disillusionment set in almost instantly.
Piper Laurie said that “every line and moment for the girl seemed like a cartoon” in reference to her debut performance in “Louisa” (1950), playing the teenage daughter of Reagan’s character. “It was a constant struggle on the set, but I kept trying to think of ways to make her real for myself,” she continued.
“I always played the same character, regardless of whether my co-star was Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, or Rory Calhoun,” Laurie said in 1977, alluding to the movies she was had to do for her contract. “She was always slender, sexual, innocent, and simple—the less intelligent, the better. Complexity was forbidden.”
Piper Laurie breached her contract with Universal in the middle of the 1950s, but she still had trouble landing the Hollywood parts she desired. She started watching TV shows and movies instead.
Releasing myself from the studio that had been my property since I was seventeen was one thing. In her memoir, she said,
“It was another thing entirely to put the image Universal had created behind me.”
Her brief comeback to the big screen came in 1961 with “The Hustler,” after which she had a more than ten-year hiatus from Hollywood productions. She made a triumphant comeback in 1976 with her torturous depiction of Margaret White, the fervently evangelical mother in “Carrie.”
Piper Laurie claimed that she had never felt like she would genuinely enjoy herself on a movie set until she started shooting “Carrie.”
For me, it was a very sentimental and lovely moment. The team, some of whom I had already met, made me feel quite welcome. In her memoir, Laurie said,
“I felt embraced by everyone and especially free to do the work.”
In the early 1960s, Laurie wed Joe Morgenstern, a film critic; the two eventually got divorced. Their daughter is shared.
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