Maureen Stapleton

Maureen Stapleton was an American actress of stage and screen, born Lois Maureen Stapleton on June 21, 1925, in Troy, New York, and died on March 13, 2006, in Lenox, Massachusetts. Raised in poverty by an Irish-Catholic mother after her father's alcoholism broke up the household, she moved to New York City at age eighteen with one hundred dollars and studied at the Actors Studio under Herbert Berghof and later Lee Strasberg.

Her Broadway debut came in 1946 in The Playboy of the Western World, but the role that established her was Serafina Delle Rose in Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo in 1951, for which she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play at age twenty-five. She returned to Tony recognition in 1971 for Neil Simon's The Gingerbread Lady, becoming one of the few actresses to win the award for both a drama and a comedy.

On film she received four Academy Award nominations: Best Supporting Actress for Lonelyhearts (1958), Best Supporting Actress for Airport (1970), Best Supporting Actress for Interiors (1978), and finally winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress on March 31, 1981, for her portrayal of the anarchist Emma Goldman in Warren Beatty's Reds.

Stapleton also won an Emmy Award in 1968 for her role in the Hallmark Hall of Fame production of Among the Paths to Eden. Her 1995 memoir A Hell of a Life, written with Jane Scovell, recorded her struggles with stage fright, alcohol, and her relationships with Williams, Marlon Brando, and George Abbott.

The name Maureen is the anglicized form of the Irish Máirín, a diminutive of Máire, the Irish form of Mary, from the Hebrew Miriam. She bore it as a woman whose voice could fill a Broadway house from the back row.