SANDY DENNIS

Sandy Dennis was born Sandra Dale Dennis in Hastings, Nebraska in 1937. She went to high school with Dick Cavett, and was in some community theater, then moved to New York to become an actress when she was just 19. She studied under Uta Hagen at the Actor's Studio, and got a part in the TV soap opera "The Guiding Light". The following year she got an understudy role on Broadway in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs and appeared in the show when it went on tour. After a few more stage roles, she made her film debut in Splendor in the Grass, playing an important role. But she did not parlay this success into more films, and instead went back to Broadway for five years! She found major success as the social worker in A Thousand Clowns, winning the Tony Award. In 1966, she returned to the movies in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, where she and George Segal managed to hold their own against the harrowing Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and both Dennis and Taylor won Oscars (hard luck Burton did not win only because he was up against Paul Scofield in his once-in-a-lifetime performance in A Man For All Seasons). This time Dennis stayed with movies, but her choices were quirky and not very commercial. She made Up the Down Staircase (intended to be like To Sir With Love, which came out that same year, but Dennis did not play the teacher in a very upbeat way at all), The Fox (where she played a lesbian, a formerly taboo subject in mainstream movies), Sweet November (the ultimate "odd couple" romance), That Cold Day in the Park (perhaps Robert Altman's oddest movie, and that's saying a lot), and others. She finally made a mainstream movie in 1970, Neil Simon's The Out of Towners (opposite Jack Lemmon), but true to form she immediately returned to quirky odd movies and more stage acting. She lived with jazz musician Gerry Mulligan (who was ten years older than her) for a decade, and a few years after they broke up she lived with Eric Roberts (who was 19 years younger than her) for five years. She never married, and had no children, and for the last seven years of her life she lived alone, with 30 or more cats, resembling one of the neurotic characters she played, and she passed away in 1992, at just 54. No one could deny that Sandy Dennis was a superb actress, but she had zero sex appeal (even in her romantic roles!), and her neurotic ways of performing (one wondered if she was acting or if that was who she really was!) made her a polarizing figure, with some liking her very much and others finding her outright repellent. She played quirky intensely neurotic characters perfectly, but none of them were very likable at all!