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Famous Like Me > Actress > S > Beatrice Straight

Profile of Beatrice Straight on Famous Like Me

 
Name: Beatrice Straight  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 2nd August 1914
   
Place of Birth: Old Westbury, New York, USA
   
Profession: Actress
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia

Beatrice Whitney Straight (August 2, 1914 – April 7, 2001) was an American theater and film actress.

Born in Old Westbury, New York, she was the daughter of investment banker Willard Dickerman Straight, and the wealthy Dorothy Payne Whitney. She was four years old when her father died in France of influenza during the great epidemic while serving with the United States Army during World War I. Following her mother's remarriage to British agronomist Leonard K. Elmhirst in 1925, the family moved to England. As such, Beatrice Straight was educated there and it was where she began acting in amateur theater. Returning to the United States she made her Broadway debut in a 1935 production of Bitter Oleander. She concentrated her attentions on her theater work, winning a Tony Award for her role as Elizabeth Proctor in the 1953 production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

She was married twice, first to Frenchman Louis Dolivet, a left-wing activist who became editor of the "United Nations World" magazine and later an Academy Award winning film producer. They divorced in 1949 and Beatrice Straight immediately married film and Broadway actor/producer Peter Cookson with whom she had two sons.

She worked infrequently in television and cinema, and is remembered by film goers for two roles. As the devastated wife, confronted by her husband William Holden's infidelity in Network (1976), Straight was onscreen for a little more than 5 minutes, however her performance was widely praised, and earned her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Further film and television performances include the role of the mother of Lynda Carter in the Wonder Woman series. She also played the role of the paranormal investigator, Dr Lesh in the film Poltergeist (1982), the most widely seen role of her film career.

She died from pneumonia in Los Angeles, California. She was cremated.

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Beatrice Straight