Piper Laurie, an actress with a very long career in movies and television that began in the 1950s and lasted until a few years ago, died Saturday in Los Angeles. Laurie, who was 91, had starred in famous films such as Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961), Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976) and Randa Haines’ Sons of a Lesser God (1986); She was also nominated for an Oscar for each of these films. She also worked for numerous television series, including David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” in the early 1990s, where she played Catherine Packard Martell, one of the series’ negative characters.
Piper Laurie with Ronald Reagan in 1950 (AP Photo)
Laurie was born in Detroit into a family of Jewish descent and made her debut at the age of 18 in Alexander Hall’s “I Love Louise Desperately” (1950) alongside Ronald Reagan (then only an actor; they also briefly dated off-set ). In the following years she played the characters of young beautiful women in many films, like many other young actresses of that time. Her real name was Rosetta Jacobs, but she was pressured to use a stage name by Universal-International, the film production company to which she was signed. In 1956, she rebelled against the series of more or less identical roles that were proposed to her and looked for more demanding roles: in The Hustler she played that of an alcoholic girl deceived by Paul Newman’s character. After this film, however, she left the cinema for fifteen years, during which she devoted herself intensively to her family – from 1962 to 1982 she was married to the Wall Street Journal film critic and Pulitzer Prize winner Joe Morgenstern.
Piper Laurie before the 1987 Academy Awards (AP Photo/Lennox McLendon)
When she returned, she played dramatic roles for which she was highly appreciated. At the same time, he starred in many television productions: the most demanding and long-lasting roles were those in “Blackbird” (1983) and “Twin Peaks” (1990-1991), but he also appeared in other famous series such as “Murder, She Wrote”. The Twilight Zone, Baywatch, ER – Doctors on the Front Lines and more recently Will & Grace and Law & Order. In recent years he has had roles in the films Hesher Was Here by Spenser Susser (2010), The Dawn of an Old Day by Greg Swartz (2010), Bad Blood by Conrad Janis (2012) and Cocaine: The True Story of White Boy Rick by Yann Demange (2018).
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