Two-time Oscar nominee Melinda Dillon has died at the age of 83… after a legendary career in Hollywood that spanned 45 years
Tony-winner Melinda Dillon, best known for starring in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, has died aged 83.
The family of the two-time Oscar nominee confirmed in an obituary that she died on January 9, but no cause of death has been announced at this time.
Throughout her legendary Hollywood career, the Arkansas-born Magnolia actress has twice won Best Supporting Actress at the Academy Awards.
Her acting career in film, television and Broadway has spanned more than four decades.
In addition to a memorable role as Ralphie’s nervous mother, A Christmas Story, she won a famous Tony for her Broadway debut in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Died: Tony Award-winner Melinda Dillon, best known for her starring role in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, has died at the age of 83
In 1976 she admitted that intense gaming drove her “crazy” and spent time in a psychiatric hospital.
“I think it was the way I lived; The play was so long and the actors’ union wouldn’t let us play the matinee,” she told the New York Times at the time.
She continued, “We had to have a very different cast for this, but I was called in many, many times because the girl was going to be sick. I would do it for three hours in the afternoon, then study with Lee Strasberg for two hours and play the piece for three hours in the evening.’
She was married to Richard Libertini for more than 12 years before they separated in 1978.
The former couple shared a son named Richard Jr.
Her filmography includes portraying Sylvester Stallone’s wife in Norman Jewison’s FIST (1978), a suicidal woman in The Prince of Tides (1991) and Sydney Pollack’s Absence of Malice (1981).
An icon: The family of the two-time Oscar nominee confirmed in an obituary that she died on January 9, but no cause of death has been announced at this time; seen in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind