THE BUTTERSCOTCH COMEDIENNE (REMEMBERING SALLY KELLERMAN)
From childhood, Sally Kellerman always wanted to be an actress.
Born into a Christian Scientist family in Long Beach California, she was initially shy but found her calling in her teenage years and eventually became one of America's most gifted comic actresses.
Sally's mother was a piano teacher and her father was a Shell Oil executive who moved to the San Fernando Valley when she was in fifth grade.
Kellerman told the Chicago Sun Times film critic Roger Ebert in an interview in 1980 that she was a bit of a rebel in Hollywood High School.
"It was the era of bobby socks and ponytails, high heels and makeup," she recalled.
"I was so dumb I had to be taught to swear. They called me Miss Innocent. I didn't smoke grass until I was 27."
Academically she struggled but she got a taste of acting in a school production of 'Meet Me In St Louis'.
Deemed to have a great voice, a friend also helped her put together a demo which would secure a recording contract with Verve Records.
However Sally backed away from the opportunity because she found it too daunting.
She attended Los Angeles City College instead, enrolling in an acting class run by Jeff Corey.
Kellerman's classmates included Jack Nicholson, Dean Stockwell, Shirley Knight and Robert Blake and she appeared with them in a production of John Osborne's 'Don't Look Back In Anger'.
Joining the recently opened Actors Studio West, she worked as a waitress to fund her tuition and landed her first taste of working on a movie in Edward Bernds' critically lambasted 1957 film 'Reform School Girl'.
During the 1960s, Sally started to make some headway, landing roles in episodes of TV shows like ABC's Western series 'Cheyenne,' John Forsythe's sitcom 'Bachelor Father,' playing Martin Landau's wife in the sci-fi series 'The Outer Limits,' it's Fred MacMurray sitcom 'My Three Sons,' it's military drama 'Twelve o'clock High,' CBS's 'The Twilight Zone,' its detective series 'Mannix,' NBC's 'The Alfred Hitchcock Hour,' David Niven's conman series 'The Rogues' and in 1970 on its Western series 'Bonanza'.
There was also a notable appearance as a psychiatrist observing the crew of the USS Enterprise in the second pilot for NBC's 'Star Trek' with William Shatner.
In 1961, Sally suffered a botched abortion at home after becoming pregnant by the actor William Duffy.
She was admitted to hospital for the first time on her life, as it was forbidden by her Christian Scientist faith.
There had been rolea onstage in productions of Henrik Ibsen's 'An Enemy of the People,' Leslie Stevens' 'The Marriage Go Round,'Michael Shurtleff's 'Call Me By My Rightful Name' and as Meg Wildwood in the original Broadway production of 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' which lasted just four preview performances.
On the big screen, Jack Smight directed her in the 1965 suspense thriller 'The Third Day' in which she played the victim of a car crash who appears to be the sleazy mistress of George Peppard's amnesiac.
While hardly a classic, it performed well in cinemas.
There was an eye catching role as a survivor of 'The Boston Strangler,' in Richard Fleischer's 1968 movie of that name starring Tony Curtis, Henry Fonda, Murray Hamilton and George Kennedy.
She landed the high profile part of Jack Lemmon's uncaring wife in Stuart Rosenberg's 1969 romcom 'The April Fools' with Catherine Deneuve, Myrna Loy and Peter Lawford.
The New York Times praised her performance and the film drew decent box office returns.
However in 1970, she was to have her defining role as the original Hotlips Houlihan in Robert Altman's black comedy Korean war film 'MASH' with Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland and Robert Duvall.
Kellerman's performance as the head nurse who bonds with Duvall's straightlaced medic was a huge hit with audiences, earning her Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe and Oscar nomination and a Laurel Award for Top Female Comedy Performance.
A massive hit around the world, it was the third highest grossing film behind 'Love Story' and 'Airport 70' and won Altman the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival
After the release of 'MASH,' she married the Hollywood producer Rick Edelstein who would help bankroll 'Starsky and Hutch'.
Their marriage, however, lasted just two years.
Sally also appeared that year in Altman's black comedy 'Brewster McCloud' with Bud Cort, Michael Murphy and Shelley Duvall.
Also lauded by the critics, it featured Kellerman in the role of an enigmatic "fairy godmother" style figure wearing only a trench coat who encourages Cort's offbeat character, who is a suspect in a series of murders in Houston, to make wings so he can fly.
Her next role was as the object of Alan Arkin's married seafood restraurant owner's affections on Gene Sak's 1972 movie of Neil Simon's comedy 'The Last of the Red Hot Lovers'.
The film, however, drew mixed to negative reviews.
There was a more serious role in William A Fraker's thriller 'A Reflection of Fear' with Sondra Locke, Mary Ure and Robert Shaw which got held up after distribution issues.
When it was eventually released in 1973, the film drew positive reviews with Kellerman's performance being particularly singled out for praise by the New York Times.
Such was Kellerman's popularity that she released an album on Decca Records called 'Roll With The Feelin'' which featured songs by Carole King and Stephen Stills.
In 2009, she would release her only other album of her singing classic songs like Screamin' Jay Hawkins' 'I Put A Spell On You,' Nina Simone's 'Sugar In My Bowl' and The Searchers 'Love Potion, Number 9'.
Sally teamed up with James Caan and Peter Boyle for the 1973 Howard Zieff comedy crime caper 'Slither' which again drew enthusiastic reviews and performed respectably at the box office.
Caan would, though, later dismiss the film as insubstantial, saying he took the role of an ex-con looking for a stash of cash because he needed the money.
In Charles Jarrott's 1973 fantasy musical 'Lost Horizon,' she played a photographer with a drug addiction who is among a group of people whose plane crashes in the Himalayas and end up in Shangri-La.
Derided by the critics, the film, which was a remake of a 1937 Frank Capra film, also starred Liv Ullmann, Peter Finch, George Kennedy, Olivia Hussey and Michael York and was was a box office bomb.
It is regarded as one of the 100 worst movies ever made.
Sally got to demonstrate her singing skills, playing a hitchhiker in Dick Richards' well received 1975 comedy drama 'Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins' where she was reunited with Alan Arkin and acted alongside Mackenzie Phillips and Harry Dean Stanton.
She played the wife of Richard Mulligan in James Crawley's star studded 1976 disaster movie spoof 'The Big Bus' with Joseph Bologna, Stockard Channing, Ned Beatty, Jose Ferrer, Lynn Redgrave, Harold Gould and Larry Hangman.
Now regarded as a cult classic, it was poorly received by the critics and crashed at the box office.
In Alan Rudolph's Robert Altman produced 'Welcome to LA' she played a real estate agent unhappily married to John Considine's furniture owner who is pursuing Sissy Spacek's maid.
The film which also starred Harvey Keitel, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Linda Hutton and Denver Pyle, was hammered by the critics.
Kellerman adopted her niece Claire in 1976 whose mother Diana had had a bitter split from her husband Ian Graham who also died that year.
Diana had come out as a lesbian nine years earlier and moved to France with her partner, breaking off contact with Claire.
During the mid-1970s, Sally dated Mark Farmer of the rock group Grand Funk Railroad whose 1976 song 'Sally' was about their relationship.
She also dated the screenwriters Laurence Hauben of 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' fame, David Rayfiel who wrote 'Three Days of the Condor' and Charles Shyer who crafted 'Smokey and the Bandit', the New York Times journalist Warren Hoge, the producer Jon Peters and the 'Grease' and Edd Bynes.
In Russell Hoban's 1977 animation 'The Mouse and His Child,' she joined a voice cast that included Peter Ustinov, Cloris Leachman and John Carradine, playing a seal but again it met with critical disdain.
She went Down Under to appear in an Australian ABC TV adventure movie 'She'll Be Sweet' as the daughter of a tycoon with Tony Lo Bianco, Rod Mullinar and Anne Semler which earned mixed reviews.
There was another small screen role in NBC's 12 episode star studded miniseries 'Centennial,' based on the James A Michener novel about a Colorado town, starring Raymond Burr, Robert Vaughn, Lynn Redgrave, Richard Chamberlain, Mark Harmon, Stephanie Zimbalist, Dennis Weaver, Brian Keith and Timothy Dalton.
George Roy Hill directed her, Laurence Olivier and Arthur Hill and played Diane Lane's mum in the 1979 Parisian romcom 'A Little Romance' which drew mostly positive reviews.
In 1980 Sally married the producer and screenwriter Jonathan D Krane in a private ceremony in the actress Jennifer Jones' Malibu home, with her niece Claire serving as her maid of honour.
The 36 year marriage had its ups and downs, with the couple separating on two occasions in 1994 and in 1997 after his affair with the actress Nastassja Kinski was exposed.
Krane formally adopted Claire in 1987 and two years later they adopted newborn twins Jack and Hannah Vaughan.
In August 2016, Jonathan passed away at the age of 67 after suffering a heart attack.
Two months later, their adopted daughter Hannah died as a result of a heroin and amphetamines overdose.
Up and coming Englitsh director Adrian Lyne directed her, Jodie Foster, Scott Baio and Randy Quaid in the 1980 coming of age drama 'Foxes' did reasonably well at the box office and earned decent reviews.
Kellerman was more dismissive of her performance in Nicolas Gessner's 1980 Canadian Israeli and French gun running comedy 'It Could Have Rained All Night' with Tony Curtis, Louis Gossett Jr and John Vernon.
Playing a character known as The Colonel, she later remarked: "I always say that I was solidly mediocre and everybody else stunk."
There was an ill advised appearance in Bill Persky's 1980 movie comedy 'Serial' with Tuesday Weld and Christopher Lee which was accused of sexism and homophobia.
She also had the lead in Michael Grant's 1980 Canadian drama 'Head On' with Stephen Lack about an intense affair between two people initially involved in a traffic collision.
1985 saw Sally appear as a judge in Neal Israel's critically pummelled traffic school comedy 'Moving Violations' with Jennifer Tilly, John Murray, Fred Willard and Don Cheadle in his debut film role.
There was a spy drama role in Dwight H Little's underwhelming 1985 movie 'KGB: The Secret War' with Michael Billington.
Kellerman was a literature professor in Alan Netter's hit 1986 Rodney Dangerfield comedy movie 'Back to School' with Burt Young, Keith Gordon, Ned Beatty and Robert Downey Jr which was the sixth highest grossing film that year.
She also joined Jack Lemmon, Julie Andrews and Robert Loggia in Blake Edwards' comedy 'That's Life' which failed to perk the interest of cinemagoers and critics.
Kellerman also appeared in the summer camp comedy sequel George Mendeluk's 'Meatballs III: Summer Job' with Patrick Dempsey and Al Waxman which also flopped.
In Bill L Norton's 1987 comedy 'Three for the Road,' she joined Charlie Sheen and Alan Ruck as Kerri Greene's estranged mum in another critical and commercial dud.
There was also a role in Henry Jaglom's comic pseudo documentary 'Someone to Love' which was screened as part of the Cannes Film Festival's 'Un Certain Regard' strand and was more notable for featuring Orson Welles playing himself in his final live action movie appearance.
Kellerman had a role in Richard Martini's 1988 romcom 'You Can't Hurry Love' with Bridget Fonda, David Leisure, Anthony Geary and Charles Grodin.
Rocky Lang's 1989 comedy 'All's Fair' with George Segal, John Carradine and Lou Ferringo about business executives who take part in paintballing games continued her run of mostly poorly received movie comedies which flopped with audiences.
An animated musical fantasy 'Happiky Ever After' with Irene Cara, Malcolm McDowell, Ed Asner, Dom DeLuise, Carol Channing and Phyllis Diller also faded quickly on its release after critics destroyed it.
During the 1980s, she hosted an episode of NBC'a satirical show 'Saturday Night Live' and co-starred alongside Treat Williams and Sam Waterston in 'Dempsey,' a CBS TV movie about the heavyweight boxer Jack Dempsey.
There were guest roles too in the ABC soap 'Hotel' and on the Showtime fantasy series 'Tall Tales and Legends'.
Israeli director Avi Nesher cast her as a nun in the 1993 supernatural thriller 'Doppelgnger' with Drew Barrymore, while she joined Donald Sutherland, Lolita Davidovich, Julie Delpy and Brendan Fraser in the Percy Adlon comedy 'Younger and Younger'.
1994 saw her, Linda Hunt and Tracy Ullmann wooing Stephen Rea's photographer in Robert Altman's typically acerbic fashion industry satire 'Pret A Porter' which also starred Sophia Loren, Julia Roberts, Tim Robbins, Richard E Grant, Teri Garr, Forest Whittaker, Kim Basinger, Lyle Lovett, Jean Rochefort, Lauren Bacall, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Rupert Everett, Lili Taylor, Ciara Mastroianni and Danny Aiello.
The film, which drew mixed reviews, featured a memorable scene where she hid in a closet alongside Marcello Mastroianni's murder suspect.
There was also an AIDS drama, Randal Kleiser's 1996 movie 'It's My Party' with Bruce Davison, Margaret Cho, Roddy MacDowell, Eric Roberts, George Segal and Olivia Newton-John which struggled at the box office after mostly negative reviews.
Larry Arrick directed her, Ed Begley Jr and Tyne Daly in the 1997 comedy 'Lay of the Land,' while there was an appearance in Jean Pierre Marois' I'll conceived comedy 'American Virgin' with Mena Suvari, Bob Hoskins, Robert Loggia and the porn actor Ron Jeremy which was savaged by the critics.
On the small screen, she guested in episodes of CBS's sitcom 'Evening Shade' with Burt Reynolds on 1990 and HBO's sitcom 'Dream On' in 1994.
Kellerman also popped up twice as different characters on CBS's popular 'Diagnosis Murder' with Dick Van Dyke and alongside Daryl Hannah, Randy Quaid and Jennifer Tilly in an episode of the Robert Altman produced ABC anthology series 'Gun' in 1997 which was directed by him.
She also appeared in a 1998 episode of the Peter Falk detective vehicle 'Columbo' on ABC and narrated Ken Burns' 1999 PBS documentary on the US suffrage movement 'Not For Ourselves Alone'.
On TV, there were appearances during the 2000s and 2010s in IFC's comedy 'The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman,' on the Hallmark Channel's drama 'The Wishing Well' with Ernest Borgnine, on CBS's teen drama '90210,' on FX's animated adult comedy 'Unsupervised,' on Comedy Central's sitcom 'Workaholics,' on the Cartoon Network's 'The High Fructose Adventures of the Annoying Orange' and as Marc Maron's mum Toni in his IFC sitcom 'Maron'.
The 2000s saw her appear in Dan Mirvish's real estate comedy 'Open House' and played Len Cariou's lover in Susan Seidelman's Florida indie comedy 'Boynton Beach Club' with Brenda Vaccaro, Dyan Cannon, Joseph Bologna and Michael Nouri.
In 2011, Kellerman picked up a Best Supporting Actress Award of Excellence for her performance in 'Night Club' - Sam Borowski's retirement home comedy with Mickey Rooney and Ernest Borgnine.
She was part of an impressive all star cast that included Sylvester Stallone, Kyra Sedgwick, Tom Berenger, Kelsey Grammer, Nelly, Danny Trejo, Danny Aiello, Elisabeth Henstridge, Tom Sizemore, Terry Crews and Cary Elwes in John Herzfeld's 2014 self-help book drama 'Reach Me' which baffled critics and failed to entice moviegoers.
There was a recurring role, however, in 2016-17 season of CBS's daytime soap opera 'The Young and The Restless' as Constance Bingham which saw her acting opposite future 'This is Us' star Justin Hartley.
"I'm really excited," she said after it was announced she was taking on her first daytime soap role.
"I really am but God help me."
She was nominated for a Daytime Emmy for her performance.
In 2016 Kellerman also played a First Lady controlled by Dracula in a YouTube series 'Decker' which spoofed action movies, sending up Hillary Clinton.
Simon Erickson and Scott R Thomson cast her alongside Stephanie Zimbalist and Daniel Roebuck in one of her last movie roles in the 2016 indie comedy drama 'His Neighbor Phil'.
Lynne Alanna Delaney also directed her in the movie industry satire 'The Remake' which also featured June Lockhart and Larry King as himself and there was one more role alongside Fionnula Flanagan and Macy Gray in Greg Masuak's comedy thriller 'Flycatcher'.
Her final screen role was a guest appearance on an episode of the Hulu comedy series 'Difficult People' in 2017.
In her final years, Kellerman succumbed to dementia before losing her life as a result heart failure.
Tributes poured in after passing from Nancy Sinatra, William Shatner, Marc Maroon and Roseanna Arquette.
However one affectionate review of her work on the movie 'Boynton Beach Club' by the critic Roger Ebert springs to mind as a great summary of what she brought to the big and small screen.
"Kellerman really is as beautiful as ever, and with her butterscotch voice and effortless timing, she's probably best comedian in the bunch," he observed.
"She's beautifully paired with Cariou, a down-to-earth gentleman who really is a gentle man.
"Only now, she's the one controlling when the sheets are dropped."
That butterscotch voice and impeccable comic timing may not have graced movies and TV shows released since 2017.
However it is still there to be treasured for many years to come in the host of great movie and TV performances she notched up over her career
(Sally Kellerman passed away at the age of 84 on February 24, 2022)
Comments
Post a Comment