Sally Kirkland, the forthright actress whose bustling career included an Oscar-nominated turn in 1987’s Anna and character roles in The Way We Were, Edtv and scores of other films, died Tuesday. She was 84.
Kirkland died in hospice care in Palm Springs, her representative Michael Greene announced. A year ago, friends set up a GoFundMe page to help her with expenses related to two “life-threatening infections” and fractures in her neck, wrist and hip, THR reported.
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The daughter of a top magazine fashion editor, the statuesque Kirkland in the 1960s appeared nude on stage for Terrence McNally and in an Andy Warhol film on the way to compiling more than 260 onscreen acting credits on IMDb.
Kirkland also portrayed a pasties-wearing stripper and romantic interest of Robert Redford‘s character in George Roy Hill’s The Sting (1973), an outrageous rock star opposite Kevin Costner in Tony Scott’s Revenge (1990) and Rose Cheramie, a woman who claimed to know about a presidential assassination attempt in advance, in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991).
The New York native collected Golden Globe and Spirit awards for her performance as the title character, an aging Czechoslovakian actress forced to take a stand-in job in a horrible off-Broadway play, in Anna. Written by Agnieszka Holland, the drama was made for less than $1 million and distributed by independent film company Vestron Pictures.
Amid much love from the critics, Kirkland was nominated as best actress in 1988 along with Meryl Streep of Ironweed, Glenn Close of Fatal Attraction, Holly Hunter of Broadcast News and eventual winner Cher of Moonstruck.
“At the Oscars, there were all these movie stars emerging from their limos, and then there was me. I felt like Cinderella,” she said in 2012. “The greatest part was the feeling to be in the same Oscar category of these women that I was a huge fan of — Meryl, Glenn, Holly Hunter and Cher, who I used to roller skate with in the ’70s.”
She followed up her acclaimed performance with starring turns in such erotic thrillers as High Stakes (1989) and In the Heat of Passion (1992) and in the 1991 Fox telefilm The Haunted, for which she received another Globe nom.
“A lot of people would have said, ‘She made a lot of wrong choices,’ thinking that I should have continued to do Anna-type films,” she said in a 2013 interview.
She was born in New York City on Oct. 31, 1941. Her mother, also named Sally Kirkland, was a fashion editor at Vogue and Life magazines who put Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Faye Dunaway and Jacqueline Kennedy on covers and hired photographer Gordon Parks; her father, Frederic, was from a wealthy Philadelphia Main Line family.
“When I was a kid, it was all about how decadent can we be,” she told Skip E. Lowe in a 1990 interview. “LSD was on the cover of Time magazine, Timothy Leary was very big, and Harvard University and Cary Grant were endorsing it. So I went and did it thinking it was, like, legal. I had been a very normal kid, and from that point on I went through a lot of trouble.”
Kirkland studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and then with Lee Strasberg at The Actors Studio, where her classmates included Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. She danced in Hey, Let’s Twist! (1961), served as an understudy on Broadway and appeared off-Broadway alongside James Earl Jones in The Love Nest.
Meanwhile, she worked as a hat check girl at The Bitter End nightclub and as a go-go dancer at the Peppermint Lounge.
Her mom knew Warhol, and he put Kirkland in his 1964 film The 13 Most Beautiful Women. “Andy used to say to me, ‘Just sit in front of the camera and do nothing,’” she recalled in a 2006 interview, “and I would say, ‘I’m a Strasberg-trained actress, what do you mean do nothing?’”
In 1968, the 5-foot-9 Kirkland became one of the first actresses to appear nude in a legitimate stage play when she starred as a kidnapped woman opposite Robert Drivas in McNally’s Sweet Eros. She spent the entire 45 minutes of the two-person, off-Broadway production without clothes. “It was a political statement. You can’t carry a gun on a naked body,” she said in 1989.
She appeared with Karl Malden in Blue (1968), with Rip Torn (whom she had dated) in the X-rated Coming Apart (1969) and in Tom O’Horgan’s Futz (1969), which she promoted by appearing on the cover of Screw magazine riding nude and bareback on a huge hog.
She portrayed Barbra Streisand’s communist switchboard pal Pony in The Way We Were (1973), a Rolling Stone photographer in another Streisand starrer, A Star Is Born (1976), and a lesbian named Helga in Private Benjamin (1980).
Kirkland was appearing in a Joseph Papp-produced Czechoslovakian play written by Vaclav Havel when she was approached by her manager to audition for Anna, directed by Yurek Bogayevicz and also starring Paulina Porizkova.
“Although I hadn’t been using an accent in the Czech play, I was feeling very Eastern European,” she recalled. “I said, ‘How many weeks do I have?’ He said, ‘Two.’ So I said, ‘Tell them yes.’
“Then I went through the whole thing of finding tapes. I found out that the back-elevator man of my mother’s building was Czech. I gave him a bottle of wine and had him read my lines. Then I copied his Czech accent. That was sort of the beginning of the Anna period. My whole life changed. Isn’t that funny how that happens when you get nominated?”
To play the stripper in High Stakes (1989), she underwent cosmetic surgery. “I had these implants put in, and that ended up being a tragedy because I almost died from them,” she said. In 1998, she had them removed and founded the Kirkland Institute for Implant Survival Syndrome.
She portrayed a martial arts coach opposite Jones and Eric Roberts in Best of the Best (1989), played Matthew McConaughey’s doting mom in Ron Howard’s Edtv (1999) and — coming full circle — was the grandmother of Warhol legend Edie Sedgwick (Sienna Miller) in George Hickenlooper’s Factory Girl (2006).
Her feature résumé also included Cinderella Liberty (1973), Blazing Saddles (1974), Cold Feet (1989), Bullseye! (1990), The Player (1992), Bruce Almighty (2003), Coffee Date (2006), Archaeology of a Woman (2012) and The Most Hated Woman in America (2017).
On television, she played Johnny Galecki’s mother on Roseanne, an art professor on Felicity and an environmentalist on Days of Our Lives and starred on a five-nights-a-week syndicated Valley of the Dolls series.
Married and divorced twice, Kirkland also taught acting for years (Sandra Bullock was among her students), was an ordained minister and practiced yoga.
“My attitude is always one of sensuality, aggressive enthusiasm and kind of outrageousness in my expression,” she said. “I suppose if I wanted to be the girl next door, I could have. I think America is a little too confused by someone who appears to be sexual and spiritual at the same time.”
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