She began her career in the sweetened cinema of the 50s, fought for roles with greater psychological burden in the 60s and 70s and had a second career in the 80s. Piper Laurie, one of the last stars of golden Hollywood, died yesterday in Los Angeles at 91 years old. She was well known for playing two evil characters: Carrie's mother and Catherine Martell, the villain of Twin Peaks.
Piper, who earned three Oscar nominations for The Hustler, Carrie and Children of a Lesser God, landed her first movie deal at just 17 years old. Universal signed her because of her stunning red hair to give her supporting roles as a nice girl. He accompanied Donald O'Connor in one of the profitable films of the France mule series, The Francis Mule at the Races (Arthur Lubin, 1951) and provided the counterpart to Tony Curtis in His Highness the Thief (Rudolph Maté, 1951 ), one of those adventure films so popular in the 1950s.
Laurie's career continued along these lines. Again alongside Curtis she starred in The Son of Ali Baba (Kurt Neumann, 1952), one of oriental adventures in full color. She later placed herself under the command of the great Douglas Sirk, in two of the famous melodrama director's lesser-known titles: No Entry to the Groom (1952), with the inevitable Curtis, and Has Anyone Seen My Girl? (1952) where Sirk hooked her up with Rock Hudson.
In The Gentleman of the Mississippi (Rudolph Maté, 1953) Laurie repeatedly gave blows to Tyrone Power, a card player whose fortune was growing on the boats that sailed the river of the title. And in The Sword of Damascus (Nathan Juran, 1953) she made Hudson fall in love again as a princess from an oriental tale.
At the end of the 50s, the actress tried to get out of typecasting and get away from the role of a redhead who fell in love with gallants and participated in more important films such as Guilty Women (Robert Wise, 1957) in a supporting role. She was accompanied by Jean Simmons, Joan Fontaine and Paul Newman. But Laurie couldn't quite find her place in Hollywood and she chose to move to New York and start a new career in television.
She returned to the movies when they offered her a role that fit her aspirations, that of the invalid and lonely woman who could become Paul Newman's salvation in The Hustler (Robert Rossen, 1961). Her performance earned her her first Oscar nomination, but despite that victory no new significant offers arrived and Laurie decided to dedicate herself to her family and to participate in a play on the New York stage.
The thing could have stayed there, in that retirement that perhaps was not so desired, because Laurie returned in front of the cameras in 1976 and began a second and fruitful career. Her opportunity came with a horror classic from Brian De Palma, who was going to adapt Stephen King's novel Carrie, where Sissy Spacek was a teenager with telekinetic powers who caused chaos around her. Carrie was not well and it was not surprising because she lived with a disturbed mother. That was the role that brought Laurie back to the movies and earned her her second Oscar nomination.
And another role as a mother, in this case of the young deaf-mute Marlee Matlin, in Children of a Lesser God (Randa Haines, 1986), marked the third nomination for Laurie, who during the 1980s participated in ensemble films such as Date with Death (Michael Winner, 1988), based on a novel by Agatha Christie, or comedies such as A Dream Girl (Marc Rocco, 1989).
In 1990 she joined the cast of Twin Peaks, the David Lynch series that would become a classic, where she played the villain Catherine Martell. Piper Laurie said goodbye to movies in 2010 playing Hesher's (Spencer Susser) grandmother. The actress, one of the last stars of the golden Hollywood era, died yesterday at the age of 91.
