Colleen Dewhurst

Biography

Colleen Rose Dewhurst was a Canadian-American actress. She is known most for theatre roles, and for a while as “the Queen of Off-Broadway”. In her autobiography, Dewhurst wrote: “I had moved so quickly from one Off-Broadway production to the next that I was known, at one point, as the ‘Queen of Off-Broadway’. This title was not due to my brilliance, but, rather, because most of the plays I was in closed after a run of anywhere from one night to two weeks. I would then move immediately into another.”

She was a renowned interpreter of the works of Eugene O’Neill on the stage, and her career also encompassed film, early dramas on live television, and Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. One of her last roles was playing Marilla Cuthbert in the Kevin Sullivan television adaptations of the Anne of Green Gables series, and her reprisal of the role in the subsequent TV series Road to Avonlea (marketed as Avonlea in the US).

She appeared in 1962 as Joanne Novak in the episode “I Don’t Belong in a White-Painted House” in NBC’s medical drama, The Eleventh Hour, starring Wendell Corey and Jack Ging.[5] Dewhurst appeared opposite her then-husband, Scott, in a 1971 television adaptation of Arthur Miller’s The Price, on Hallmark Hall of Fame, an anthology series, and there is another television recording of them together when she played Elizabeth Proctor to his unfaithful John in Miller’s The Crucible (with Tuesday Weld). In 1977, Woody Allen cast her in his film Annie Hall as Annie’s mother.

Dewhurst was married to James Vickery from 1947 to 1960. She married and divorced George C. Scott twice. They had two sons, Alexander Scott and actor Campbell Scott; she co-starred with Campbell in Dying Young (1991), one of her last performances. During the last years of her life, she lived on a farm in South Salem, New York, with her partner, Ken Marsolais.