Eileen Heckart, 1919-2001

I notice that today is the birth anniversary of actress Eileen Heckart, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing the overbearing mother to blind Edward Albert (Jr.) in Butterflies are Free. The movie may belie its stage origins, but it's still a very finely performed movie.

This was actually Heckart's second nomination, as she had been nominated many years earlier for her role as the alcoholic mother of a child murdered by Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed, another film that was taken from a stage play:

Looking at Heckart's IMDb page, I was surprised to see how much TV work Heckart did compared to how relatively little film work she did. She was the daughter-in-law in the premiere of The Trip to Bountiful, which had a performance on one of those live (I'm assuming) anthology shows before moving to Broadway. Lillian Gish played her mother-in-law, and Eva Marie Saint was Thelma, the fellow passenger on the bus. Interestingly, Jo Van Fleet (who along with Saint and Heckart would go on to win a Supporting Actress Oscar) had a small role in the TV production, and would go on to take Heckart's part in the original Broadway production.

Heckart's final film was The First Wives Club, as the mother of the Diane Keaton character; it's on Showtime Women tomorrow evening and then on StarzEncore later in the week.