Piper Laurie turns 85

I just happened to be looking up actress Piper Laurie the other day because I saw that one of her lesser-known movies, the western Smoke Signal with Dana Andrews, is going to be on StarzEncore Westerns later this week (5:48 AM Thursday, to be exact). It's one that I can't remember the last time I saw; those old Universal(-International) westerns don't show up on TCM very often. And I don't currently have any of the premium cable channel packages or the bandwidth to do streaming video.

But today happens to be Laurie's 85th birthday. Laurie started her career at Universal as an 18-year-old, playing small parts for several years before decampign to television. She eventually wound up getting one big role, as Paul Newman's girlfriend in The Hustler, which earned Laurie the first of three Oscar nominations, this one for Best Actress. Marriage slowed Laurie's career, but she eventually returned in the late 1970s, earning a second Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress in Carrie. Laurie's third nomination would be for Children of a Lesser God 10 years later.

Despite that long layoff that produced little screen work, Laurie has a substantial body of both movie and TV work.