Tammy Grimes, the Original ‘Unsinkable Molly Brown,’ Dies
at 82
The New York Times
By Anita Gates
October 31, 2016
Tammy Grimes, the throaty actress and singer who
conquered Broadway at the age of 26, winning a Tony Award for her performance
in “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” and went on to a distinguished stage career,
died on Sunday in Englewood, N.J. She was 82.
The death was confirmed by Duncan MacArthur, her nephew.
Ms. Grimes was largely unknown in 1960 when she was cast
as Molly, the rags-to-riches turn-of-the-century socialite-philanthropist who
survived the sinking of the Titanic. The show’s producers, who clearly
considered the music and lyrics by Meredith Willson more marketable than their
female lead, declined to put her name above the title, which meant that
(because of the Tony regulations of the time) she could be nominated only in
the featured-actress category.
Her second Tony, for a 1969 revival of Noël Coward’s
“Private Lives,” was decidedly for lead actress. Clive Barnes, writing in The
New York Times, called Ms. Grimes’s interpretation of her character, the
reluctant 1930s divorcée Amanda Prynne, “outrageously appealing” and “so
ridiculously artificial that she just has to be for real.”
Coward was a major influence on Ms. Grimes’s career. In
1958, he saw her performing at the Manhattan nightclub Downstairs at the
Upstairs and cast her as the lead in “Look After Lulu,” a new comedy he had
adapted from a Feydeau farce. In 1964 she appeared in “High Spirits,” a musical
version of Coward’s “Blithe Spirit” (directed but not written by Coward),
playing the ghost of the leading man’s first wife. The cast included Beatrice
Lillie as a medium trying to summon her and Edward Woodward as the husband. It
was one of more than a dozen Broadway productions in which Ms. Grimes starred.
Her mop of blond-red hair, a pointed chin, a wide mouth
and a ski-slope nose that was often compared to Bob Hope’s gave her a
distinctive look.
“I never looked like an ingénue,” Ms. Grimes acknowledged
in a 1960 interview with The New York Times Magazine. But that didn’t matter to
her, she said, because “I don’t want to be America’s Sweetheart; I’d rather be
something they don’t quite understand.”
Tammy Lee Grimes was born in Lynn, Mass., on Jan. 30,
1934, the second of three children of Luther Nichols Grimes, who managed the
Brookline Country Club, and the former Eola Willard Niles. Many fans believed
Ms. Grimes was British, partly because of her Mid-Atlantic accent, which she
attributed to a finishing-school education.
She attended Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill,
Mass., and graduated from Stephens College in Missouri, which she often said
she had chosen because of its drama program. Then she went to work for the
Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut and studied acting at the
Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, where the playwright Anita Loos saw her in
a student presentation and chose her for the title role in “The Amazing Adele.”
That show closed during out-of-town tryouts but did get
Ms. Grimes noticed. So did her Off Broadway debut, in “The Littlest Revue,” a
1956 musical production whose cast also included Joel Grey.
Critics loved Ms. Grimes from the beginning. Howard
Taubman hated “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” but praised Ms. Grimes as its
“buoyant interpreter” in introducing lively, often comic song-and-dance numbers
like “Belly Up to the Bar, Boys” and “I Ain’t Down Yet.”
Walter Kerr compared her more than once to a stormy force
of nature. Of her 1976 performance in Neil Simon’s “California Suite,” he
wrote, “Everything out of her face is thunderously funny,” and a year later he
reported that as Elmire in “Tartuffe” she called down “laughs sharp as
thunderclaps.”
Ms. Grimes made films, including “Play It as It Lays,”
“The Last Unicorn” and “Slaves of New York,” and appeared in dozens of
television movies and series (including her own short-lived sitcom, “The Tammy
Grimes Show,” in 1966). But the starring role in the film version of “Molly
Brown” (1964) went to Debbie Reynolds, who had a more traditional Hollywood
look and sound.
The stage was Ms. Grimes’s first home. The Off Broadway
productions in which she starred included Marc Blitzstein’s “The Cradle Will
Rock,” at City Center in 1960, and a 1979 Roundabout Theater production of
Turgenev’s “A Month in the Country” with her daughter, Amanda Plummer. Ms.
Grimes also worked at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, performing at least
once with her first husband, Christopher Plummer; in “Henry IV, Part I” (1958),
he was Bardolph and she was Mistress Quickly.
Ms. Grimes said she fell in love with Mr. Plummer after
seeing him on Broadway in “The Dark Is Light Enough” (1955), a comedy in which
he played a 19th-century Hungarian count. They married in 1956 and divorced in
1960. She married Jeremy Slate, a television actor, in 1966, and they divorced
the next year. She was with her third husband, the musician and composer
Richard Bell, from 1971 until his death in 2005. Ms. Grimes is survived by her
brother, Nick, and her daughter.
She quickly developed a reputation for star attitude. In
1961, Earl Wilson referred to her in his New York Post column as
“terrible-tempered Tammy Grimes” and reported that she had been known to “hit
or bite her fellow actors.” Sometimes she was more politely called mercurial.
In an interview with The Christian Science Monitor in
1980, she addressed that perception. “Well, I was very young,” she said. “It’s
difficult to know what to do with success when you’re so young.”
Her last feature film role was as Ally Sheedy’s Old World
mother in “High Art” (1998). Her final Broadway appearance was a supporting
role in a revival of Tennessee Williams’s “Orpheus Descending” (1989) starring
Vanessa Redgrave.
In 2003 Ms. Grimes was part of the rotating cast of “24
Evenings of Wit and Wisdom,” a production of Off Broadway readings about aging.
At the time, she told a writer for Theatermania that she was “about as
ambitious as a water buffalo.”
Her voice, once described as a “lyric baritone,” also
aged, but if it became whispery it also remained strong, as she demonstrated in
2010 with “Miss Tammy Grimes: Favorite Songs and Stories,” a solo cabaret show
at the Metropolitan Room in Manhattan.
In a 1964 interview with The Saturday Evening Post, Ms.
Grimes speculated about old age and a life that she fully intended to dedicate
to work. “Perhaps all you have left in the end is a scrapbook filled with old
newspaper clippings,” she said.
She quickly reconsidered, however, sounding a bit like
the debutante she once was. “If things get too bad,” she added, “well, there
are always far-off cities and cowboys with guitars, new clothes, music boxes
and large funds of traveler’s checks.”
GRIMES, Tammy (Tammy
Lee Grimes)
Born: 1/30/1934,
Lynn, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Died: 10/30/2016, Englewood, New Jersey, U.S.A.
Tammy Grimes’
westerns – actress:
The Virginian (TV) – 1963 (Angie Clark)
Destry (TV) – 1964 (Patience Dailey)
The Outcasts (TV) – 1969 (Polly)
The Young Riders (TV) – 1990 (Margaret Herrick)
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