Lee Remick

Lee Remick
Remick in 1974
Born	Lee Ann Remick (1935-12-14)December 14, 1935 Quincy, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	July 2, 1991(1991-07-02) (aged 55) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Education	Barnard College
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1953–1989
Spouse(s)	Bill Colleran (m. 1957; div. 1968) Kip Gowans (m. 1970; her death 1991)
Children	2

Lee Ann Remick (December 14, 1935 – July 2, 1991) was an American actress. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for the 1962 film Days of Wine and Roses, and for the 1966 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her Broadway theatre performance in Wait Until Dark.

Remick made her film debut in 1957 in A Face in the Crowd. Her other notable film roles include Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Wild River (1960), The Detective (1968), The Omen (1976), and The Europeans (1979). She won Golden Globe Awards for the 1973 TV film The Blue Knight, and for playing the title role in the 1974 miniseries Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill. For the latter role, she also won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress. In April 1991, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Early life

Lee Remick was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, the daughter of Gertrude Margaret (two sources say Patricia^[1][2]) (née Waldo), an actress, and Francis Edwin "Frank" Remick, who owned a department store.^[3][4][5] One of her maternal great-grandmothers, Eliza Duffield, was a preacher born in England.^[6] Remick attended the Swaboda School of Dance, the Hewitt School,^[2] and studied acting at Barnard College and the Actors Studio, making her Broadway theatre debut in 1953 with Be Your Age.^[7]

Career

Remick made her film debut in Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957). While filming the movie in Arkansas, Remick lived with a local family and practiced baton twirling so that she would be believable as the teenager who wins the attention of Lonesome Rhodes (played by Andy Griffith).

After appearing as Eula Varner, the hot-blooded daughter-in-law of Will Varner (Orson Welles) in 1958's The Long, Hot Summer, she appeared in These Thousand Hills (1959) as a dance hall girl. Remick came to prominence as a rape victim whose husband is tried for killing her attacker in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder. In 1960, she made a second film with Kazan, Wild River, which co-starred Montgomery Clift and Jo Van Fleet.

Rehearsing with director George Cukor in 1962

In 1962 she starred opposite Glenn Ford in the Blake Edwards suspense-thriller Experiment in Terror. That same year she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as the alcoholic wife of Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses. Bette Davis, also nominated that year for Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, said "Miss Remick's performance astonished me, and I thought, if I lose the Oscar, it will be to her." They both lost to Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker.

When Marilyn Monroe was fired during the filming of the comedy Something's Got to Give, the studio announced that Remick would be her replacement. Co-star Dean Martin refused to continue, however, saying that while he admired Remick, he had signed onto the picture strictly to be able to work with Monroe.

Remick next appeared in the 1964 Broadway musical Anyone Can Whistle,^[7] written by Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents, which ran for only a week. Remick's performance is captured on the original cast recording. This began a lifelong friendship between Remick and Sondheim, and she later appeared in the landmark 1985 concert version of his musical Follies. In 1966, she starred in the Broadway play Wait Until Dark,^[7] which was another big success; Remick was nominated for a Tony award for Best Actress (Dramatic).^[8] It was adapted into a successful film the following year starring Audrey Hepburn.

Remick continued to star in major films throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, including Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965), The Hallelujah Trail (1965), No Way to Treat a Lady (1968), The Detective (1968), Hard Contract (1969), Loot (1970), Sometimes a Great Notion (1971), A Delicate Balance (1973), and Hennessy (1975).

She co-starred with Gregory Peck in the 1976 horror film The Omen, in which her character's adopted son, Damien, is revealed to be the Antichrist. The film was both a critical and commercial success and was regarded as one of the best horror films ever made. She followed it up with leading actress roles in Telefon (1977), The Medusa Touch (1978) and The Europeans (1979).

Remick later appeared in several made-for-TV movies and miniseries, for which she earned a total of seven Emmy Award nominations. Several were of a historical nature, including two noted miniseries, Ike, in which she portrayed Kay Summersby, alongside Robert Duvall (her co-star in Wait Until Dark) as General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill, where she portrayed Winston Churchill's mother, the American debutante Jennie Jerome who married Lord Randolph Churchill.^[9] She is also remembered for Mistral's Daughter. The reviewer of The New York Times praised Remick for portraying Kate "to fresh-faced clawing perfection".^[10]

Recognition

Remick was awarded the Women in Film Crystal Award in 1990.^[11]

She has a star in the Motion Pictures section on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6104 Hollywood Boulevard. (The Hollywood Walk of Fame site lists it at 1615 Vine Street.) It was dedicated April 29, 1991.^[12]

Personal life

Remick in 1960

Remick married producer Bill Colleran, whose credits include Your Hit Parade, The Dean Martin Show and The Judy Garland Show, on August 3, 1957. They had two children, Katherine Lee Colleran (b. January 1, 1959) and Matthew Remick Colleran (b. June 7, 1961).^[1] Remick and Colleran divorced in 1968.

Remick married British producer William Rory "Kip" Gowans on December 18, 1970. He was an assistant director on such films as Darling (1965), Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) and The Lion in Winter (1968) before they married, and afterwards worked on Sleuth (1972), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and The Human Factor (1979). She moved with Gowans to England and remained married to him until her death.^[2] She starred in four telefilms he produced, The Women's Room (1980), The Letter (1982), Rearview Mirror (1984) and Of Pure Blood (1986). Remick and Gowans spent time in both England and Osterville, Massachusetts, which she considered her "true home".^[13]

Through her daughter, Remick had two grandchildren, Remick Rose Minelian (b. 1993) and Georgia Lee Minelian (b. 1997).

Death

Remick died of kidney and liver cancer on July 2, 1991, at the age of 55, at her home in Los Angeles.^[14]

Popular culture

Remick was the subject of "Lee Remick", the 1978 debut single by the Australian indie rock band The Go-Betweens. The British indie rock band Hefner also recorded a song titled "Lee Remick" in 1998, but it is unrelated to the Go-Betweens' single.

Filmography

Film

Remick (left) with Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal on the set of A Face in the Crowd (1957)

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1957	A Face in the Crowd	Betty Lou Fleckum	Film debut
1958	The Long, Hot Summer	Eula Varner
1959	These Thousand Hills	Callie
1959	Anatomy of a Murder	Laura Manion	Nominated—Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama
1960	Wild River	Carol Garth Baldwin
1961	Sanctuary	Temple Drake
1962	Experiment in Terror	Kelly Sherwood
1962	Days of Wine and Roses	Kirsten Arnesen Clay	Nominated—Academy Award for Best Actress Nominated—BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress Nominated—Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama
1963	The Running Man	Stella
1963	The Wheeler Dealers	Molly Thatcher
1965	Baby the Rain Must Fall	Georgette Thomas
1965	The Hallelujah Trail	Cora Templeton Massingale
1968	No Way to Treat a Lady	Kate Palmer
1968	The Detective	Karen
1969	Hard Contract	Sheila Metcalfe
1970	Loot	Nurse Fay McMahon
1970	A Severed Head	Antonia Lynch-Gibbon
1971	Sometimes a Great Notion	Viv Stamper
1973	A Delicate Balance	Julia
1974	Touch Me Not	Elanor
1975	Hennessy	Kate Brooke
1976	The Omen	Katherine Thorn
1977	Telefon	Barbara
1978	The Medusa Touch	Doctor Zonfeld
1979	The Europeans	Eugenia Young
1980	The Competition	Greta Vandemann
1980	Tribute	Maggie Stratton
1988	Emma's War	Anne Grange	Final film

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Lee Remick.

• Lee Remick at AllMovie
• Lee Remick at the Internet Broadway Database
• Lee Remick on IMDb
• Lee Remick at the TCM Movie Database
• Lee Remick at Find a Grave
• Lee Remick at filmreference.com