Eileen Heckart

Anna Eileen Heckart, actress: born Columbus, Ohio 29 March 1919; married 1943 John Harrison Yankee Jnr (died 1997; three sons); died Norwalk, Connecticut 31 December 2001.

One of Broadway's finest character actresses, the tall and husky-voiced Eileen Heckart recreated two of her greatest stage triumphs on film, gaining an Oscar nomination for her role as the mother of a murder victim in The Bad Seed (1956) and winning an Oscar for her superb performance as the over-protective mother of a young blind man in Butterflies are Free (1972). She also created a memorable character on the television series The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but her first love remained the theatre, and in 1990 she was given a special Tony Award for her lifetime of stage work.

Born in 1919 in Columbus, Ohio, she became strongly involved in dramatics at Ohio State University and was advised by teachers to pursue an acting career. She studied for the stage at the American Theatre Wing and made her New York début at the Blackfriars Club in the play Tinker's Dam.

She had married a business student, John Yankee, having met him at a college dance. They settled in Connecticut after the Second World War, and he worked as an insurance broker and later an investment adviser while she took acting jobs in New York. Heckart first gained major attention when she played the love-starved teacher Rosemary in William Inge's Picnic (1953). The director Joshua Logan, after describing in his autobiography the impact that the little-known Kim Stanley had made at her audition for the leading role of Millie, then writes,

The role of the hearty yet haunted schoolteacher Rosemary required a bravura performance. An unknown actress came onstage to read, and the impossible happened again. This odd, rough-hewn woman with a strong Middle Western accent made it clear that she was at heart a tender, yearning human being. It was Eileen Heckart, and our cast gained even further stature.

Both Heckart and Paul Newman (who played the hero's friend) were among those given Theatre World awards as the most promising new players of the year. The following year she won more plaudits for her role in Maxwell Anderson's The Bad Seed, the controversial play in which an eight-year-old girl commits several murders, starting with a school-mate who had won a penmanship prize she coveted. Heckart recreated her role as the dead child's grief-stricken, alcoholic mother in Mervyn LeRoy's film version which, due to screen censorship rules, could not let the young murderess get away with her crimes, as she did in the original play.

Heckart's screen début had come earlier in 1956 when she played the spinster girlfriend of Jane Wyman in Miracle in the Rain, and the same year she gave fine performances as the mother of the boxer Rocky Graziano (Paul Newman) in Somebody Up There Likes Me and as Marilyn Monroe's waitress friend in Bus Stop.

On stage, she appeared in two plays by Arthur Miller, A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays (both 1955), and won the New York Drama Critics Award for her role as Lottie Lacy, the heroine's sister, married to a weakling, in Inge's play about an Oklahoma family, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1958). She starred in the comedy Everybody Loves Opal (1961), and proved an adept singer when, starring with Shelley Berman in a short-lived musical, A Family Affair (1962), she sang touchingly of ageing in her ballad solo "Summer is Over" ("The girl I once knew in pinafore blue will soon be a lady in grey"). She toured as the scheming Regina in The Little Foxes (1964) and again played a love-starved spinster when she toured in Arthur Laurents' The Time of the Cuckoo (1964).

In 1969 she had another Broadway triumph when she created the role of the mother in Leonard Gershe's Butterflies are Free and the following year she made her London début when she played the same role at the Apollo Theatre.

She had made sporadic returns to the screen, notably in George Cukor's Heller in Pink Tights (1960), as, in Cukor's words, "a stage mother to end all stage mothers". When she recreated on screen her role in Butterflies are Free, Variety commented,

Miss Heckart finally gets another role that enables her to display the versatility that has been evident for a long time in her stage roles.

Her last screen role was as Diane Keaton's mother in The First Wives' Club (1996).

Heckart was more prolific on television, making her television début in 1947. She was a guest star on such series as The Defenders and Naked City, and in 1967 won her first Emmy Award for her performance in Win Me a Place at Forest Lawn. She created a memorable character in The Mary Tyler Moore Show as the heroine's Aunt Flo, a high-powered, globe-trotting reporter. In the mini-series Backstairs at the White House (1979), she was praised for her fresh approach to the role of Eleanor Roosevelt, whom she presented as lively, intelligent and slightly sexy (three years earlier she had toured in the one-woman play Eleanor). In 1994 she won a second Emmy for an episode of Love and War, but her first love was always theatre. "You do television to make money so you can afford to act in the theatre," she said.

Her favourite role was that of Mother Courage which she played in New Jersey in 1975. Admitting that her tall frame, gravelly voice and sad eyes had often prompted her to be cast as an eccentric, she said, "I am not one bit an eccentric. I'm always on time. I know my lines." Her husband died in 1995 after more than 50 years of marriage. She described him as "the nicest, kindest, sweetest man I ever met in my life".

Heckart retired in 2000 after playing a woman with Alzheimer's disease in the play The Waverly Gallery. The New York Times critic called her performance "uncanny" and "a beautifully coherent and intelligent portrayal of a woman sliding into incoherence".

Tom Vallance