Piper Laurie, the three-time Oscar-nominated actress known for her performances in The Hustler and Carrie and for her outlandish two-character, two-gender turn on the original Twin Peaks, died Saturday morning in Los Angeles. She was 91.
Laurie had not been well for some time, her rep, Marion Rosenberg, told The Hollywood Reporter.
An Emmy winner who was nominated nine times during her career, Laurie spent three years as a child in a sanatorium, broke free from her original contract at Universal Pictures, once went 15 years without making a movie and starred in the original production — for live television — of Days of Wine and Roses.
In Learning to Live Out Loud, her frank 2011 memoir, she revealed that she lost her virginity to Ronald Reagan and that she had slept with Mel Gibson when she was twice his age. Laurie wrote the book because “my life had many secrets, and it was wearing,” she said in a 2011 interview with the Archive of American Television.
After Laurie’s unscrupulous Catherine Martell of the Packard Sawmill presumably had perished in a fire during the first season of ABC’s Twin Peaks, series co-creator David Lynch called her and said he wanted the actress to return for season two — to play Martell disguised as a man.
“‘What kind of man is going to be up to you,’” she said he told her. “‘You could be a Mexican, a Frenchman, whatever you think.’ I was beside myself with the power to be able to pick my part like that. I decided I would be a Japanese businessman because I thought it would be less predictable.”
Incredibly, the cast and crew were kept in the dark about this. Laurie was told not to tell anyone — not even her family — that she was back on Twin Peaks, and her name was kept out of the credits. And so, sporting a black hairpiece, Fu Manchu mustache and dark glasses, Laurie arrived on the set as actor Fumio Yamaguchi, there to portray the character Mr. Tojamura.
“The cast would never come very close to me,” Laurie said. “They were told to be respectful to this actor who had come over from Japan specifically for the show and had only worked with [Akira] Kurosawa.”
She said that, eventually, some in the cast began to realize something was amiss — but Peggy Lipton, Laurie noted, thought Yamaguchi was actually Isabella Rossellini in disguise.
The actress earned Emmy noms in 1990 and 1991 for her work on the show.
Earlier, the Detroit native received a best actress Oscar nom for portraying the broken and tormented love interest of pool shark Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) in Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961), then landed supporting mentions for playing Sissy Spacek’s religious-fanatic mother in Brian De Palma‘s Carrie (1976) and Marlee Matlin’s mom in Randa Haines’ Children of a Lesser God (1986).
At the Academy Awards, she lost out to Sophia Loren (Two Women), Beatrice Straight (Network) and Dianne Wiest (Hannah and Her Sisters), respectively. Laurie, though, said she never believed in judging performances or awards for actors.
More recently, Laurie appeared as the grandmother of a real-life, teenage FBI informant turned drug dealer in White Boy Rick (2018), starring Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rory Cochrane.
She was born Rosetta Jacobs on Jan. 22, 1932, the youngest of two daughters. Her father, Alfred, worked as a furniture dealer, and her mother, Charlotte, was a housewife. When she was 6, the family came west, and she spent three years in a children’s asylum outside Los Angeles accompanying her sister, who was there for health reasons.
That experience made her extremely quiet, “changed my life and gave me the great gift of imagination because I relied on myself,” she said in her TV Archive interview. When she finally was allowed to leave, she “wanted to create, be brave, do something wonderful in the world.”
In grammar school, she entertained classmates with a comedy routine she had memorized for an elocution class and decided she wanted to be an actress. At age 9, she won a talent contest, and with it a screen test at Warner Bros. It didn’t go well, but she got another one at Universal Studios in 1949 (with Rock Hudson) and earned a contract there while still a senior at Los Angeles High School.
Her manager rechristened her Piper Laurie, and she made her movie debut in Louisa (1950), playing Reagan’s daughter. She was 18, and he was 39. Universal told the press that the fresh-faced ingenue bathed in milk and ate flowers for lunch.
Laurie then appeared in other films like Francis Goes to the Races (1951), Has Anybody Seen My Gal (1952) opposite Hudson, No Room for the Groom (1952) — one of four movies she did with Tony Curtis — The Mississippi Gambler (1953) and Ain’t Misbehavin‘ (1955).
All her roles were lightweight, and Laurie wanted more. She informed her agent, “‘They can throw me in jail, sue me, I don’t care what it is. I’m never working again until I can do something that I have some respect for,’” she told People magazine in 1990.
He got her out of her contract at Universal, and Laurie moved to New York.
The parts she was longing for were on live television. On Studio One‘s “The Deaf Heart” episode, directed by Sidney Lumet, she portrayed a girl who loses her hearing because of an emotional calamity. That resulted in her first Emmy nom.
In October 1958, Laurie played the alcoholic Kirsten opposite Cliff Robertson in the original production of Days of Wine and Roses, done for director John Frankenheimer for Playhouse 90. She visited drunks in the Bowery, at AAA meetings and at Bellevue Hospital to prepare for the role.
“Miss Laurie is moving into the forefront of our most gifted young actresses,” Jack Gould wrote in his review for The New York Times. Meanwhile, after working with Frankenheimer, she “had fallen madly in love with my director, and he was in love with me,” she said in her TV Archive chat.
After The Hustler, Laurie did not do another film for some 15 years as she moved to Woodstock, New York, to study sculpture and raise her daughter, Anne, with her then-husband, entertainment journalist Joe Morgenstern. She also appeared in The Glass Menagerie on Broadway.
Laurie said she was surprised when De Palma courted her for Carrie, and after reading the script, she thought the horror film was a comedy. “I had the opportunity to play-act as children do. I could be the mean lady,” she said.
Her film résumé also included Son of Ali Baba (1952), the Australian drama Tim (1979) — that’s where she first met and had her liaison with her co-star Gibson — Storyville (1992), Wrestling Ernest Hemingway (1993), The Grass Harp (1995), The Crossing Guard (1995), Saving Grace B. Jones (2009) and Hesher (2010).
Laurie captured her lone Emmy for portraying James Garner‘s old flame in the revered 1986 Peabody Award-winning telefilm Promise. She also was nominated for playing the wife of Nazi Joseph Goebbels and for work on The Thorn Birds, St. Elsewhere (as a stroke victim and Alan Arkin’s wife) and Frasier (as Christine Baranski’s mother).
Survivors include her daughter, Anna.
