11/8/2022 0 Comments Sold girl town patchNevertheless, she came back, with an agent as a buffer this time, and was quickly offered two major roles. “She didn’t have the aggressiveness it takes,” he recalls. John Kenley, now director of the Civic Theater in Akron, encouraged her to return to New York, but not without reservations. She returned to Ohio, where she got a job as a resident actor with the Cleveland Playhouse and, later, with the Kenley Players in Warren, Ohio. “My illusions were shattered,” she said later. She spent five months huddled in her hotel room, too afraid of rejection to audition for acting roles. Her excessive shyness made this initial venture a disaster. Her success as the shy, sweet heroine Emily in a local production of “Our Town” (she was selected as Ohio High School Actress of the Year) and further triumphs in summer stock and at Carnegie Tech’s drama department, made her determined to try her luck in New York. She wanted to be a star because of her abilities.” She didn’t dream about those parties she’d be too shy to attend anyway. “But she didn’t think about the glitter and glamour. “She wanted to be a movie star,” says Janet Shoop. She felt her talent could make her overcome these obstacles, that it was, ultimately, all she would need for stage and motion-picture success. To the 21-year-old Hartman, her overnight discovery was initially part of the natural order of things.Įver since her childhood in Youngstown, she had been positive an acting career was her destiny.Īlthough desperately shy and a loner, she could lose herself in a character to such an extent that she could tune out the world, and what she perceived as her disabilities: her timidity, her daydreaming and her desire to retreat into her private fantasies. I’m suddenly in a different kind of world. I used to know who Biff was, but I don’t, now. “I wish I had helped her.”Īll this has happened so fast, I’m kind of misplaced. I keep thinking that acting is a noble profession, but it’s nothing but a garbage pail. There are a lot of (people) here who won’t stick with someone when they’re down. It’s true that Hartman didn’t die like Peg Entwistle, the ‘30s would-be starlet who hurled herself dramatically from the Hollywood sign in despair over her non-career.īut it is uncomfortably coincidental that Hartman leaped to her death on June 10, five years to the day after she left movies forever.Īnd people like Joe Don Baker, Hartman’s co-star in “Walking Tall” (1973), do think her predicament is not unique. The pressure had built up so much, I don’t think she could handle it.” She lived a pretty pressure-packed life for a youngster. no matter what she decided to do.”īut even Hartman’s brother-in-law, attorney Bob Shoop, admits that the link was there: “Don’t forget, she was nominated for an Academy Award in her first motion picture. “I think that sort of illness is a spiraling thing,” says her former husband, screenwriter Gill Dennis (co-writer of “Apocalypse Now,” writer of HBO’s “Home Fires”). But, in the end, it was just too difficult for her to do so.” Hartman desperately wanted to resume her career. “That’s what’s so hard for people to understand about mental illness. “There’s so much more to it,” says her sister, Janet Shoop. Those closest to Hartman get angry when it is suggested that it was just her faltering movie career that propelled her out that window. “Failing Career/Mental Problems Blamed in Actress Suicide Here.” The headline in another Pittsburgh paper summed it up. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette magazine editor George Anderson had a harder edge: “I think hers was a tragic American career that peaks at the beginning and has no follow-up. representative for Clint Eastwood, who starred with Hartman in “The Beguilded,” were not returned.) She was asked to appear in a documentary about Marilyn Monroe and she turned that down, too.”) Her spokesperson at International Creative Management offered, “She’s busy. (Another “Patch of Blue” co-star, Shelley Winters, declined comment. She was a wonderful actress and a truly gentle person. After she died, once co-star Poitier issued the following statement: “It saddens me to think she’s no longer with us.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |