Elizabeth Ashley

Elizabeth Ann Cole took the name Elizabeth Ashley to Broadway and won a Tony Award in 1962 for Take Her, She's Mine, one of the three Tony nominations she has collected. Hollywood came for her immediately: she was nominated for both a BAFTA and a Golden Globe for her supporting performance in The Carpetbaggers in 1964, and played Jenny in Ship of Fools a year later. That is about as fast a start as the industry offered anyone, and she spent the following six decades declining to be typecast by it.

The voice did much of the work. It is low, dry and slightly abraded, and it turns politeness into something with a blade in it, which is why directors kept casting her as women who have seen through everybody in the room. She is Cora Brown in Rancho Deluxe, Mrs. Emerson in Coma, Diana Stetson in Split Image, Dallas in the 1986 Stagecoach, Dr. Glaser in Vampire's Kiss and Diane Freed in Todd Solondz's Happiness, where a small amount of screen time goes a long way.

Television has been just as steady, from The Nurses in the 1960s through B.L. Stryker and Freida Evans on Evening Shade, which brought an Emmy nomination in 1991, to Aunt Mimi in Treme and Ruth Brenner in Russian Doll. She was a guest of Johnny Carson twenty four times, appeared in Ocean's Eight as one of the older heads in the room, and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2024.