Elizabeth Ashley Biography
Born: August 30, 1939
A graduate of Louisiana State University and New York's Neighborhood Playhouse, Elizabeth Ashley started her professional career as a model and ballet dancer (she had studied with Tatiana Semenova). Ashley was still travelling under her given name of Elizabeth Cole when she made her 1959 Broadway bow in The_Highest_Tree. She first adopted the billing of "Ashley" for her 1961 breakthrough stage appearance in Take_Her,_She's_Mine, which won her the Theatre World Award. Ashley followed this triumph with her performance as newlywed Corrie Bratter in Neil_Simon's Barefoot in the Park (1963). She made her film debut as Monica Winthrop in The_Carpetbaggers (1963), co-starring with then-husband George_Peppard (she had previously been married to actor James_Farentino). After the 1965 film Ship of Fools, Ashley dropped out of acting for five years. In her candid 1978 autobiography Actress: Postcards From the Road, she attributed her career hiatus to a number of mitigating circumstances: a bout with cancer, a difficult pregnancy, her increasingly unhappy marriage to Peppard, and a professional "freeze-out" because she'd turned down the film version of Barefoot in the Park. By the time she reactivated her career in 1970, Ashley's performances had taken on a harsh, dangerous edge -- which, in the long run, had a most salutary effect on her career. With her searing portrayal of Maggie in the 1974 Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, her comeback was complete. A busier-than-ever character actress in films and on stage, Elizabeth Ashley was also seen on a semiweekly basis as husky-voiced Aunt Frieda on the TV sitcom Evening_Shade (1990-1994), which starred fellow Floridian Burt_Reynolds. Hal Erickson, Rovi
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