Nancy Marchand Biography
Born: June 19, 1928
Died: June 18, 2000
Following extensive dramatic training at Carnegie Tech, American actress Nancy Marchand did some stage work, then entered the infant TV medium with a 1950 production of Little Women. One year later she appeared on Broadway for the first time; for the rest of the '50s she fluctuated between on-stage classics (Shakespeare, Euripedes) and TV anthologies and soap operas. In later years, Nancy explained that she retreated to contemporary characters on TV because she was "tired of being a queen or a poor put-upon Greek" on stage. A handsome woman, but not voluptuously beautiful in the then-fashionable Marilyn_Monroe tradition, Ms. Marchand was usually cast in character roles: she was the dateless "dog" with whom lonely Bronx butcher Rod_Steiger fell in love in the original 1953 telecast of Paddy Chayefsky's Marty. Marchand made her movie bow in another Chayefsky work, The_Bachelor_Party (1957). In 1960, Ms. Marchand won an Obie for her stage performance as the Madam of a fantasy-granting brothel in Genet's The Balcony (also in the cast were future TV stars Michael_Conrad and Jack_Dodson). From 1977 through 1982, Ms. Marchand played Mrs. Margaret Pynchon, a powerful newspaper executive said to be patterned after the Washington_Post's Katherine Graham, on the TV series Lou Grant; she won four Emmies, one for each year of the series' existence. When at one point her character suffered a stroke and spent several weeks recovering, Ms. Marchand was besieged with get-well cards from fans who believed that the actress' fictional stroke was genuine. Recent film appearances for Nancy Marchand include the role of the long-suffering mayor in The_Naked_Gun (1988). Hal Erickson, Rovi
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