Career
Heckart began her Broadway career as the assistant stage manager and an understudy for The Voice of the Turtle in 1943. Her many credits include Picnic, The Bad Seed, A View from the Bridge, A Memory of Two Mondays, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, A Family Affair, Barefoot in the Park, Butterflies Are Free, You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running, Ladies at the Alamo and The Cemetery Club. In 2000, at the age of 81, she appeared Off Broadway in Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery and received more awards for a single performance in a single season than any actress in theatre history, including The Drama Desk Award, The Lucille Lortel Award, The Drama League Award and The Outer Critics Circle Award. That same year, she was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame and received an honorary Tony Award for lifetime achievement. Her other awards include the 1953 Theatre World Award for Picnic. Her nominations include a 1996 Drama Desk Award for Northeast Local and Tony nominations for Butterflies Are Free (play), Invitation to a March, and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. She was granted three honorary doctorates by Sacred Heart University, Niagara University and Ohio State University.
Heckart won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her work in the 1972 movie adaptation of Butterflies Are Free and was nominated in 1956 for her performance as the bereaved, besotted Mrs. Daigle in The Bad Seed. She also appeared as a Vietnam War widow with Clint Eastwood in Heartbreak Ridge. Heckart played Diane Keaton's meddling mother in the 1996 comedy film The First Wives Club.
She appeared in the Saturn Award-winning horror film Burnt Offerings in 1976 alongside Bette Davis (although they shared no scenes).
Heckart was familiar to television audiences with starring roles in The Five Mrs. Buchanans, Annie McGuire, Out of the Blue, Trauma Center, Partners in Crime, Backstairs at the White House (Emmy nomination as Eleanor Roosevelt), and guest spots on The Fugitive, The Mary Tyler Moore Show (two Emmy nominations as journalist Flo Meredith, a role she carried over to a guest appearance on MTM's spinoff Lou Grant), Rhoda, Alice, Murder One, Hawaii Five-O, Gunsmoke, Cybill, The Cosby Show, and many other shows.
Heckart played two unrelated characters on the daytime soap opera One Life to Live. During the 1980s, she played Ruth Perkins, the mother of Allison Perkins, who had kidnapped the newborn baby of heroine Viki Lord Buchanan under orders from phony evangelist and mastermind criminal Mitch Laurence. During the early 1990s, she played the role of Wilma Bern, mother of upstate Pennsylvania mob boss Carlo Hesser and his meek twin, Mortimer Bern.
She appeared in the 1954 NBC legal drama Justice, based on case files of the Legal Aid Society of New York. She also appeared in an episode of the NBC medical drama about psychiatry, The Eleventh Hour, "There Should Be an Outfit Called 'Families Anonymous!'" (1963).
Read more about this topic: Eileen Heckart
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“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
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“Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.”
—Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)