Career
She studied at Santa Rosa Junior College for a year, where she had her introduction to acting in a production of The King and I. She dropped out of the course and moved to San Francisco to study acting. She joined The Actors Workshop and was with them for three years working as an understudy; for one role in Jean Genet's The Balcony she appeared nude on stage, and in 1964 she was cast by John Houseman as Cordelia in a production of King Lear. While at the Workshop, she began acting bit parts in television series in Los Angeles to earn extra money. She was brought to Hollywood by Metro, dropped, then picked up by Universal.
Her first television role was in Sam Benedict in 1962. In 1964, Ross appeared in episodes of Arrest and Trial, The Virginian and Gunsmoke, and made her first film, Shenandoah, followed by a starring role in Mister Buddwing with MGM in 1965. In 1966, she appeared in the episode "To Light a Candle" of Barry Sullivan's NBC Western The Road West.
That year, she had her first major role in the film Games. Then came her breakout roles in two of cinema's most popular films, Elaine Robinson in The Graduate (1967) and Etta Place in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). After appearing as Dustin Hoffman's girlfriend Elaine in The Graduate, a part for which she received an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe as most promising female newcomer, she said that "I'm not a movie star...that system is dying and I'd like to help it along." She also won a BAFTA for her part as an Indian in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969). She turned down several roles before accepting the part in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and then turned down several more roles, including a part in The Towering Inferno. She was dropped by Universal in the spring of 1969 for refusing to play a stewardess in Airport, a role that went to Jacqueline Bisset. She preferred stage acting, returning to the small playhouses in LA for much of the 1970s. One of her best-known roles came in 1975's The Stepford Wives, for which she won the Saturn Award for Best Actress. She reprised the role of Etta Place in a 1976 ABC TV movie, Wanted: The Sundance Woman, and then won a Golden Globe for best supporting actress for her part in 1977's Voyage of the Damned; as of 2011, she, along with Shirley MacLaine in Madame Sousatzka in 1988, are the only Golden Globe winners to not get an Oscar nomination for the same performance.
She starred in several TV movies from the late 1970s, including Murder by Natural Causes in 1979 with Hal Holbrook, Barry Bostwick and Richard Anderson, Rodeo Girl in 1980, Murder in Texas in 1981, and the 1980s television series The Colbys opposite Charlton Heston as Francesca Scott Colby. More recently, she played Donnie's therapist in the 2001 film Donnie Darko.
Read more about this topic: Katharine Ross
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“A black boxer’s career is the perfect metaphor for the career of a black male. Every day is like being in the gym, sparring with impersonal opponents as one faces the rudeness and hostility that a black male must confront in the United States, where he is the object of both fear and fascination.”
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