Jackson, Anne (1926—)

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Jackson, Anne (1926—)

American actress of stage, film, and television. Born Anna Jane Jackson in rural Millvale, Pennsylvania, onthe outskirts of Pittsburgh, on September 3, 1926; youngest of three daughters of John Ivan Jackson (a hairdresser) and Stella Germaine (Murray) Jackson; graduated from Franklin K. Lane High School, Brooklyn, New York, 1943; attended New School for Social Research, New York City, summer 1943; attended Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater, New York City, 1943–44, and member of Actors Studio from 1948; married Eli Wallach (an actor), on March 5, 1948; children: Roberta Wallach (an actress); Katherine Wallach (an actress); Peter Wallach (an artist and filmmaker).

Selected theater:

made professional debut as Anya in a touring production of The Cherry Orchard (September 1944); appeared as Alice Stewart in the pre-Broadway tryout of Signature (Forrest Theater, Philadelphia, February 1945); appeared with Eva Le Gallienne's American Repertory Theater (New York City, 1946–47); appeared as Judith in The Last Dance (Belasco Theater, New York City, January 1948), Nellie in Summer and Smoke (Music Box Theater, New York City, October 1948), Nita in Magnolia Alley

(Mansfield Theater, New York City, April 1949), Margaret Anderson in Love Me Long (48th St. Theater, New York City, November 1949), Mildred in Oh, Men! Oh, Women! (Henry Miller Theater, New York City, December 1953), the Daughter in Middle of the Night (ANTA, February 1956); succeeded Glynis Johns in the title role of Major Barbara (Martin Beck Theater, New York City, October 1956); appeared as Laura in The Glass Menagerie (Westport Country Playhouse, Connecticut, summer 1959), Daisy in Rhinoceros (Longacre Theater, New York City, January 1961); appeared in The Typist and The Tiger (Orpheum Theater, New York City, February 1963, London, 1964); appeared as the Actress in The Exercise (Berkshire Festival, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, summer 1967, and John Golden Theater, New York City, April 1968), Molly Malloy in revival of The Front Page (Ethel Barrymore Theater, New York City, May 1969), Ethel Rosenberg in Inquest (Music Box Theater, New York City, April 1970); appeared as Mother H., Grandmother H., Doris, and Joan in Promenade, All! (Alvin Theater, New York City, April 1972), Madame St. Pé in The Waltz of the Toreadors (Eisenhower Theater, Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C., as well as national tour and Circle in the Square Theater, September 1973), Madame Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard (Stage Company, Hartford, December 1974), Mrs. McBride in Marco Polo Sings a Solo (Public Theater, New York City, January 1977), Mrs. Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank (Theater Four, New York City, December 1978), Anna Cole in Cafe Crown (Brooks Atkinson Theater, New York City, February 1989); succeeded Irene Worth as Grandma Kurnitz in Lost in Yonkers (Richard Rogers Theater, New York City, 1991); appeared in In Persons (Kaufman Theater, New York City, September 1993); appeared as Esther in The Flowering Peach (Lyceum Theater, March 1994).

Filmography:

So Young So Bad (1950); The Journey (1959); Tall Story (1960); The Tiger Makes Out (1967); How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life (1968); The Secret Life of an American Wife (1968); Zigzag (1970); (cameo) The Angel Levine (1970); Lovers and Other Strangers (1970); Dirty Dingus Magee (1970); (as Abigail Adams) Independence (1976); Nasty Habits (UK, 1976); The Bell Jar (1979); The Shining (1980); Sam's Son (1984); (documentary) Sanford Meisner (1985); Funny About Love (1989); Folks! (1992).

Born in 1926 in rural Millvale, Pennsylvania, on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, Anne Jackson was the youngest of three daughters of Stella Murray Jackson , an Irish Catholic from a coalmining family, and John Jackson, a restless Croatian immigrant who, in 1931, opened one of the country's first unisex hairdressing establishments. In her autobiography Early Stages, Jackson recalled the somewhat tense relationship between her "ill-matched" parents and the frequent flights with her mother to her maternal grandmother's house. "Although I didn't like it when my parents fought, I loved running home to Ma'am's with our suitcase, for Mom's relatives were a colorful lot. They were constantly birthing, burying, and backbiting. They wetkissed, were maudlin and sentimental. Mom was very much at home with them."

A shy youngster with red hair and freckles, Jackson called her eldest sister Katherine her "mentor and stage mother." It was Katherine who read stories to the younger girls and led them in reenactments of movies. In 1933, the family moved to New York, settling in a tenement in Brooklyn. Jackson responded to city life with a personality change. "I no longer hid behind my mother's skirts, but emerged from a quiet, timid child into a show-off and hellion," she wrote. As she advanced into adolescence, she became more and more enraptured with the movies, memorizing large chunks of dialogue and entertaining her sisters with elaborate impersonations of her favorite stars. At age 11, she won an amateur night at a local movie house, after which she was called upon to perform for local civic and church groups. Live audiences became an enormous source of affirmation. "The power of making an audience laugh was joyous," she later said. "And you never forget it once you do it."

Jackson went through a difficult period in junior high school when her mother had a nervous breakdown, but a sympathetic English teacher kept her busy preparing monologues for the weekly assembly program. After graduating from high school in the winter of 1943, she held down a series of jobs (insurance tracer, elevator operator, and salesgirl in a chocolate shop) while studying drama at night with Herbert Berghof at the New School for Social Research. "Herbert Berghof's classes whetted my appetite and increased my craving to act," she wrote, "though I still thought of the theater as an escape from reality. Berghof would help me discover how the two are inextricably entwined." Through Berghof, she also met Sanford Meisner, an acting coach at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where she obtained a scholarship to study acting full-time. In 1944, ignoring overtures from movie scouts, Jackson launched her stage career with a 16-week road tour as Anya in Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard.

Jackson's first outing on Broadway was in the melodrama Signature (1945), which closed after two performances. In 1946, while performing in a showcase production of Tennessee Williams' one-act This Property is Condemned, she met her future husband, actor Eli Wallach. The two then joined Eva Le Gallienne 's American Repertory Theater where Jackson had small roles in Henry VIII, What Every Woman Knows, and Androcles and the Lion. The couple married in 1948, after which Jackson continued to build her credentials in a series of what she describes as "smash flops." Her first solid Broadway hit was Oh, Men! Oh, Women! (1953), a sex farce by Edward Chodorov in which, as psychiatric patient Mildred Turner, she delivered a hilarious 20-minute monologue while lying on the doctor's couch. During the 1950s, Jackson continued to hone her skills by studying with method acting teacher Lee Strasberg and with frequent performances on live television dramas, including "Armstrong Circle Theater," "Philco Playhouse," and "Goodyear Playhouse."

Jackson returned to Broadway in 1956, playing the daughter in Paddy Chayefsky's Middle of the Night and, in 1957, replaced Glynis Johns in the title role of Shaw's Major Barbara. Other notable actors in the Shaw production included Cornelia Otis Skinner , Burgess Meredith, Charles Laughton and her husband Eli Wallach, with whom Jackson frequently appeared. "The kind of thing that happens on stage between us is very good," she explained to Jerry Parker of Newsday (August 6, 1970). "With other actors, I'm less certain. With some actors a lot of time is spent just creating a relationship so that we can work together. But I know Eli's range. I know how he works, what he will discover about a play."

The Jackson-Wallach team scored a number of subsequent successes, including Ionesco's Rhinoceros (1961) and a double bill, The Typist and the Tiger, of Murray Schisgal's one-act plays, The Typist, which recounts the lives of two office workers, and The Tiger, a satire about a lonely postman who kidnaps a discontented suburban housewife. Jackson made her London stage debut in the Schisgal plays in May 1964 at the famed Globe Theatre. For her performance in The Tiger, which was later recreated for television and made into a movie (The Tiger Makes Out, 1967), Jackson also received the 1963 Village Voice Obie award for Best Actress in an Off-Broadway Play. The Jackson-Wallach team scored again in Schisgal's first full-length play Luv (1964) and were also paired in the 1972 David Robinson comedy Promenade, All!, about six generations of an American family in which Jackson played all four of the female roles.

Jackson and Wallach enjoyed perhaps their greatest triumph in the revival of Jean Anouilh's The Waltz of the Toreadors, which toured nationally in 1973 and 1974. In it, Jackson played the shrewish, bedridden wife of the foolish, aging roué, General St. Pé (Wallach). The New York Times critic Clive Barnes likened the actress to "a poisoned Isolde." "She takes her one big scene," he wrote, "and, looking like a kewpie doll with temper tantrums, makes it into a beautifully virtuostic thing." In 1978, in an Off-Off-Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank, Jackson (as Mrs. Frank) and Wallach appeared with their daughters Roberta and Katherine. Although some critics felt that Jackson's portrayal of Mrs. Frank was too low-key, Martin Gottfried found it the most powerful of her career.

On her own, Jackson performed in numerous television specials throughout the 1970s, including a superb PBS production of Helene Hanff 's "84 Charing Cross Road," and on stage portrayed Mrs. McBride, the transsexual, in John Guare's Marco Polo Sings a Solo (1977) at the New York Shakespeare Festival. In 1977, she also played Diana, a defeated woman who suspects her husband of adultery, in the American premiere of Alan Ayckbourn's Absent Friends at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Connecticut, a performance that showcased a fully matured acting talent. "Her nerve ends seem to glitter through an only nearly opaque charm," wrote Clive Barnes, "and her social graces, even her efforts to keep afloat her subsiding marriage, have the small poetry of genteel despair."

In addition to her stage and television career, Jackson also appeared sporadically in films, including So Young, So Bad (1950), Tall Story (1960), and The Secret Life of an American Wife (1968). She did several with her husband: How to Save a Marriage—And Ruin Your Life (1968), Zig-Zag (1970), and The Angel Levine (1970). Jackson and Wallach also appeared as Abigail Adams and Benjamin Franklin, respectively, in John Huston's Independence (1976), a half-hour film celebrating the American Bicentennial. In 1993, they produced In Persons (scenes from plays in which they had performed over the years), which ran Off-Broadway at the Kaufman Theater. Jackson, who is generally characterized as direct and good-humored, attributes the longevity of her marriage to luck. "We seem to have in a very modest sense the same talent quota. And a similar idea about homelife and marriage.… We're fairly indepen dent as people, stubborn as people, [and] we hold on to our own identities."