McCambridge, Mercedes (1918—)

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McCambridge, Mercedes (1918—)

Stage, screen, and radio actress who won an Academy Award for her first film and was later the off-camera voice of the demon in The Exorcist . Born Carlotta Mercedes Agnes McCambridge on March 17, 1918, in Joliet, Illinois; daughter of John Patrick McCambridge (a farmer) and Marie (Mahaffry) McCambridge; Mundelein College, B.A., 1937; married William Fifield (a writer), in 1939 (divorced 1946); married Fletcher Markle (a writer and director), in 1950 (divorced 1962); children: (first marriage) John Lawrence (died 1987).

Selected filmography:

All the King's Men (1949); Lightning Strikes Twice (1951); Inside Straight (1951); The Scarf (1951); Johnny Guitar (1954); Giant (1956); Suddenly, Last Summer (1959); Cimarron (1960); Angel Baby (1961); Crackshot (1968); 99 Women (1969); Sixteen (1972); Two for the Money (1972); The Girls of Huntington House (1973); (voice only) The Exorcist (1973); Thieves (1977); The Sacketts (1979); Amazing Stories: Book Two (1987).

Born in 1918 in Joliet, Illinois, actress Mercedes McCambridge grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where she attended St. Thomas Apostle High School. A talented student, she won a scholarship to Mundelein, a Catholic women's college in the city, and received solid dramatic training from nuns in the drama department there. By the time she graduated in 1937, she had already been signed to a five-year contract with NBC Radio.

In this pre-television era of the Great Depression, radio was perhaps the most pervasive form of entertainment in the United States, and Chicago was the center of much of radio production. McCambridge soon became an acclaimed actress in the medium, greatly in demand for her versatility even after she moved briefly to Hollywood and then, in 1942, to New York. Over the years, she appeared in numerous radio series, including "Inner Sanctum," "Abie's Irish Rose," "I Love a Mystery," "Bulldog Drummond," "Dick Tracy," and "The Thin Man." She was called "the world's greatest living radio actress" by no less an authority than Orson Welles, with whom she worked on the "Ford Theater" series. She starred in her own series on CBS radio, "Big Sister," in 1945.

Though McCambridge was considered an outstanding radio performer, she encountered a streak of bad luck during her first attempts on Broadway in the mid-1940s, with miscast roles and abysmal productions. In 1946, she divorced her husband, writer William Fifield, and the following year took her six-year-old son on a trip that included long sojourns in Italy and the West Indies. She later published an account of this year as The Two of Us (1960). After returning to the United States, McCambridge continued working in radio and in 1948 was cajoled by a friend into showing up at a cattle call at Columbia Pictures. Signed to a contract, she made her film debut in the 1949 drama All the King's Men, based on the Robert Penn Warren novel about a Huey Long-type politician. McCambridge won great reviews for her 17 minutes on screen, and, much to her surprise, was awarded the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1950. Roles in an array of other outstanding films followed, including Johnny Guitar (1954), a Western in which she battled Joan Crawford , Giant (1956), a classic based on the Edna Ferber novel that also starred Elizabeth Taylor , Rock Hudson, and James Dean, and for which she received her second Academy Award nomination, and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), an adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play with Katharine Hepburn , Montgomery Clift, and Elizabeth Taylor (whose mother McCambridge played onscreen). Although she also appeared in the worthwhile Angel Baby (1961), her film career then began to stall, in part due to her battle with alcoholism. Among her later movies, which include 99 Women (1969) and Thieves (1977), certainly the most well known is The Exorcist (1973), for which she provided the demonic voice that issues from the mouth of the possessed Linda Blair .

McCambridge had married her second husband, writer and director Fletcher Markle, in 1950, but her personal life was plagued by a series of tragic events that began around the time of their divorce in 1962. Her college-age son John was severely beaten by muggers late that year; in early 1963, her home was destroyed by fire, she broke a leg, and her son again suffered injuries, this time in an automobile crash. The news of the latter event drove McCambridge to a suicide attempt. In 1987, her son shot and killed his wife and two daughters before killing himself. McCambridge wrote a candid autobiography in 1981, The Quality of Mercy.