McCormack, Patty (1945—)

American actress . Born on August 21, 1945, in Brooklyn, New York.

A prototypical child star, Patty McCormack worked as a professional model at the age of four and appeared in the television series "Mama" for four years beginning at the age of seven. Her most notable role, however, was that of Rhoda Penmark in both the stage and screen versions of Maxwell Anderson's The Bad Seed. A little girl with pigtails, a flat stare, and an apparently inherent capacity for evil, Rhoda was quite a shock to 1950s America as she drowned a little boy at a picnic and burned to death a gardener. McCormack was barely ten during the play's 1954 run in New York. The movie version of The Bad Seed, which featured a new ending in which Rhoda was struck dead by lightning, was released in 1956 and has since gone on to become a cult classic. (Nancy Kelly , who won a Tony award for her performance on Broadway as Rhoda's mother, also reprised that role in the film.) McCormack never again played a role as significant as that of Rhoda in The Bad Seed, although she was briefly the star of her own television show, "Peck's Bad Girl," in 1959, and had a fairly prolific career playing wild girls and troubled teens in films in the 1960s and 1970s. These included The Explosive Generation (1961), The Mini-Skirt Mob (1968), The Young Runaways (1968), and Bug (1975). McCormack also sang for various rock bands during that period, and later appeared on the television sitcom "The Ropers" (1979–80). Following a long absence, she returned to films in 1988 in Saturday the 14th Strikes Back, playing the role of a mother.

Grant Eldridge , freelance writer, Pontiac, Michigan