Susan Anspach, 75, Dies; Daring Actress in Maverick Films
The New York Times
By Anita Gates
April 5, 2018
Susan Anspach, the radiant and rebellious
actress who personified the 1960s-into-the-’70s counterculture in films like
“Five Easy Pieces” and “Blume in Love,” as well as in the stage musical “Hair,”
died on Monday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 75.
Her
son, Caleb Goddard, who announced the death on Thursday, said the cause was
coronary failure.
Ms.
Anspach (pronounced ONS-bok) had the distinction of playing Sheila, the
good-girl-turned-hippie female lead, in the Off Broadway production of the
musical “Hair” that immediately preceded the Broadway run.
The
show, which shocked some audiences with its antiwar message, celebration of
nonmarital sex and all-nude final scene, ran 45 performances at the Cheetah
Theater, a club on West 53rd
Street. That was in December 1967. When “Hair”
opened on Broadway at the Biltmore Theater in April 1968, Lynn Kellogg was
Sheila.
Ms. Anspach’s film career, which began soon afterward,
hit the ground running. Her first role was in Hal Ashby’s “The Landlord”
(1970), about a young white man (Beau Bridges) who buys a building in a black
neighborhood in Brooklyn.
Her second movie, the same year, was
the now-classic “Five Easy Pieces,” directed by Bob Rafelson, in which she played
the sophisticated New Age intellectual who sleeps with Jack Nicholson’s
character despite being engaged to his brother.
In “Play It Again, Sam” (1972), there she
was in flashbacks as Woody Allen’s blatantly critical ex-wife. (“I don’t feel
any rapport with you, and I don’t dig you physically,” she says, cautioning him
a minute later, “Don’t take it personal.”)
In “Blume in Love” (1973), she left her stuffy
divorce-lawyer husband (George Segal), let her hair go wild and moved in with a
shaggy out-of-work musician (Kris Kristofferson) who wrote songs about being
free.
Vincent Canby of The New York Times was a fan of Ms.
Anspach’s. Writing about “Montenegro,” a low-profile 1981 comedy set in Sweden,
in which she played a bored American wife raucously trying to find her true
self, he described her as “one of America’s most daring and talented actresses
and who has yet to land a film role that shows her off to full advantage.” Some
would argue that she never did.
“I was getting reviews that compared me
to Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis,” Ms. Anspach told People magazine in 1978.
“But there were no Hepburn or Davis parts.”
Because of neglect and physical abuse, Susan left home at
15 and, with a Roman Catholic organization’s help, moved in with a family in Harlem. She received a full scholarship to the Catholic
University of America in Washington, where she
studied music and drama, and made her professional debut in Thornton Wilder’s
one-act play “Pullman Car Hiawatha” at a summer theater in Maryland.
In New York,
Ms. Anspach had the good luck to fall in with a company of young actors that
included Dustin Hoffman, Robert Duvall and Jon Voight, who were then unknown.
She made her New York
stage debut in a 1965 Off Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the
Bridge” with Mr. Duvall and Mr. Voight; she appeared with Mr. Hoffman the next
year in Turgenev’s “The Journey of the Fifth Horse.”
Her two Broadway appearances, in
“And Things That Go Bump in the Night” (1965) and “Lovers” (1968), were brief.
Around the same time, she was making her first television
appearances; “The Patty Duke Show” and “The Defenders” were among her early
credits.
Ms. Anspach continued to work in both movies and
television until her late 60s. One of her last films was “Wild About Harry”
(2009), a family drama (originally titled “American Primitive”) set in 1973.
This time she was part of the older generation, sitting at the head of the
dining table in her blond bouffant, surrounded by young people with straight,
shoulder-length hair or daring sideburns.
In addition to her son, whose father is Jack Nicholson,
she is survived by a daughter, Catherine Goddard, whose father was Steve Curry,
an original cast member of “Hair”; three grandchildren; and a brother, Robert
Anspach.
Although Ms. Anspach often said that she disdained
marriage, she did marry and divorce twice. Her first husband, from 1970 to
1978, was the actor Mark Goddard, who adopted her children. Her second was the
musician Sherwood Ball, from 1982 to 1988.
She didn’t even think it was a good idea to live with a
man, she remarked in her People interview, because “if the kids get attached to
him and you break up, it just isn’t fair.” But she still had something of an
ever-changing, big, happy family. “My closest friends in the world are my
ex-lovers,” she said.
ANSPACH, Susan (Susan Florence Anspach)
Born: 11/23/1942,
New York City, New York, U.S.A.
Died: 4/2/2018, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.
Susan Anspach’s
western – actress:
Blood Red – 1989 (widow)
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