Background
Nye was born Carolyn Nye McGeoy in Greenwood, Mississippi. Her father was a vice president of a local bank.
Nye was born Carolyn Nye McGeoy in Greenwood, Mississippi. Her father was a vice president of a local bank.
She attended Stephens College and then went on to the Yale School of Drama.
The majority of Nye"s roles were on the stage. She joined the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 1955 and portrayed a number of roles at the festival through the 1960s and 1970s. Among her credits were the leads in The Skin of Our Teeth and A Streetcar Named Desire.
She was part of a cast from the American Shakespeare Festival that performed Troilus and Cressida at the White House during the John F. Kennedy administration.
She made her debut on Broadway in 1960 with a role in the play A Second String. The following year she portrayed Tiffany Richards in the original cast of Mary, Mary.
She appeared in two more productions on Broadway during the 1960s, A Very Rich Woman (1965) and Cop-Out (1969). Nye made her feature film debut in The Group (1966), the film adaptation of Mary McCarthy"s bestselling novel about a group of Vassar College students.
The film also starred Joan Hackett, Joanna Pettet, Candice Bergen, Kathleen Widdoes, and Shirley Knight.
Her other film appearances included The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979), as Sylvia Grantham in the classic horror film Creepshow (1982), Too Scared to Scream (1985), and the Shelley Long comedy Hello Again (1987). Nye was featured in a number of television movies during the 1970s, including Screaming Skull (1973) and The Users (1978). She also acted in the television movie Divorce His, Divorce Hers (1973), which starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
Nye wrote a humorous essay that year published in Time about the experience.
In 1978, Nye was a semi-regular panelist on the Public Broadcasting Service quiz show We Interrupt This Week. That same year she returned to Broadway to perform the role of Lorraine Sheldon in a revival of The Manitoba Who Came to Dinner.
In 1984, Nye was cast on the daytime soap opera Guiding Light as Susan Piper, an unscrupulous real estate agent going to great lengths, including murder, to attempt to reclaim a cottage that harbors a deep-seated secret. Her portrayal of the villainous character proved popular for some time, culminating in a location shoot in Barbados, but ended in a memorable death scene where she fell into quicksand.
Despite acclaim for Nye"s performance, this storyline was unpopular, changing the back-story for many of the show"s core characters (whom she had crossed paths with in her first stint) and Nye"s character was written off after six months.
Personal life
Nye was married to Dick Cavett, whom she met at Yale, from June 4, 1964, until her death. Nye and Cavett bought Tick Hall, a house in Montauk, New York, designed by Stanford White. The house burned down in 1997, but with the assistance of architects and preservationists, she and Cavett built an exact replica of the house.
Nye died of lung cancer on July 14, 2006, at her Manhattan home.
She is interred in the Lutheran All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens, New New York
Married Dick Cavett, 1964.