Background
Laurie, Piper was born on January 22, 1932 in Detroit, Michigan, United States.
Laurie, Piper was born on January 22, 1932 in Detroit, Michigan, United States.
Ms. Jacobs was screen-tested while still at school, and with her new name she became a Universal kid in Louisa (50, Alexander Hall). Thereafter, she was with Donald O’Connor in The Milkman (50, Charles T. Barton); with Tony Curtis in The Prince Who Was a Thief (51, Rudolph Maté); Francis Goes to the Races (51, Arthur Lubin); with Curtis in No Room for the Groom (52, Douglas Sirk); with Rock Hudson in Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (52, Sirk); with Curtis again in the classic Son of Ali Baba (52, Kurt Neumann); with Tyrone Power in Mississippi Gambler (53, Maté); The Golden Blade (53, Nathan Juran); Dangerous Mission (54, Louis King); Johnny Dark (54, George Sherman); Dawn at Socorro (54, Sherman); Smoke Signal (55, Jerry Hopper); Ain’t Misbehavin' (55, Edward Buzzell); Kelly and Me (57, Robert Z. Leonard).
Until They Sail (57, Robert Wise), with Paul Newman, was actually her first grown-up film. But then she retired for four years before The Hustler came along. It should have brought her so many better offers, but in the event she married the critic Joseph Morgenstern and then retired seriously for fifteen years.
Her comeback was as the mother in Carrie (76, Brian De Palma), an overwrought performance that won a supporting nomination—she lost to Beatrice Straight in Network. Since that, Laurie has worked fairly steadily, often for television: Ruby (77, Curtis Harrington); The Boss’s Son (78, Bobby Roth); in love with Mel Gibson in Tim (79, Michael Pate); Skag (SO, Frank Perry); as Magda Goebbels, nominated for an Emmy in The Bunker (81, George Schaefer); The Thorn Birds (82, Daryl Duke); as Aunt Em in Return to Oz (85, Walter Murch); another Oscar nomination in Children of a Lesser God (86. Randa Haines)— she lost to Dianne Wiest in Hannah and Her Sisters; Appointment with Death (88, Michael Winner); Tiger Warsaw (88, Amin Q. Ghaudhri); Dream a Little Dream (89, Marc Rocco); spectacular on TV in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (90); Other People’s Money (91, Norman Jewison); Storyville (92, Mark Frost); Trauma (93, Dario Argento); Wrestling Ernest Hemingway (93, Haines); The Crossing Guard (95, Sean Penn); The Grass Harp (96, Charles Matthau); The Faculty (98, Robert Rodriguez); on TV in Inherit the Wind (99, Daniel Petrie); The Mao Game (99, Joshua John Miller); Possessed (00, Steven E. de Souza); Midwives (01, Glenn Jordan).
Member Academy Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Somewhere deep down in the Hollywood papers (all the reports, all the stories), there may be an explanation of how the name “Piper Laurie” came to be, and even a joyful sell-tribute from the person who came up with the fabrication.
The young woman from Michigan may have hated the name, eventually, yet she never changed it. Few Hollywood veterans have taken her leaves of absence—and few can point to a role that did as much to change the dramatic place of women in pictures as that of Sarah Packard, beautiful, wounded, limping, and expecting the worst in The Hustler (61, Robert Rossen). Laurie was nominated for an Oscar for Sarah (she lost to Sophia Loren in Two Women). But Sarah still seems like a woman any man touches at his peril. She is so strong that her eventual fate is a matter of bleak tragedy. If only someone had remembered her in The Color of Money.
1 child.