FOCUS ON FILM, 1977, PL On cover as raving mad Margaret White in Carrie

COMEBACK by Allen Eyles. In the erly Sixties, Piper Laurie and Joel McCrea seemingly ended their screen careers with magnificent performances in two of the decades outstanding films: she showed unexpected depth and maturity opposite Paul Newman in The Hustler (1961) while he teamed up with the cowboy rival Randolph Scott to perform with great feeling in the elegaic Ride the High Country (Guns in the Afternoon)(1962). In 1876, both returned to work in films that have now been released, and we welcome them back with these abbreviated career surveys...

PIPER LAURIE: IN CARRIE, Piper Laurie appears as Margaret White, the fanatically religious mother of high school ugly duckling Carrie (Sissy Spacek) who has kept her daughter in ignorance of the facts of life, believing (after her own unfortunate experience with marriage) that anything to do with sex is sinful. With forehead furrowed, skin a well-scrubbed pinkish white, her auburn hair wirily billowing, Piper Laurie's unselfconscious appearance is almost as shocking a jolt to expectations as Bette Davis's in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? The part is ultimately too one dimensional and the film too lacking in genuine compassion and concern to justify the harsh fate it dishes out its leading character as she escapes her mother's clutches and tantalizingly blossoms like Cinderella at the high school ball before being crushed between her repressive home life and the callousness of her classmates, but it has quite a few moments of electrifying impact (including the savage end that Carrie with her telekinetic powers to move objects, visits upon her deranged mother) and it forms part of a welcome new burst of activity on the part of Miss Laurie.
Born Rosetta Jacobs in Detroit on 22 January, 1932 of parents of European ancestry (Russian on her father's side, Polish on her mother's), she was educated initially in Detroit and later at high school in Los Angeles. Her interests turned towards acting and modeling; she appeared in school plays and in little theatre group, and was spotted by a talent scout. Signed to a contract by Universal-International in 1949, she was groomed for stardom along with numerous other hopefuls. The publicity machine began to turn, churning out stories like one surrounding her debut in Louisa (1950) which maintained that for screen tests she and co-star Scotty Beckett performed a necking scene set in a movie theatre and 'kissed 524 times in a single day and broke a record set by Andrea Leeds and four would-be Lotharios in 1936'.
Piper Laurie soon graduated to starring roles opposite the studio's leading men (including Tony Curtis on four occasions) but was essentially required to be no more than a pretty face in a series of forgettable assembly line products (the single loan-out to RKO for Dangerous Mission was scarcely an improvement). The films of her Universal period were:
1950: Louisa, The Milkman. 51: Francis Goes to the Races, The Prince Who Was a Thief. 52: No Room for the Groom, Has Anybody Seen My Gal?, Son of Ali Baba. 53: Misssissippi Gambler, The Golden Blade. 54: Dangerous Mission, Johny Dark, Dawn at Soccoro. 56: Smoke Signal, Ain't Misbehavin' 56: Kelly and Me.
She gained her freedom from Universal in late 1956 and apart from one further film, a cut above her earlier work, called Until They Sail, she quit movies for the New York stage and television. The latter, then in a highly creative phase, enabled her to appear in "Twelth Night" (Hallmark Hall of Fame) and 'Caesar and Cleopatra' (G.E. Theater) while her other work gainer her two Emmy nominations: for a 'G.E. Theater; episode called "The Road That Led Afar" and for her portrayal of the alcoholic wife in the 'Playhouse 90' production of "Days of Wine and Roses" (Lee Remick subsequently took the part in the film version). Piper Laurie also put in time at the Actor's Studio and was spotted in a production there by Robert Rossen who cast her oppposite Paul Newman in The Hustler (1961), As the crippled, alcoholic Sarah Packard, she gave a searingly real sense of the agony of a woman badly bruised by life, finding new hope in attaching herself to Newman's poolroom hustler but being brutally demolished by George C. Scott as Newman's manager. Nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actress, she lost to Sophia Loren in Two Women. She did no more films, only a little television until 1964, and then still in her early thirties, seemed to disappear.
In 1962, she married a writer, Joseph Morgenstern, and this led her to give up her career. They have a young daughter, Anna Grace, and live in Woodstock, New York. A few years ago, Miss Laurie did a Broadway revival of "The Glass Menagerie". Then, just before Carrie, she portrayed Margaret Sanger, the campaigner for birth control, in a television production, "A Woman's Rebel", in which she went from teenager to septuagenarian. However, Carrie seems to have given the actress a taste for horrific film roles as she has now completed a part opposite Stuart Whitman in Curtis Harrington's latest excursion into the bizarre, Blood Ruby.