Geraldine Page

1.1. Birthplace and background

Geraldine Page was born on November 22, 1924, in Kirksville, Missouri, as the first child of Edna Pearl (née Maize) and Leon Elwin Page. Her father was an osteopathic physician who worked at the Andrew Taylor Still College of Osteopathy and Surgery (which later combined with the American School of Osteopathy to form A.T. Still University). Leon Page was also an author, with works including Practical Anatomy (1925), Osteopathic Fundamentals (1926), and The Old Doctor (1932). Geraldine had one younger brother named Donald.

At the age of five, Page's family relocated to Chicago. Raised as a Methodist by her mother, Page was an active member of the Englewood Methodist Church in Chicago. It was there that she first explored acting within the church's theatre group, appearing in a play called Excuse My Dust and later playing Jo March in a 1941 production of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.

1.2. Education and acting training

After graduating from Chicago's Englewood Technical Prep Academy, Page attended the Goodman School of Drama at the Art Institute of Chicago (now part of DePaul University), with the intention of becoming an actress. Although she initially had aspirations of becoming a pianist or a visual artist, her appearance in her first amateur theatre production at age 17 solidified her desire to pursue a professional acting career.

Following her graduation from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1945, Page continued her acting studies in New York City. She enrolled at the Herbert Berghof School and the American Theatre Wing, training extensively with Uta Hagen for seven years, and subsequently at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg. During this period, Page would return to Chicago in the summers to perform in repertory theatre in Lake Zurich, Illinois, where she and several fellow actors had established their own independent theater company. She also spent two critically successful years performing with the Woodstock Players, another group from Goodman, primarily at the Woodstock Opera House. During this time, she was celebrated by critic Claudia Cassidy of The Chicago Tribune as a talent to watch and earned the moniker "the lady with the thousand faces" due to her remarkable ability to transform her appearance and actions, often making her unrecognizable to even her most devoted fans. While establishing her career, Page took on various odd jobs, including working as a hat-check girl, theatre usher, lingerie model, and factory laborer.

2.1. Early career (1945-1969)

As a trained method actor, Page dedicated five years to performing in various repertory theatre productions throughout the Midwest and New York after college. Her New York stage debut came on October 25, 1945, in Seven Mirrors, a play created by students from Immaculate Heart High School in Los Angeles. The play had a run of 23 performances at Blackfriars Repertory Theatre on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

In February 1952, director José Quintero cast Page in a minor role in Yerma, a theatrical adaptation of a poem by Federico García Lorca, staged at Circle in the Square Theatre in Greenwich Village, New York City. She was subsequently cast as Alma in Quintero's production of Summer and Smoke, a play by Tennessee Williams, also staged at the Circle Theatre in 1952. Page's portrayal in Summer and Smoke brought her significant recognition, including a Drama Desk Award and a profile in Time magazine.

Her official film debut was in Hondo (1953), where she starred opposite John Wayne. This role earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Prior to Hondo, she had an uncredited, small but satisfactory role in Taxi (1953), which was filmed in New York. Following her debut in Hondo, Page faced the Hollywood blacklist due to her association with Uta Hagen, which prevented her from working in film for nearly ten years. Despite this, she continued her work on Broadway, playing a spinster in the 1954-1955 production of The Rainmaker by N. Richard Nash. She also played a frustrated wife whose husband becomes obsessed with a young Arab, portrayed by James Dean, in the 1954 production of The Immoralist, based on André Gide's novel. Page and Dean remained friends until his death the following year. She kept personal mementos from the play, including his drawings, which were later acquired by Heritage Auctions. In 2015, her daughter Angelica Page revealed that her mother and Dean had a three-and-a-half month affair during the production of The Immoralist, stating that Page "never really got over Jimmy" and considered him an "artistic soul mate."

In 1952, prior to Hondo, Page appeared in a revival of Summer and Smoke, which helped establish her, the play, and director José Quintero as pivotal figures in the burgeoning Off-Broadway scene. She reprised her role as Alma Winemiller in a 1953 radio version opposite Richard Kiley and again in the 1961 film version opposite Laurence Harvey. Both Page and Una Merkel received Academy Award nominations for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, respectively, at the 34th Academy Awards in 1961. However, the awards went to Sophia Loren for Two Women and Rita Moreno for West Side Story.

In 1959, Page earned an Emmy Award nomination for Best Single Performance by an Actress for her role in "The Old Man" episode of Playhouse 90, based on a story by William Faulkner. She subsequently received critical acclaim for her performance in the 1959-1960 Broadway production of Tennessee Williams's Sweet Bird of Youth, opposite Paul Newman. In this play, she originated the role of a larger-than-life, addicted, and sexually voracious Hollywood legend grappling with career fears through a relationship with a young hustler, Chance Wayne (played by Newman). For her performance, Page received her first nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play, as well as the Sarah Siddons Award for her work in Chicago theatre. She and Newman later starred in the 1962 film adaptation of the same name, which earned Page another nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Geraldine Page notably won consecutive Golden Globe Awards for Best Actress - Motion Picture Drama in 1961 and 1962 for Summer and Smoke and Sweet Bird of Youth, respectively.

In 1963, Page starred in Toys in the Attic, based on Lillian Hellman's play, which garnered her a Golden Globe nomination. She received another nomination the following year for her role in Delbert Mann's Dear Heart, portraying a self-sufficient but lonely postmistress visiting New York City for a convention, where she finds love with a greeting card salesman. In 1964, she starred in a Lee Strasberg-directed Broadway revival of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, playing the eldest sister Olga, with Kim Stanley as Masha and Barbara Baxley as Natasha. Both Shirley Knight and Sandy Dennis played the youngest sister Irina at different stages of this production.

Between 1966 and 1969, Page appeared in two holiday-themed television productions based on stories by Truman Capote: "A Christmas Memory" (for ABC Stage 67) and the television film The Thanksgiving Visitor. Both roles earned her two consecutive Primetime Emmy Awards for Best Actress. In 1967, Page returned to the stage in Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy/White Lies, a production that also featured Michael Crawford and Lynn Redgrave in their Broadway debuts. The same year, she starred opposite Fred MacMurray in the Walt Disney-produced musical The Happiest Millionaire. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times criticized the film, describing it as "an over-decorated, over-fluffed, over-sentimentalized endeavor to pretend the lace-curtain millionaires are-or were-every bit as folksy as the old prize-fighters and the Irish brawlers in the saloon."

Page starred opposite Ruth Gordon in the thriller What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969), the third and final film in the Robert Aldrich-produced trilogy, which followed What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964). Based on Ursula Curtiss's novel The Forbidden Garden, the film features Page as Claire Marrable, a recently widowed socialite who discovers her husband has left her virtually nothing. To maintain her extravagant lifestyle, Marrable hires and murders unsuspecting housekeepers, robbing them of their life savings. Writing for The New York Times, Vincent Canby praised Page's "affecting" performance and deemed the film "an amusingly baroque horror story told by a master misogynist."

2.2. Mid-career (1970-1979)

Page next appeared in the Don Siegel-directed thriller The Beguiled (1971), opposite Clint Eastwood, playing the headmistress of a Southern girls' boarding school who takes in a wounded Union soldier. Director Siegel praised Page, calling her "certainly as fine an actor as I've ever worked with." This was followed by a supporting role in the comedy Pete 'n' Tillie (1972), for which she earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She also appeared in three episodes of Rod Serling's Night Gallery between 1972 and 1973. In January 1973, she returned to Broadway, portraying Mary Todd Lincoln opposite Maya Angelou in the two-character play Look Away, written by Jerome Kilty.

In 1974, Page played Regina in a production of The Little Foxes, where she starred opposite her husband Rip Torn (in the role of Benjamin Hubbard), directed by Philip Minor. Staged for the Academy Festival Theater at Barat College in Lake Forest, Illinois, her performance received a rave review from William Leonard of the Chicago Tribune, who declared it "one of the greatest performances of her glorious career." The legendary Kim Stanley also hailed Page's Regina as "possibly the finest performance" she had ever witnessed.

Page received her second Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her role in the 1975 production of Alan Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular, co-starring with Sandy Dennis and Richard Kiley.

She also had a supporting role as a charismatic Hollywood evangelist, modeled after Aimee Semple McPherson, in The Day of the Locust (1975), an adaptation of Nathanael West's novel. In 1977, she appeared as a nun in the British comedy Nasty Habits, and provided the voice for Madame Medusa in the Walt Disney animated film The Rescuers. During this period, she also made television appearances, guest-starring in popular series such as Kojak (1976) and Hawaii Five-O (1977).

Page appeared as the mother of three siblings and wife of a prominent attorney in Woody Allen's Interiors (1978). Her performance earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress and a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. The New York Times's Vincent Canby lauded her portrayal, stating, "Miss Page, looking a bit like a youthful Louise Nevelson with mink-lashed eyes, is marvelous-erratically kind, impossibly demanding, pathetic in her loneliness and desperate in her anger." In November 1979, Page was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame for her prolific work onstage.

2.3. Later career and final roles (1980-1986)

In 1980, Page starred as Zelda Fitzgerald in the last major Broadway production of a Tennessee Williams play, Clothes for a Summer Hotel. This was followed by a supporting role in Harry's War (1981). She also appeared in Honky Tonk Freeway (1981), I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can (1982), and the television mini-series The Blue and the Gray (1982). Page starred as the secretive nun Mother Miriam Ruth in the Broadway production of Agnes of God, which opened in 1982 and ran for 599 performances, with Page appearing in nearly all of them; for this role, she received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.

Also in 1983, Sabra Jones Strasberg and her husband John Strasberg founded the Mirror Theater Ltd and invited Page to serve as Founding Artist in Residence for its repertory program, the Mirror Repertory Company. Page remained highly active in theatre throughout the 1980s, appearing in numerous repertory, Broadway, and Off-Broadway productions. These included revivals of Inheritors by Susan Glaspell and Paradise Lost by Clifford Odets in 1983. She also performed in Rain by John Colton (based on the short story "Miss Thompson" by W. Somerset Maugham) the following year. Further revivals in 1985 included Vivat! Vivat Regina! by Robert Bolt (in which she played Elizabeth I), Clarence by Booth Tarkington, and The Madwoman of Chaillot by Jean Giraudoux, where her portrayal of the Madwoman received significant acclaim.

Page earned her seventh Academy Award nomination for her performance in the dark comedy The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984). At the time, this marked a record for most Academy Award nominations without a win, a record she shared with Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton, who had also garnered seven nominations without a victory. On television, Page had a supporting role in the miniseries The Dollmaker (1984), opposite Jane Fonda and Amanda Plummer. In 1985, she appeared in the British horror film The Bride opposite Sting and Jennifer Beals; the drama White Nights, directed by Taylor Hackford; and opposite Rebecca De Mornay in the drama The Trip to Bountiful. In The Trip to Bountiful, she played an aging Southern Texas woman seeking to return to her hometown, a role that garnered her widespread critical acclaim, with the Los Angeles Times calling it "the performance of a lifetime."

In 1986, Page appeared on Broadway in The Circle by W. Somerset Maugham. During this production, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Trip to Bountiful. In her acceptance speech, she thanked The Mirror Theater Ltd. Page wore her costume from The Circle, designed by Gail Cooper-Hecht, the Mirror Theater's costume designer. She received the award from F. Murray Abraham, who, after winning his Oscar for Amadeus, also joined the Mirror Repertory Company to play the rag-picker in The Madwoman of Chaillot. Prior to winning the Academy Award, Page told People magazine, "If I lose the Oscar this year, I'll have the record for the most nominations without ever winning... I'd love to be champion, [but the loser] doesn't have to get up there and make a fool of herself."

After her Academy Award win, Page completed her run in The Circle for Mirror Theater and appeared opposite Carroll Baker, Oprah Winfrey, and Elizabeth McGovern in Native Son (1986). She followed Native Son with a lead role opposite Mary Stuart Masterson in My Little Girl (1987). In the fall of 1986, Page sought permission to return to Broadway in a revival of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit in the role of Madame Arcati. She was cast in the role, which would ultimately be her final one. She was again nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play, though she did not win. A week after the Tony Awards ceremony, Page failed to appear for two performances of the play and was found dead in her Manhattan home. The show continued for several more weeks, with Page's understudy Patricia Conolly taking over her role.

3.1. Acting style

Page was a trained method actor and sometimes collaborated with psychoanalysts to develop her interpretations of roles. She once told the Los Angeles Times: "If I read a part and think I can connect to it, that I can touch people with it, I will do it, no matter what its size. And if I think I can't do something with a part, I won't take it." In a 1964 interview after completing the Broadway run of The Three Sisters, Page discussed her method acting extensively. When asked if she used emotional recall as a technique, she responded: "I would never shut it out. But I don't try to get one. My whole effort is to relax and keep the doors open so that there's room if one should pop up." She also expressed that "If [other actors] have trained the way you've been trained there is at least the hope of communication. But wonderful actors are wonderful to act with-it doesn't matter how they've been trained." Page regarded acting as a "bottomless cup," adding, "If I studied for the next ninety years I'd just be scratching the surface." In 1986, reflecting on her stage career, she remarked, "I used to think that by opening [night] all the work was done. Now I'm finding how much you can learn from the audience."

3.2. Critical reception and evaluation

Throughout her life, Geraldine Page was highly regarded as a respected character actress. Early in her career, she was dubbed "the lady with the thousand faces" for her remarkable ability to change her appearance and demeanor so completely that even dedicated fans struggled to recognize her. Her dedication to her craft was frequently noted by critics and peers. Kim Stanley, another celebrated actress, once described Page's portrayal of Regina in The Little Foxes as "possibly the finest performance" she had ever witnessed. Vincent Canby of The New York Times praised her "affecting" performance in What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? and called her "marvelous" in Interiors.

Actress Anne Jackson, highlighting Page's achievements, stated, "Page used a stage like no one else I'd ever seen. It was like playing tennis with someone who had 26 arms." The New York Daily News referred to her as "one of the finest stage actors of her generation." Page's enduring influence is still acknowledged, with her presence and dedication to acting seen as having been passed down to contemporary actresses such as Meryl Streep and Michelle Pfeiffer.

5.1. Death

On June 13, 1987, Geraldine Page failed to arrive at the Neil Simon Theatre for both the afternoon and evening performances of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, a production that had begun its run in March. At the conclusion of the evening performance, the play's producer announced that Page had been found dead in her lower Manhattan townhouse. It was determined that she died of a heart attack.

On June 18, an "overflow crowd of colleagues, friends and fans," including Sissy Spacek, James Earl Jones, Amanda Plummer, Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara, and her husband Rip Torn, attended a memorial service held at the Neil Simon Theatre.

5.2. Legacy and influence

Page's death was met with an outpouring of tributes from the acting community. Actress Anne Jackson praised Page's mastery of the stage, saying she "used a stage like no one else I'd ever seen. It was like playing tennis with someone who had 26 arms." Rip Torn, her husband, delivered a heartfelt eulogy, calling her `Mi corazón, mi alma, mi esposa<sub>My heart, my soul, my wife</sub><sup>Spanish</sup>` and affirming that they had "never stopped being lovers, and ... never will."

Geraldine Page left an indelible mark on the acting world through her versatility, profound commitment to her craft, and her unique approach to performance. She holds a significant place in the history of American theatre and film, notably for achieving eight Academy Award nominations, a record for actresses without a win for many years, eventually culminating in her Best Actress Oscar for The Trip to Bountiful. Her work continues to influence and inspire actors, cementing her legacy as one of the most accomplished and celebrated actresses of her generation.

6.1. Major works

Page's career spanned numerous acclaimed roles across film, stage, and television.

6.2. Major accolades

Geraldine Page received significant recognition throughout her career, earning numerous awards and nominations for her work in film, stage, and television.

• Academy Awards:** 1 win (Best Actress for The Trip to Bountiful, 1986) out of 8 nominations (1 for Best Supporting Actress, 7 for Best Actress).
• British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA):** 1 win (Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Interiors, 1979).
• Primetime Emmy Awards:** 2 wins (Outstanding Single Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Drama for A Christmas Memory, 1967, and The Thanksgiving Visitor, 1969).
• Golden Globe Awards:** 2 wins (Best Actress - Motion Picture Drama for Summer and Smoke, 1961, and Sweet Bird of Youth, 1962). She also received additional nominations in this category and for Best Supporting Actress.
• Tony Awards:** 4 nominations (Best Actress in a Play).
• Drama Desk Award:** For her performance in Summer and Smoke (1952).
• Sarah Siddons Award:** For her performance in Sweet Bird of Youth (1959-60) in Chicago.
• American Theater Hall of Fame:** Inducted in 1979.
• Boston Society of Film Critics Award:** 1 win (Best Actress for The Trip to Bountiful, 1985).
• Hollywood Walk of Fame:** Honored for her contributions to the film industry.