LEST WE FORGET KIM STANLEY
(February 11, 1925 - August 13, 2001)

"Kim Stanley was often called the greatest actress of her generation, though today relatively few people know who she was."
            George Riddick, book review, Female Brando: The Legend of Kim Stanley by Jon Krampner

She was known as "First Lady of the Actors Studio".

Her birth name was Patricia Beth Reid; she was born in Tularosa, New Mexico. Her mother was an interior decorator; her father a professor of philosophy and education at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Patricia majored in drama at the University of New Mexico and later studied at the Pasadena Playhouse where she adopted her maternal grandmother's surname as her stage name.
                     Earlier at the age of 16 she had already decided to become an actor after seeing Katharine Hepburn in a touring version of The Philadelphia Story.  "I was overcome", she said, "transfixed."After the Pasadena Playhouse she relocated to New York, joined the Actors Studio and studied the method acting under Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan.

BROADWAY DEBUT
       After appearing in an off-Broadway production of Gertrude Stein's Yes Is For A Very Young Man (1949), in which she played an older American woman (at age 24) infatuated by a young French soldier played by Anthony Franciosa (at age 21), she was cast in her first Broadway role, replacing Julie Harris in Lillian Hellman's short-lived historical play, Montserrat

FIRST BIG SUCCESS
      In 1953 she won the New York Drama Critics Award for playing the tomboy Millie Owen in William Inge's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Picnic.  The character was supposed to be 16; Kim was 28.  Due to her success in Picnic, Inge cast her as Cherie in Bus Stop, probably her finest stage portrayal.  The New York Times hailed her "glowing performance full of amusing detail--cheap, ignorant, bewildered, but also radiant with personality."  During the run she suffered nightly nerves and missed a few performances. Marital troubles with her second husband, actor Curt Conway, the father of her two children, was partly responsible.

Marilyn Monroe, who played the role in the film, studied at the Actors Studio to prepare for the role of Cherie, while Kim was known as the "First Lady of the Studio". Many believed Monroe's performance was actually based on Kim's.   She would continue to get critical acclaim in role after role on Broadway, though many of her plays were not successful, and except for Bus Stop, she rarely appeared in any play longer than two or three months, often with frequent absences in even those short runs.

In 1958, when she appeared as Sara Melody, the daughter of the drunken bar owner Con Melody played by Eric Portman in Eugene O'Neill's
A Touch of the Poet, on Broadway, for which she was highly praised, she again missed a number of performances.  She abruptly left the play altogether after blaming Portman for slapping her in one scene with what she said was "excessive zeal".
  Helen Hayes, who played her mother in the play, tried to explain Kim's behavior from observing her during rehearsal. "If we don't get something from a director, we're terrified, We think we're so bad because he doesn't know what to say to us. This is how far from conceited actors are, and I assure you that I've worked with. . .You know, Kim Stanley, with all her fighting and everything else--that's the basis of Kim's fighting. It's such a personal insecurity about herself----"Oh, how terrible I am, I can't do this." And the greater the insecurity is, the more they put on this act of bravado sometimes."   (Actors Talk About Acting, arranged and edited by Lewis Funke and John E. Booth, 1961)    Kim had divorced Conway and married actor/director Alfred Ryder, by whom she had another daughter.

       Before that marriage ended in divorce, Ryder directed her in Henry Denker's play A Far Country (1961) as a young woman afflicted by hysterical paralysis and helped by Sigmund Freud.
Note:  As a sophomore drama major at San Jose State University, I saw her in A Far Country when it came to San Francisco on tour and I was like she had been regarding seeing Katharine Hepburn--"overcome and transfixed."  I kept impersonating her voice and behavior; I wanted to do what she did. But only Kim could sustain that inner light which made her so brilliant and moving.

Three years later she appeared as Masha in the Actors Studio production of Chekhov's Three Sisters with Geraldine Page and
Shirley Knight directed by Lee Strasberg and recorded on film.  Unfortunately when the play was invited to the Aldwych Theatre in London as part of the 1965 World Theatre season, it was a disaster. The ill-prepared cast, with some late substitutes, had trouble with the raked stage, and the production was greeted with laughter. It was too much for her. She had a nervous breakdown and never stepped on stage again.

FILM AND TV

Between 1949 and 1960 she appeared in over 40 live dramas, only a handful of which have survived in kinescopes.  Among her many starring roles was Wilma, a star-struck 15-year-old girl from the U.S. Gulf Coast of Texas in Horton Foote's A Young Lady of Property, which aired on The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse in 1953.

She never considered herself a sexpot but was able through her acting skills to convey the glamour of the Monroe-type film star in The Goddess (1958) desperately seeking attention and love denied her in childhood.
               The lust for celebrity was also a theme in Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) in which she played a medium organizing a kidnapping so that she can use her powers to find a child. Subtly changing her character from moment to moment, she was nominated for an Oscar.

AWARDS
Theatre World Award for her role in The Chase (1952).  Two Tony nominations for Best Actress in a Play for Sara in A Touch of the Poet and for the lead in A Far Country.  The New York Film Critics Circle Award for  Best Actress, Oscar nomination for
Seance on a Wet Afternoon.  Second Oscar nomination for playing the mother of Frances Farmer
in Frances starring Jessica Lange (1982)
Primetime Emmy for outstanding supporting actress as Big Mama in the TV adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1985)  Inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1985.

           In Rick McKay's 2003 film Broadway: The Golden Age, Frank Langella, Elaine Stritch and other actors were interviewed describing the impact of Stanley's acting, providing an enticing prelude to a fuller discussion of her life and work.  Her reputation, her elusiveness, and the few tantalizing appearances that have survived on film and tape, have given her practically mythic status, as Jon Krampner's book Female Brando: The Legend of Kim Stanley illustrates.  That label, "The Female Brando," may seem like a commercial attempt to compare her to the more widely known name, but as the author reveals, the comparison of Stanley to Brando was a recurrent one throughout her career. Both were Actors Studio Method actors, considered by many actors and critics to be at the top of their profession.

"Nobody can adequately describe her brilliance, for actors are sculptors who carve in snow."
       Bryan Forbes, director and writer, Seance on a Wet Afternoon

Resources
Krampner, Jon. Female Brando: the Legend of Kim Stanley, Back Stage Books (2006)
Bergan, Ronald, Obituary, The Guardian. August 24, 2001
https://www.talkinbroadway.com/bookreviews/femalebrando.html