Jean Stapleton Born: Jan 19, 1923 in New York City, New York Occupation: Actor Active: '70s Major Genres: Comedy Career Highlights: Bells Are Ringing, You've Got Mail, Cold Turkey First Major Screen Credit: Bells Are Ringing (1960)
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Biography:
Each and every week from 1971 to 1980, the popular TV sitcom All in the Family was heralded by the glass-shattering offkey singing of Edith Bunker, aka Dingbat. This tended to obscure the fact that Jean Stapleton, the woman who so brilliantly portrayed Edith not only possessed a lilting, well-modulated singing voice, but also was as far removed as possible from a dingbat in real life. While attending Hunter College, Stapleton began her performing career as a member of the Robert Shaw Chorale. She made her professional stage debut in 1941, then went on to fruitful work-study associations with the {~American Apprentice Theater}, the American Actors Company, the American Theater Wing, and director-acting coach Harold Clurman. Her first Broadway appearance was in the 1953 production {+In the Summer House}; the following year, she made her TV bow as a semi-regular on the daytime drama Woman With a Past. She endeared herself to Broadwayites with her wistfully funny characterizations in the SRO musicals {+Damn Yankees}, Bells Are Ringing, and Funny Girl, roles that she would carry over into the film versions of these hits. In 1958, she made her first appearance at the {~Totem Pole Playhouse} in Fayetteville, PA, a summer-stock operation managed by her husband, Bill Putch.
Most of Stapleton's onscreen work in the 1960s and 1970s could be found in New York-based movies (Something Wild, Up the Down Staircase, Klute) and TV series (Car 54, Where Are You, The Defenders, The Patty Duke Show). Her earliest association with producer-director Norman Lear occurred in the 1969 theatrical feature {+Cold Turkey}, in which she played a neurotic housewife named Edith. When Lear began assembling the cast for his upcoming TV sitcom All in the Family, he immediately thought of Stapleton for the role of slow-witted, strident, essentially kindhearted Bronx housewife Edith Bunker. Before leaving the series in 1980, Stapleton earned three Emmy Awards for her portrayal of Edith -- not to mention the undying affection of millions.
Once free of All in the Family, she sought out roles that she hoped would demonstrate her versatility: She played the distraught mother of a drug-addicted teenager (enacted by her real-life son, John Putch) in the made-for-TV Angel Dusted (1981), and effectively portrayed Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1982 TV biopic Eleanor: First Lady of the World. Stapleton kept her comic skills sharpened by appearing in the made-for-cable productions of Shelley Duvall: She was terrific as a no-nonsense Fairy Godmother (Trust me. This is important.) in Duvall's Faerie Tale Theater adaptation of {-Cinderella}, and even better as the title characters in Mother Goose Rock 'n' Rhyme and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. In 1990, she briefly returned to weekly television as co-star (with Whoopi Goldberg) of the offbeat sitcom Bagdad Café. Jean Stapleton was then an infrequent but always welcome TV guest-star presence; in 1995, she startled (and delighted) her Edith Bunker fans with her con brio portrayal of Lea Thompson's sex-starved aunt in an episode of Caroline in the City. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide.
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