Sissy Spacek Biography

At Quitman High School, Sissy studied hard. In particular, in 6th Grade, she recalls one teacher introducing her to biographies. She began to devour the stories of all the strong women she could - Clara Barton, Helen Keller, Florence Nightingale, women who fought against the odds on the side of righteousness, women who used their position to change society for the better. She recognised that Texas was FULL of strong women, women battling poverty and male-formed conventions to maintain dignity and a decent standard of life for themselves and their family. Young Sissy took these lessons to heart. Many of her finest roles would see her acting the part of real-life women of fortitude. And many more would see her - quite deliberately - trying to better the world.

Sissy enjoyed school. Her popularity ensured she was Homecoming Queen (a far cry from her most famous character!). But the biggest influence on her life was her cousin, Rip Torn (son of Edwin's sister Thelma). These days we know him as the foul-mouthed, manipulative and utterly hilarious producer of The Larry Sanders Show. But, back then, he was a Hollywood heart-throb. He'd appeared in Paul Newman's Sweet Bird Of Youth (he'd marry co-star Geraldine Page), the biblical epic King Of Kings and The Cincinatti Kid. Later, he'd be first choice to play the Jack Nicholson role in Easy Rider. So, when Sissy was a kid, cousin Rip was the apple of the family eye. She recalls one Christmas when he gave her a little white rabbit collar and muff - completely inappropriate for life in Texas, but SO exciting.

So, Sissy had the idea implanted in her that you could make it really big. And, when her brother Robbie died of leukemia while she was in her senior year at High School, she decided life was too short for college. She took off for New York, where Torn lived with Page, hoping to be a singer. This was, of course, the Sixties, during a folk boom that Bob Dylan had ridden to stardom. She played around the coffee-houses of Greenwich Village, got to know the denizens of Andy Warhol's Factory, even briefly appearing in his movie Trash. For money, she did a bit of modelling and sang on adverts. She even cut a single of her own, under the name Rainbo. Called You've Gone Too Far This Time, John, it addressed the cover of John Lennon's Two Virgins, on which he appeared naked with Yoko Ono.

But, eventually (thankfully) she recognised that music probably wasn't where her future lay. She decided to follow Torn into acting and he got her enrolled at the Actors Studio, made famous by director Lee Strasberg - she then moved on to Strasberg's new Institute Of The Theatre. In 1972, she made her movie debut proper in Prime Cut. Here she played Poppy, a youngster drugged, kidnapped and about to be sold into sex slavery by Gene Hackman - till she's rescued by hit-man Lee Marvin. This led to a few TV roles, including that of Sarah Simmonds in The Waltons where, trying to get John Boy to marry her, she uttered the immortal line "When are you going to stop being John Boy and start being John Man?" She was also the romantic lead in Ginger In The Morning.

Then came her first big break, and a wholly life-altering experience, with Terrence Mallick's Badlands. Based on the real-life tale of killer Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril-Ann Fugate who went on a murder-spree back in 1958, this paired Sissy with Martin Sheen as the deadly duo. A slow, beautiful study of alienation, amorality and obsession, it was a cinematic landmark. It also proved the cosmopolitan, worldly and experienced Spacek's spooky ability to play innocents years younger than herself - this would serve her well for a good 15 years.

Badlands also brought her a husband as she married the movie's art director, Jack Fisk, in 1974. They would collaborate many times. He'd later direct her in Raggedy Man and Violets Are Blue and they'd together help finance the debut of Fisk's art school buddy David Lynch (she's credited at the end of Eraserhead, and he appears as The Man In The Planet. Decades later Lynch would repay the favour by casting her as Richard Farnsworth's slow daughter in The Straight Story). But, first, they worked together on the set design of Brian De Palma's wacky musical Phantom Of The Paradise. It was a connection that proved vital, very quickly.

In 1975, Sissy, already a controversial figure after Badlands, went further with the TV movie Katherine, where she played a rich debutante whose liberal beliefs gradually lead her into terrorism. With Sissy and co-star Henry "The Fonz" Winkler discussing their worldview direct to camera, this was a critical hit (as an aside, Sissy had the year before starred alongside Ron "Richie Cunningham" Howard in Tennessee Williams' The Migrants).

Now the De Palma connection kicked in and Sissy went totally overboard in the role for which most people will always remember her. This was as Carrie White (as in Carrie White Burns In Hell), the victimised teen who brings telekinetic disaster to her townsfolk in Stephen King's Carrie. Now, there is a story that auditions for Carrie and Star Wars were held simultaneously, that Sissy was up to play Princess Leia while Carrie Fisher was set to be Carrie. Fisher, though, disapproved of Carrie's nudity, they swapped roles and the rest in blood-spattered history (not quite as blood-spattered as it might've been as Sissy turned down the lead in David Cronenerg's Rabid). What's certain is that De Palma had a group of actors read all at once, for all the roles, and Spacek thought she was most impressive as Chris, John Travolta's bitchy girlfriend, eventually played by Nancy Allen.

De Palma didn't agree, and here's why. Spacek had a TV ad booked on the same day as the screen-test for the part of Carrie. She called the director to tell him, thinking he'd beg her to drop the ad and come do the test. But De Palma surprised her by telling her to take the ad. Furious, she swore at him and hung up. Wholly intent upon showing him a thing or two, the morning of the test she didn't wash her face, and rubbed Vaseline into her hair, so she'd suitably feel ugly, and put on a dress her mother had once made her wear to a 7th Grade party. And there she was. Her young looks made her a perfect, vulnerable, gawky teen and her real age and experience made her capable of expressing Carrie's terrible feelings of betrayal by her friends and pity for her God-fearing mother. And, of course, as a Texan she could quite naturally do Bloody Revenge.

Carrie was a sensation, the first of the big Stephen King adaptation, and Spacek immediately entered filmic folklore for her fabulous performance. No one would forget her bleeding and freaking out in the shower as all the other girls shower her with tampons. And the still of her standing onstage at the end, covered in pig's blood and coming to the realisation that she must KILL EVERYONE, was an instant classic. But, being a serious professional of the Strasberg school, she did not leap upon that bandwagon, despite an Oscar-nomination (Faye Dunaway won it for Network). She chose instead to work with Robert Altman on 3 Women, playing Pinky Rose, a worker at a solarium who, due to an accident, suddenly swaps personalities with Shelley Duvall. Then came (after Badlands) her second biographical role, as Carolyn Cassady, opposite Nick Nolte's Neal in the Beatnik-friendly Heart Beat. Already, it was clear that Spacek wanted her films to MEAN something.

Now came a part that pulled it all together. The Coal Miner's Daughter was the biography of country star and all-round strong woman Loretta Lynn (Spacek went on the road with her for weeks, watching her movements). The role called on her to sing, and sing well - something she had practised throughout her teens and early twenties. And she needed to play this woman from the age of 13 up to her forties - and which other actress could do THAT?

Of course, backed up by Tommy Lee Jones as her renegade boyfriend and Beverly D'Angelo as Patsy Cline, Spacek was amazing as Loretta Lynn. She took a Golden Globe, then the Oscar, and was considered by critics and public alike to have matched the two outstanding male performances of that year - Robert De Niro in Raging Bull and John Hurt in The Elephant Man. Sissy also found herself Grammy-nominated for the film's title song, and this led to her recording an album called Hangin' Up My Heart, produced by Country legend Rodney Crowell, featuring hot picker Vince Gill, and released by Atlantic in 1983. On it, Sissy had written the track He Don't Know Me herself, and co-penned Smooth Talkin' Daddy with Lynn.

With a brief break to give birth to daughter Schuyler Elizabeth Fisk (now an actress herself. Sissy turned down the Debra Winger role in Terms Of Endearment to see Schuyler through her first few months), she spent the next few years seeking out a succession of well-written and usually socially important movies. She played a single mother of two facing the disapproval of Texas townsfolk in Raggedy Man. She was excellent (and Oscar nominated again) alongside Jack Lemmon, in Missing, as a young wife seeking her "disappeared" activist husband in South America. There was another Oscar nomination for The River, where she was Mel Gibson's wife, fighting to save their farm from terrible storms and mean-spirited bankers. She played real-life Marie Ragghianti in Marie, escaping a violent husband and exposing government corruption while seeking a cure for her sick son - years before Erin Brockovich. Then came ANOTHER Oscar nomination for Crimes Of The Heart, where she shone as the ditsy, husband-killing sister of Diane Keaton and Jessica Lange. AND she found time to lend her voice to Steve Martin's beloved cerebellum, Anne Uumellmahaye, in The Man With Two Brains.

She took a break for several years at the end of the Eighties, to look after Schuyler and her newborn sister, Virginia Madison (Sissy and Jack had moved from Charlottesville to a 210-acre horse farm in the foot-hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in north Virginia). Then she continued in her usual mode, once explaining "Once or twice a year I take a project that appeals to me for its redeeming social value".

The Nineties brought plenty. She starred alongside Whoopi Goldberg in The Long Walk Home, concerning racism in 1955 Alabama. She dealt with abortion in A Private Matter and If These Walls Could Talk: adoption in A Place For Annie: capital punishment in Beyond The Call: while as Kevin Costner's wife in JFK she questioned, well, everything. On top of this, there was an Emmy nomination for her part in The Good Old Boys, co-starring and directed by her old Coal Miner's Daughter flame Tommy Lee Jones (and featuring a young Matt Damon).

And, somehow, it kept getting better. Affliction, where Nick Nolte tried desperately to sort out his relationship with dad James Coburn, resurrected the careers of both those actors. But it brought Spacek back to cinematic prominence too - most of her Nineties roles having been played on TV (cinema no longer being a hot-bed of political or social activism). As Nolte's waitress girlfriend, Margie Fogg, she was deliberately subdued and wholly eyecatching, and this led to a part as inventor Christopher Walken's longsuffering wife, unnecessarily buried for years in a nuclear bunker in Blast From The Past.

Then came the surprise hit In The Bedroom, where Sissy's son is killed by a sinister and explosive William Mapother (a fellow who, like Spacek, has a film star cousin - Tom Cruise). It's a strange film, almost like three squeezed into one - a tale of love, a tale of grief, then a tale of murder. But Spacek, along with screen husband and co-griever Tom Wilkinson, was undeniably brilliant, even if not quite in the way she expected. For research, she studied hard to perfect a Maine accent, only to be told her character was actually from Connecticut and University-educated, with a posh voice. Nevertheless, she won that Oscar nomination, and was most people's favourite, only to be pipped by Halle Berry.

On she'd go, joining William Hurt in Tuck Everlasting, where a weirdo family have discovered the Spring of Eternal Life. And then there was Against The Current, where she played Zelda Fitzgerald, super-smart wife of Jeremy Irons's jazzy author F. Scott.

It's great to see Spacek back as an older woman. Having once been beautifully described as "ethereal and rootsy, like a dreamy pioneer woman reincarnated as a hippy chick", she now deserves to be better recognised for her acting, rather than her appearance (especially when you consider what a range of roles she's been Oscar-nominated for). We're sure to see more. With young Madison entering her teens, Sissy Spacek is sure to take on more roles, roles guaranteed to test her abilities and thus sure to see her challenging for more honours. Not just a pretty, blood-spattered face, you know.

Dominic Wills