Colleen Rose Dewhurst was a Canadian-American actress and the leading Broadway interpreter of the plays of Eugene O’Neill in the second half of the 20th century.
Dewhurst was born June 3, 1924, in Montreal, Quebec. Her family moved to Massachusetts in 1929. Later they moved to New York and then to Wisconsin. After her parents separated, Dewhurst attended College for two years, then moved to New York to pursue an acting career.
She made her Broadway debut in a small role in O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms in 1952, then as Kate in the 1956 New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of The Taming of the Shrew.
Two years later she acted with George C. Scott in Children of Darkness, and again with him in Antony and Cleopatra.
In her autobiography, Dewhurst wrote: “I had moved so quickly from one Off-Broadway production to the next that I was known, at one point, as the ‘Queen of Off-Broadway’. This title was not due to my brilliance, but, rather, because most of the plays I was in closed after a run of anywhere from one night to two weeks. I would then move immediately into another.”
Dewhurst became a defining figure of American theatre in the second half of the twentieth century. She appeared in many TV series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the adaptation Anne of Green Gables and its sequel, Anne of Avonlea.
Throughout her career, Dewhurst won two Tony Awards and four Emmys; she also served as president of the Actors’ Equity Association from 1985 until her death in 1991.
Dewhurst was diagnosed with cancer, but she refused any treatment due to her personal beliefs in Christian Science. She died at age 67 at her farmhouse in South Salem, New York.
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