Geraldine Sue Page (November 22, 1924 – June 13, 1987) was an American actress. With a career that spanned four decades across film, stage, and television, Page was the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards, as well as nominations for four Tony Awards.
A native of Kirksville, Missouri, Page studied at the Goodman School of Drama at the Art Institute of Chicago and with Uta Hagen and Lee Strasberg in New York City. During the McCarthyism era, she was blacklisted in Hollywood because of her association with Hagen and did not work in film for eight years. Page won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in The Trip to Bountiful (1985). She was Oscar-nominated for her work in Hondo (1953), Summer and Smoke (1961), Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), You're a Big Boy Now (1966), Pete 'n' Tillie (1972), Interiors (1978), and The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984). She is also known for her roles in What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969), The Beguiled (1971), and The Rescuers (1977).
On stage she made her Broadway debut in the 1953 play Mid-summer. She went on to receive Tony Award nominations for her performances as Princess Kosmonopolis in Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Marion in Absurd Person Singular (1974), Mother Miriam Ruth in Agnes of God (1982), and Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit (1987). For her prolific work on stage she was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1979. For television she received two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Single Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Drama for her acting in the adaptations of Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory (1967) and The Thanksgiving Visitor (1969).
Page was born in Kirksville, Missouri, the first child of Edna Pearl (née Maize) and Leon Elwin Page, who worked at Andrew Taylor Still College of Osteopathy and Surgery (combined with the American School of Osteopathy, eventually to form A.T. Still University). He was an author whose works included Practical Anatomy (1925), Osteopathic Fundamentals (1926), and The Old Doctor (1932). She had one younger brother, Donald.
At age five Page relocated with her family to Chicago. Raised a Methodist by her mother, Page was an active parishioner of the Englewood Methodist Church in Chicago, where she had her first foray into acting within the church's theatre group, appearing in a play called Excuse My Dust, then playing Jo March in a 1941 production of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. After graduating from Chicago's Englewood Technical Prep Academy, she attended the Goodman School of Drama at the Art Institute of Chicago (which moved to DePaul University in 1978), with the intention of going into acting. Page had had aspirations of becoming a pianist or visual artist, but at 17 she appeared in her first amateur theatre production, and from that point she never wavered from her desire to be a professional actress.
After graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1945, Page studied acting at the Herbert Berghof School (HB Studio) and the American Theatre Wing in New York City, studying with Uta Hagen for seven years, and then at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg. During this time 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 a winter stock company called the Woodstock Players, another group from Goodman, who performed mostly at the Woodstock Opera House where she was singled out by critic Claudia Cassidy of The Chicago Tribune as destined to be a star to bear watching. She was called "the lady with the thousand faces" for her ability to change her looks and actions to an extent that her most devoted fans were unable to recognize her. When she was attempting to establish her career, she worked various odd jobs, including as a hat-check girl, theater usher, lingerie model, and a factory laborer.
1945–1969: Early stage and film
A trained method actor, Page spent five years appearing in various repertory theater productions in the Midwest and New York after college. On October 25, 1945, she made her New York stage debut in Seven Mirrors, a play devised by Immaculate Heart High School students from Los Angeles. The play ran for a total 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 interpretation of a poem by Federico García Lorca, staged at Circle in the Square Theatre in New York City's Greenwich Village. Page was subsequently cast in the role of Alma in the Quintero-directed production of Summer and Smoke, written by Tennessee Williams (also at the Circle Theatre in 1952). Page's work in Summer and Smoke garnered her significant exposure, including a Drama Desk Award and a profile in Time magazine.
Her official film debut and role in Hondo, opposite John Wayne, earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Prior to this she appeared in an uncredited role in Taxi. Speaking to a Kirksville newspaper, she said: "Actually Hondo wasn't my first movie. I had one small but satisfactory scene in a Dan Dailey picture called Taxi, which was filmed in New York." Page was blacklisted in Hollywood shortly after her debut due to her association with Uta Hagen and did not work in film for nearly ten years. Her work continued on Broadway playing a spinster in the 1954–1955 production of The Rainmaker, written by N. Richard Nash, and as the frustrated wife whose husband becomes romantically obsessed with a young Arab, played by James Dean, in the 1954 production of The Immoralist, written by Augustus Goetz and Ruth Goetz and based on the novel of the same name (1902) by André Gide. Page remained friends with Dean until his death the following year and kept a number of personal mementos from the play—including several drawings by him. After Page's death these items were acquired by Heritage Auctions in 2006. In 2015 Angelica Page revealed that her mother had an affair with Dean during the production of The Immoralist. She stated, "According to my mother, their affair went on for three-and-a-half months. In many ways my mother never really got over Jimmy. It was not unusual for me to go to her dressing room through the years, obviously many years after Dean was gone, and find pictures of him taped up on her mirror. My mother never forgot about Jimmy -- never. I believe they were artistic soul mates."
Prior to Hondo in 1952, she appeared in a revival of Summer and Smoke, placing her, the play, and director Jose Quintero at the beginning of the Off-Broadway scene. Page played the same role of Alma Winemiller in a 1953 radio version (opposite Richard Kiley) and a film version in 1961 opposite Laurence Harvey. She and Una Merkel received nominations for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, respectively, for the 34th Academy Awards in 1961. The awards, however, went to Sophia Loren for Two Women and Rita Moreno for West Side Story.
In 1959 Page was nominated for the Best Single Performance by an Actress Emmy Award for her role in the Playhouse 90 episode "The Old Man", written by William Faulkner. She subsequently received critical accolades for her performance in the 1959–1960 Broadway production of Tennessee Williams's Sweet Bird of Youth opposite Paul Newman, in which she originated the role of a larger-than-life, addicted, sexually voracious Hollywood legend trying to extinguish her fears about her career with a young hustler named Chance Wayne (played by Newman). For this performance Page received her first nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play and won the Sarah Siddons Award for the run in Chicago. She and Newman later starred in the 1962 film adaptation of the play, for which Page was nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award.