Lee Ann Remick (; December 14, 1935 – July 2, 1991) was an American actress. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for the film Days of Wine and Roses (1962) and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her role in Wait Until Dark (1966) in addition to earning seven Emmy Award nominations.
Remick made her film debut in A Face in the Crowd (1957). Some of her other notable film roles include Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Wild River (1960), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), No Way to Treat a Lady (1968), The Detective (1968), The Omen (1976), and The Europeans (1979).
Remick won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for the TV film The Blue Knight (1973), and for playing the title role in the miniseries Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill (1974). For the latter role, she won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress. In April 1991, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Remick was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, the daughter of Gertrude Margaret (two sources say Patricia) (née Waldo), an actress, and Francis Edwin "Frank" Remick, who owned a department store. She had one older brother, Bruce. One of her maternal great-grandmothers, Eliza Duffield, was a preacher born in England.
Remick attended the Swoboda School of Dance and the Hewitt School.
Remick made her Broadway theatre debut, age 18, in the 1953 production Be Your Age. She began guest-starring on episodes of TV anthology series such as Armstrong Circle Theatre, Studio One in Hollywood, Robert Montgomery Presents, Kraft Television Theatre, and Playhouse 90.
Remick made her film debut in Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957). While filming the movie in Arkansas, Remick lived with a local family and practiced baton twirling, so that she would be believable as the teenager who wins the attention of Lonesome Rhodes (played by Andy Griffith).
After appearing as Eula Varner, the hot-blooded daughter-in-law of Will Varner (Orson Welles) in The Long, Hot Summer (1958), she appeared in These Thousand Hills (1959) as a dance-hall girl, both for 20th Century Fox.
Remick came to prominence portraying a rape victim whose husband is tried for killing her attacker in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959).
She made a second film with Kazan, Wild River (1960), which co-starred Montgomery Clift and Jo Van Fleet. That year she played Miranda in a television version of The Tempest with Richard Burton.
Remick was top-billed in Sanctuary (1961) alongside Yves Montand. She appeared in The Farmer's Daughter (1962) on television. She starred opposite Glenn Ford in the Blake Edwards suspense-thriller Experiment in Terror (1962). The same year, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as the alcoholic wife of Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses (1962), also directed by Edwards. Bette Davis, also nominated that year for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, said "Miss Remick's performance astonished me, and I thought, if I lose the Oscar, it will be to her." They both lost to Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker.
When Marilyn Monroe was fired for absenteeism during the filming of the comedy Something's Got to Give, the studio announced that Remick would be her replacement. Co-star Dean Martin refused to continue. Remick did The Running Man (1963) with Laurence Harvey and The Wheeler Dealers (1963) with James Garner.
Return to Broadway and 1965 films
Remick next appeared in the 1964 Broadway musical Anyone Can Whistle, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book and direction by Arthur Laurents, which ran for only one week. Remick's performance is captured on the original cast recording. This began a friendship between Remick and Sondheim, and she later appeared in the 1985 concert version of his musical Follies.
Remick returned to films with Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965), with Steve McQueen from a script by Horton Foote, and The Hallelujah Trail (1965) with Burt Lancaster.
In 1966, she starred in the Broadway play Wait Until Dark under the direction of Arthur Penn and co-starring Robert Duvall. It was a big success and ran for 373 performances; Remick was nominated for a Tony award for Best Actress (Dramatic). It was adapted into a successful film the following year starring Audrey Hepburn.
She performed in Damn Yankees! (1967) for TV and starred in No Way to Treat a Lady (1968) with Rod Steiger and George Segal, The Detective (1968) with Frank Sinatra, and Hard Contract (1969) with James Coburn.
Remick went to the UK to make Loot (1970) and A Severed Head (1971). Back in the U.S., she was in Sometimes a Great Notion (1971).