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Sissy Spacek
Spacek at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival, for the premiere of Get Low.
Born	Mary Elizabeth Spacek December 25, 1949 (1949-12-25) (age 60) Quitman, Texas, U.S.
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1970–present
Spouse(s)	Jack Fisk (1974–present)

Sissy Spacek (born Mary Elizabeth Spacek on December 25, 1949) is an American actress and singer. She is known for her role as Carrie White in Brian de Palma's 1976 horror film Carrie.

In 1980, she won the Best Actress Oscar for her role as country star Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter. She has been nominated a total of 6 times. Spacek is known mainly as a dramatic actress, but has also made comedies. The films Spacek has starred in have earned over $700 million world wide.¹

Early life

Spacek was born on December 25th, 1949 in Quitman, Texas, the daughter of Virginia Frances (née Spilman) and Edwin Arnold Spacek, Sr., a county agricultural agent.² Her paternal grandparents, Mary Červenka and Arnold A. Špaček (who served as Mayor of Granger, Texas in Williamson County), were of Moravian/Czech/Bohemian descent.³ Spacek's mother was from the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Spacek was given the nickname Sissy by her older brothers. She was greatly affected by the death of her eighteen-year old brother, Robbie, in 1967. Spacek moved to New York City hoping to become a singer. There she lived with her cousin, the actor Rip Torn, and his wife, the actress Geraldine Page.

Career

Spacek started out as a singer, recording one single ("John, You've Gone Too Far This Time"), about John Lennon,⁴ an expression of her shock over the Two Virgins cover under the name 'Rainbo'. With the help of her cousin, actor Rip Torn, she was able to enroll in Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio and then the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York City.

1970s

Her first credited role was in the 1970 cult classic Prime Cut, in which she played Poppy, a young girl sold into sexual slavery. This role led to TV work which included a small role in The Waltons, where she uttered the well known line "When are you going to stop being John Boy and start being John Man?". But her landmark role of this period and the role that brought her to international attention, came in 1973: Holly in Terrence Malick's Badlands. As Holly, the 15-year old girlfriend of mass-murderer Kit (played by Martin Sheen). Spacek has described Badlands as the "most incredible" experience of her career.⁵ It was on the set of Badlands that Spacek met art director Jack Fisk, whom she would soon marry.

Spacek's iconic and career-defining role came in 1976 with Brian De Palma's Carrie, in which she played Carietta "Carrie" White, a shy high school senior and troubled teenager with telekinetic powers. Spacek had to work hard to persuade director de Palma to engage her for the role, set as he was on an alternative actress, whose identity remains to this day shrouded in mystery. Rubbing Vaseline into her hair, and donning an old sailor-dress her mother had made for her as a child, Spacek turned up to the audition with the odds stacked against her, but blew her competition out of the water.⁶ She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her work in the film. (Veteran actress Piper Laurie, who played Carrie's religiously maniacal mother Margaret White, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.)

After Carrie Spacek played the small role of topless house-keeper Linda Murray in Alan Rudolph's ensemble piece Welcome to LA (1976), but cemented her reputation in independent cinema with her performance as Pinky Rose in Robert Altman's 1977 classic 3 Women. Altman himself was deeply impressed by her performance, stating: 'She's remarkable, one of the top actresses I've ever worked with. Her resources are like a deep well.' Meanwhile, de Palma now enthused: 'Sissy's a phantom. She has this mysterious way of slipping into a part, letting it take over her. She's got a wider range than any young actress I know.'⁷ Spacek also helped to finance then-brother-in-law David Lynch's directorial debut, Eraserhead (1976), and is thanked in the credits of the film.

In 1979's Heart Beat, Spacek played the Carolyn Cassady, slipping (under the influence of John Heard's Jack Kerouac and Nick Nolte's Neal Cassady) into a frustrating combination of drudgery and debauchery.

1980s

Spacek began the decade with an Oscar in 1980 for Coal Miner's Daughter, in which she played country music star Loretta Lynn. Film critic Roger Ebert credited the success that was Coal Miner's Daughter, "to the performance by Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn. With the same sort of magical chemistry she's shown before, when she played the high school kid in Carrie, Spacek at twenty-nine has the ability to appear to be almost any age onscreen. Here she ages from about fourteen to somewhere in her thirties, always looks the age, and never seems to be wearing makeup."⁸

The handprints of Sissy Spacek in front of The Great Movie Ride at Walt Disney World's Disney's Hollywood Studios theme park.

Spacek was also nominated for a Grammy Award for her singing on that film's soundtrack album. She followed this with her own country album, Hangin' Up My Heart in 1983; the album spawned one hit single, "Lonely But Only For You," a song written by K.T. Oslin which reached #15 on the Billboard Country chart.

The 1980s were a solid decade for Spacek. She consolidated her position as one of Hollywood's leading actresses. She starred alongside Jack Lemmon in Costa-Gavras's political thriller Missing (1982), Mel Gibson in the rural drama The River (1984), and Diane Keaton and Jessica Lange in 1986's Crimes of the Heart. She was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar for all of these roles. Other notable performances of the decade included poignant star turns in husband Jack Fisk's directorial debut Raggedy Man (1981), and opposite Anne Bancroft in the suicide drama 'Night Mother (1986). She also showed her lighter side by agreeing to play the voice of the brain in the Steve Martin comedy The Man with Two Brains (1983). By the end of 1986 Spacek retired to her farm in Virginia to raise her children and would not appear in another film until 1990.⁹

1990s

The 1990s saw Spacek slowly come back to Hollywood, after her self-imposed hiatus. She had a supporting role as Kevin Costner's wife in Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), she made a number of comedies, TV movies, and the occasional film. Most notable were her turn as the villainous Verena Talbo in 1995's ensemble piece The Grass Harp (which reunited her with both Piper Laurie and Jack Lemmon), supporting performance (opposite Nick Nolte again) as the waitress Margie Fogg in Paul Schrader's father-son psychodrama Affliction (1997), and as Rose Straight in David Lynch's The Straight Story (1999).

2000s

The last decade has seen Spacek excel in a number of film roles. In 2001, she was nominated again for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her work in Todd Field's In the Bedroom. New York Times film critic Stephen Holden said of her work in the film:

Ms. Spacek's performance is as devastating as it is unflashy. With the slight tightening of her neck muscles and a downward twitch of her mouth, she conveys her character's relentlessness, then balances it with enough sweetness to make Ruth seem entirely human. It is one of Ms. Spacek's greatest performances.¹⁰

Her portrayal of a grieving mother consumed by revenge, Ruth Fowler, won extraordinary praise and garnered the New York and Los Angeles Film Critics Awards for Best Actress.

Other notable performances of this decade include unfaithful wife Ruth in Rodrigo Garcia's Nine Lives (2005), and a recent turn as a woman suffering from Alzheimer's in the television movie Pictures of Hollis Woods (2007). In 2008, Spacek had a supporting part in the Christmas movie Four Christmases (2008) and a lead role in the independent drama, Lake City (2008).

Spacek joined the HBO drama Big Love for a multi-episode arc as a powerful Washington, D.C., lobbyist.¹¹

Personal life

Spacek married production designer Jack Fisk in 1974. Fisk directed her in the films Raggedy Man and Violets Are Blue and was Oscar-nominated for his production design in 2007's There Will Be Blood. They have two daughters, Schuyler Fisk and Madison Fisk. Schuyler has appeared in several film roles, and is now pursuing a career as a singer. Spacek and her family live on a horse ranch near Charlottesville, Virginia. She is also an ardent crusader for women's rights.

Filmography

Discography

Albums

Singles

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Sissy Spacek

External links

• Sissy Spacek at the Internet Movie Database
• Sissy Spacek at Yahoo! Movies