Beatrice Straight

About Beatrice Straight

Who is it?: Actress
Birth Day: August 02, 1914
Birth Place:  Old Westbury, New York, United States
Died On: April 7, 2001(2001-04-07) (aged 86)\nLos Angeles, California
Birth Sign: Virgo
Occupation: Actress
Years active: 1939–1991
Spouse(s): Louis Dolivet (m. 1942; div. 1949) Peter Cookson (m. 1949; his death 1990)
Children: 3
Parent(s): Willard Dickerman Straight Dorothy Payne Whitney
Relatives: Whitney W. Straight (brother) Michael W. Straight (brother)

Beatrice Straight Net Worth

Beatrice Straight was born on August 02, 1914 in  Old Westbury, New York, United States, is Actress. In her long career, Beatrice Straight actually did very little work in the movies, plying her trade mostly onstage. But when she did grace the silver screen, she did it with great skill. Her first love was theater, having debuted on Broadway in the 1935 "Bitter Oleander". Her work garnered her much acclaim, including laurels in her Tony-winning performance for which she won the award for best supporting actress as Elizabeth Proctor in the 1953 production of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible". In addition to theater and movies, she gave us notable work on television. In 1978, she won an Emmy nomination for her part as the matriarch Alice Dain Leggett in the miniseries The Dain Curse (1978). No less stately, she played the part of Lynda Carter's Queen Mother in the 1970s Wonder Woman (1975) series. Her life was touched by that same kind of elegance and stateliness that she often portrayed onstage and on-screen. She was born Beatrice Whitney Straight in Old Westbury on Long Island. Her father, banker and diplomat Willard Dickerman Straight, associated with the likes of J.P. Morgan. Her mother, Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight, was an heiress of the Whitneys, a dynastic (in the sense of TV's own "Dynasty"), moneyed family on the eastern seaboard. Beatrice went to the best schools and caught the acting bug while a student in Devonshire, England, rendering a critically acclaimed performance in a school production of Ibsen's "A Doll's House." Her studies subsequently turned to acting, and she studied under the tutelage of Michael Chekhov, nephew of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov and a member of the Moscow Art Theatre. Their relationship was somewhat symbiotic in that she persuaded him to start an acting school, later teaching there herself. It was through her work in the theater that she met her husband Peter Cookson, appearing opposite him as leading lady in "The Heiress" in 1948. She is perhaps best known for her achievement in the 1976 movie Network (1976); after only three days of work in that movie in just a few scenes that actually made it into the final cut, Beatrice Straight contributed such a stellar performance that she earned the Academy Award for the best performance by a supporting actress.
Beatrice Straight is a member of Actress

💰 Net worth: Under Review

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Biography/Timeline

1918

Beatrice Whitney Straight was born in Old Westbury, New York, the daughter of Dorothy Payne Whitney, of the Whitney family, and Willard Dickerman Straight, an investment banker, diplomat, and career U.S. Army officer. Her maternal grandfather was political leader and financier william Collins Whitney. In 1918, when Straight was four years old, her father died in France of influenza during the great epidemic while serving with the US Army during World War I. Following her mother's remarriage to British agronomist Leonard K. Elmhirst in 1925, the family moved to Devon England. It was there that Straight was educated at Dartington Hall and began acting in amateur theater productions. In the 1930s, she attended the Cornish School in Seattle where many of her teachers at Dartington Hall were from and to which both she and her mother became major benefactors.

1939

Straight returned to the United States and made her Broadway debut in 1939 in the play The Possessed. Most of her theater work was in the classics, including Twelfth Night (1941), Macbeth, and The Crucible (1953), for which she won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play.

1942

On February 22, 1942, Straight married Louis Dolivet, Free French Leader, in Polk County, Iowa. At the time, Dolivet was a speaker at the National Farm Institute and Straight was in the middle of the mid-west road show of Twelfth Night. Her mother, Dorothy Elmhirst and stepfather, Leonard K. Elmhirst attended the wedding, along with her brother Michael Straight and his wife, Belinda Crompton. Dolivet was in the French Air Force until June 1940 and was the co-editor of The Free World, a magazine published by the International Free World Association, of which he was secretary general. At the time of the wedding, her elder brother, Whitney Straight, had been missing since August 1941, when his plane was shot down on the French coast.

1948

In 1948, while starring in the Broadway production of The Heiress, an adaptation of Henry James's Washington Square, she met Peter Cookson, who she was acting opposite. They married in 1949 and remained married until Cookson's death in 1990. Peter had two children from his previous marriage, Peter Cookson, Jr. and Jane Coopland (née Cookson). Together, Straight and Cookson had two children:

1949

Straight obtained a divorce from Dolivet in Reno, Nevada on May 24, 1949. Together they had one child:

1952

In 1952, her 7-year-old son, Willard, from her first marriage, accidentally drowned in a pond on their farm in Armonk while playing in a small row boat tied to the dock. The boy was found by Straight's second husband, Cookson. The boy's father, Dolivet, who was living in Paris at the time, was refused a visa and, therefore, unable to fly to the United States to attend the funeral, because of his alleged pro-communist activities, which he denied.

1976

Straight worked infrequently in film and is perhaps remembered best for her role as a devastated wife confronting husband william Holden's infidelity in Network (1976). She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance which, at five minutes and two seconds, remains the shortest ever to win an Oscar. Her most widely seen film appearance after Network was the role of the paranormal investigator Dr. Martha Lesh in the 1982 horror film Poltergeist.

2001

Straight reportedly suffered from Alzheimer's disease in her last years. In 2001, she died from pneumonia in Northridge, Los Angeles, at the age of eighty-six. Her interment was at william Henry Lee Memorial Cemetery in New Marlborough, Massachusetts.