Carrie Nye

Carrie Nye (October 14, 1936 – July 14, 2006) was an American actress.

Biography

Early life

Nye was born Caroline Nye McGeoy in Greenwood, Mississippi; her father was a vice president of a local bank. She attended Stephens College and then went on to the Yale School of Drama.

Career

The majority of Nye's roles were on the stage. She joined the Williamstown Theater Festival in 1955 and portrayed a number of roles at the festival through the 1960s and 1970s. Among her credits were the leads in The Skin of Our Teeth and A Streetcar Named Desire. She was also part of a team from the American Shakespeare Festival that performed Troilus and Cressida at the White House during the Kennedy administration. On Broadway, she made her debut in 1960 with a role in the play A Second String. The following year she portrayed Tiffany Richards in the original cast of Mary,Mary. She was nominated for a Tony Award in 1965 for her portrayal of Helen Walsingham in Half a Sixpence. She appeared in two more productions on Broadway during the 1960s, A Very Rich Woman (1965) and Cop-Out (1969).

Nye made her feature film debut in The Group, the 1966 film adaptation of Mary McCarthy's bestseller about a gaggle of Vassar students, which also starred Joan Hackett, Joanna Pettet, Candice Bergen, and Kathleen Widdoes). She was featured in a number of television movies during the 1970s, including Screaming Skull and The Users.

She was a member of the cast of the 1973 television movie Divorce His - Divorce Hers, which starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; Nye later wrote a humorous essay for Time about the experience.

She was nominated in 1980 for an Emmy Award for her portrayal of actress Tallulah Bankhead - an actress to whom Nye was often compared - in The Scarlett O'Hara War. That same year she returned to Broadway to perform the role of Lorraine Sheldon in The Man Who Came to Dinner. She was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for her performance.

In 1984, Nye was cast on the daytime soap opera Guiding Light as villainous real estate agent Susan Piper. Her character had a memorable death scene where she fell into quicksand. When Nye's friend Ellen Weston became head writer of Guiding Light in 2003, she penned another character for Nye. Despite acclaim for Nye's performance, the storyline was unpopular and Nye's character was written off shortly after.

Nye also played Sylvia Grantham in the classic 1982 horror film Creepshow.

Personal life

Nye was married to Dick Cavett, whom she met at Yale, from June 4, 1964 until her death.

Nye and Cavett bought Tick Hall, a house in Montauk, New York designed by Stanford White. The house burned down in 1997, but with the assistance of architects and preservationists, she and Cavett built an exact replica of the house. Their accomplishment became the subject of a documentary film From The Ashes: The Life and Times of Tick Hall (2003).

Nye died on July 14, 2006 at her home in Manhattan, after a long illness due to lung cancer.

External links

• "Carrie Nye, 69, Williamstown Festival Actress, Is Dead" New York Times
• Carrie Nye at the Internet Movie Database
• Carrie Nye at the Internet Broadway Database
• Carrie Nye at the Internet off-Broadway Database