Stockard Channing was born Susan Williams Antonia Stockard on February 13, 1944, in New York. She acted on the stage and in a few movies before she made her career-making hit movie, Grease in 1978. She was 32 years old when she played teenage bad-girl, Rizzo. Though she was passed over for the same role on Broadway, Channing made dozens of movies and television shows. Some of the most famous among the movies are: Heartburn, The First Wives' Club, Moll Flanders, and Practical Magic.
Channing won both an Oscar and a Tony award for her role in the screen and stage adaptations of Six Degrees of Separation. She has won other theatre awards for roles on Broadway and off-Broadway, as well as several Emmy awards, most recently for her portrayal of First Lady Abigail Bartlett on TV's The West Wing, and for her performance in The Matthew Shepard Story.
Channing, Stockard [née Susan Stockard] (b. 1944), actress. The New Yorker was educated at Harvard and made her acting debut in Boston in 1966. She came to Broadway in 1971 in the chorus of the musical Two Gentlemen of Verona, then after performing for several seasons in California, she replaced the leading lady in They're Playing Our Song. By the 1980s Channing was one of the most lauded actresses in New York, giving such memorable performances as the tormented mother Sheila in Joe Egg (1985), the flaky Bunny in The House of Blue Leaves (1986), the depressed Susan in Woman in Mind (1988), the upper‐class Ouisa in Six Degrees of Separation (1990), the mastermind Elizabeth in Hapgood (1994), the scheming Regina in The Little Foxes (1997), and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter (1999). Times critic Frank Rich commented that her Ouisa “steadily gained gravity as she journeys flawlessly from the daffy comedy of a fatuous dinner party to the harrowing internal drama of her own rebirth.”
Career Highlights: Six Degrees of Separation, Grease, Twilight
First Major Screen Credit: The Girl Most Likely To... (1973)
Biography
Born Susan Williams Antonia Stockard Channing Schmidt on February 13, 1944, Channing is the daughter of a wealthy shipping executive, and became interested in the dramatic arts while attending college at Radcliffe. After graduating in the mid-sixties, Channing joined Boston's experimental Theater Company. Several unsuccessful Broadway auditions later, she landed a lead role in a Los Angeles production of Two Gentlemen of Verona. Eventually, Channing made it to Broadway, and won a Tony for her performance in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.
In the early '70s, Channing appeared in several small television roles, and made her big screen debut in 1971's The Hospital. In 1973, the actress starred in the Joan Rivers-penned black comedy The Girl Most Likely To..., a TV movie about an overweight college girl who loses weight, gets cosmetic surgery, and sets off in hopes of getting even. Channing's first major film role came two years later, when she starred in Mike Nichols' The Fortune with Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty. It wasn't until 1978, however, that Channing would win her most memorable role to date -- tough gal Rizzo in the retro-musical Grease. Interestingly enough, although she was cast as a teenager, the actress was in her early thirties when she was chosen for the film. Around the same time, Channing starred in two similar and short-lived sitcoms: Stockard Channing in Just Friends and The Stockard Channing Show.
By 1980, Channing's film career was idling in neutral, so she focused her energies on the theater, though she began showing up in various supporting film roles in the mid to late eighties. In 1993, she was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe for playing the formidable Upper East Side matron of Six Degrees of Separation; the role had also earned her a Tony nomination when she performed it in the film's stage version. Channing subsequently made steady appearances in both film and television, and co-starred as a witch in Practical Magic with Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock, as well as The First Wives Club, Moll Flanders, Edie & Pen, and An Unexpected Family. In 2000, Channing would play one of the more eccentric residents of a small Oklahoma town in Where the Heart Is. After filming Other Voices in 2001, which was screened at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival, Channing would receive a solid amount of critical success for her role in The Business of Strangers (2001), in which she starred as a high-level corporate player who saves her own job only to find out her boss is a rapist. In between filming a variety of television and documentary appearances - namely, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (2002), A Girl Thing (2001), Out of the Closet, Off the Screen: The William Haines Story (2001), and New York Firefighters: The Brotherhood of 9/11 (2002) -- Channing joined up with Oscar-winner Angelina Jolie in Stephen Herek's Life or Something Like It.
In 2003, Channing made a cameo appearance in Bright Young Things, and went on to co-star in Le Divorce with Kate Hudson, Glenn Close, and Matthew Modine during the same year. The actress also signed on with the legendary Woody Allen in Anything Else, in which she played a middle-aged mother determined to land a role in a cabaret production.
Stockard Channing was born in New York City, New
York, to Lester Napier Stockard, a shipping magnate,[1] and Mary Alice English. She grew up on the Upper East
Side and inherited her father's fortune when he died in 1950.[2]. She is an alumna of The Chapin School, a
prestigious girls school in Manhattan, and The Madeira
School, a Virginia boarding school for girls. Channing then studied history and literature at Radcliffe College, and graduated in 1965. She married her first husband, Walter Channing, when she was 19, and kept the amalgamated name, "Stockard Channing," after they
divorced.[3]
Career
Starting out
Channing started her acting career with the experimental Theatre Company of Boston and eventually performed in the group's off-Broadway production of Adaptation/Next.
In 1971, she made her Broadway debut in Two Gentlemen of Verona -- The Musical, working with playwright John Guare.[2]
Channing starred in two short-lived sitcoms on CBS in
1979 and 1980: Stockard Channing in Just Friends and The Stockard Channing Show. Her Hollywood career faltered
after these failures, so Channing returned to her theatre roots. After a run as the female lead in the Broadway show,
They're Playing Our Song (1980-81), she landed the part of the mother in
the 1982 New Haven production of Peter
Nichols' A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. She reprised the
role on Broadway and won the 1985 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.[2]
Channing continued her successful return to the stage by teaming up again with playwright John Guare. She received Tony
nominations for her performances in his plays, The House of Blue Leaves
(1986) and Six Degrees of Separation (1990) (for which she also won an Obie). Channing
also garnered recognition for her work in television during this time. She was nominated for an Emmy for the CBS miniseries Echoes in the Darkness
(1987) and won a CableACE Award for the Harvey
Fierstein-scripted Tidy Endings (HBO, 1988).[2]
Channing kept busy with film, television and stage roles throughout the late 1990s.[2] She starred in the USA Network film
An Unexpected Family in 1996 and in its sequel, An Unexpected Life, in 1998. She was nominated for an
Independent Spirit Award as Best Supporting Female for her performance as
one-half of an infertile couple in The Baby Dance (also 1998). On stage, she performed at Lincoln Center in Tom Stoppard's
Hapgood (1995) and in the 1997 revival of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes. During this period, Channing even dabbled in voice-over work, voicing the character Barbara Gordon in the animated
series, Batman Beyond, and appearing on an episode of King of the Hill.
Channing was nominated for the Tony Award for
Best Actress three times in the 1990s: in 1991, for Six Degrees of Separation; in 1992, for Four Baboons Adoring
the Sun; and in 1999, for The Lion in Winter.
The West Wing and beyond
In 1999, Stockard Channing took on the role of First LadyAbbey Bartlet in the NBCtelevision seriesThe West Wing. She was a recurring
guest star for the show's first two seasons; she became a regular cast member in 2001. In the
seventh and final season of The West Wing (2005-2006), Channing appeared in only six episodes (including the series
finale) because she was co-starring (with Henry Winkler) in the CBSsitcomOut of Practice
at the same time. Out of Practice was cancelled by CBS after one season.
In 2005, Channing won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Performer in a
Children/Youth/Family Special for Jack, a Showtimetelevision movie about a young man struggling to understand why his father left the family for another
man.
Personal life
Channing has been married and divorced four times; she has no children.[5] She has been in a long-term relationship with cinematographer Daniel Gillham for more than twenty years; [6] they met on the set of A Time of
Destiny.[2] The couple reside in
Maine when not working.[5]
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