Maureen Stapleton, the exceptionally talented character actress of stage and screen, and who won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Warren Beatty's Reds (1981) died on March 13 at her Lenox, Massachusetts home of respiratory ailments. She was 80.

Born on June 21, 1925, in Troy, New York, located 162 miles of New York City, Stapleton came from a working class home. Her father deserted the family when she was only five, and like most kids from that era of the great depression, she found solace from her surroundings at the movies, which aided her ambition to become an actress.

After graduating high school in 1943, Stapleton headed south to Manhattan and survived with a series of odd jobs as diverse as nude modeling and bookkeeping while she studied acting with noted drama teacher Herbert Berghof. Eventually, she took classes at the Actors Studio and after a series of small stage parts, made a name for herself in 1951 when she was in the original Broadway production of Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo. She earned a Tony Award for her work, and her career soon took off on television, where she starred in many early live television productions (Playhouse 90, Kraft Television Theatre, Studio One) and New York based programs (Naked City, Car 54, Where Are You?).

It was only a matter of time before she made the move to films, making her debut in Lonelyhearts (1958) opposite Montgomery Clift. Her performance as Fay, a neurotic housewife pining for Clift earned her an Oscar® nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Primarily a stage performer, Stapleton's film output was too infrequent, but she shined when she was on the big screen: the overbearing Mama Mae in Bye Bye Birdie (1963); an anxious wife married to a mad bomber in Airport (1970) for which she received a second Oscar® nomination; playing beautifully opposite Walter Matthau in Neil Simon's episodic Plaza Suite (1971); and as a mistress to an aging E.G. Marshall in Woody Allen's (a third Oscar® nomination) Interiors (1978).

After finally winning a deserved Oscar® for her performance as anarchist-writer Emma Goldman in Reds (1981), Stapleton found a niche as a matronly comic presence in a string of benign '80s comedies such as Johnny Dangerously (1984), Cocoon (1985), The Money Pit (1986), and Cocoon: The Return (1988). She went into semi-retirement by the mid-'90s, only occasionally returning to movies in harmless fare like Addicted to Love (1997) and Living and Dining (2003). She is survived by a daughter, Katharine Allentuck Bambery; a son, Daniel Allentuck; two grandchildren; and a brother, John Stapleton.

by Michael T. Toole