Date of Birth : Apr 27th 1937
American theater and film actress. Dennis made her television debut in 1956 in The Guiding Light and her film debut in Splendor in the Grass (1961). However, she was more committed to following a career in the theater. She won consecutive Tony Awards for her performances in A Thousand Clowns and Any Wednesday and the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Honey, the alcoholic wife of George Segal, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). She followed this with well-received performances in Up the Down Staircase (1967), The Fox (1967), Sweet November (1968) and The Out-of-Towners (1970). In 1964, she appeared in the episode “Don’t Mention My Name in Sheboygan” of Craig Stevens’s CBS drama, Mr. Broadway.
An advocate of method acting, Dennis was often described as neurotic and mannered in her performances; her signature style included running words together and oddly stopping and starting sentences, suddenly going up and down octaves as she spoke, and fluttering her hands. Walter Kerr famously remarked that she treated sentences as “weak, injured things” that needed to be slowly helped “across the street.” Nonetheless, William Goldman, in his book The Season, referred to her as a quintessential “critics’ darling” who got rave reviews no matter how unusual her acting and questionable her choice of material. Kerr said the following during Dennis’ stint in Any Wednesday: “Let me tell you about Sandy Dennis. There should be one in every home.”
Her last significant film role was in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982). In 1991, she played a leading role in a film called The Indian Runner which marked Sean Penn’s debut as a film director (he also wrote the screenplay).