Mary Elizabeth “Sissy” Spacek, born December 25, 1949, is a singer and actress from the United States. She has won an Academy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and has been nominated for four BAFTA Awards, three Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Grammy Award. In 2011, Spacek received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The American actress is noted for her ability to communicate realism in a variety of highly acclaimed parts, including the crime film Badland.
Quick Facts:
- Name: Sissy Spacek
- Birth date: December 25, 1949
- Birth Place: Texas, United States
- Gender: Female
- Career: Singer, Actress
- Best Known For: Sissy Spackek is an Oscar-winning actress best remembered for her appearances in Carrie, Coal Miner’s Daughter, In the Bedroom, and The Help.
Early Life:
Born on Christmas day into the family of Edwin Arnold Spacek Snr an agricultural agent and his wife Virginia Frances grew up in Wood County, Texas. Spacek, nicknamed Sissy by her two older brothers, was a lively little girl who made her first stage performance at the age of six, singing and dancing in a local talent contest.
After graduating from Quitman High School, where she was elected homecoming queen, Spacek came to New York City in 1967, at the age of 17, to pursue her ambition of becoming a singer. She resided in New York with her cousin, actor Rip Torn (Torn’s father was Spacek’s uncle), and his wife, actress Geraldine Page.
Spacek was profoundly affected by her 18-year-old brother Robbie’s death from leukemia in 1967, which she describes as “the defining event” of her entire life. She has stated that the tragedy has made her braver in her acting profession.
Spacek originally wanted to be a singer. Under the stage name Rainbo, she recorded a 1968 song called “John You Went Too Far This Time,” the lyrics of which chastised John Lennon and Yoko Ono for their nude album cover for Two Virgins. Her record company dropped her as her music sales slowed. Spacek decided to pursue acting and enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute.
Early Career:
After her brief singing career she worked as a photographic model (for Ford Models) and an extra in Andy Warhol’s Factory, then went on to play an uncredited role in his 1970 film Trash. She joined in Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio and then the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York with the support of her cousin, actor Rip Torn.
Spacek’s first recognized part was Poppy, a girl sold into sexual slavery in Prime Cut (1972), featuring alongside Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman. The part led to television employment, including a guest appearance on The Waltons in 1973, which she portrayed again. She had a major role in Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973), playing Holly, the film’s narrator and the 15-year-old sweetheart of serial murderer Kit (Martin Sheen).
Spacek met her future husband, production designer Jack Fisk, while working on the film. Fisk assisted Spacek in landing her breakout part in Brian De Palma’s teen horror masterpiece Carrie (1976). (Fisk served as the film’s art director.) Real-life prom queen Spacek as Carrie White had to strike a heart-wrenching, terrifying chord with critics and audiences as an emotionally unstable, telekinetically gifted teenage girl with an ardently religious mother (Piper Laurie), earning her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress and instant cult status.
Later Roles:
After Carrie, Spacek appeared in Alan Rudolph’s ensemble piece Welcome to LA (1976) and established her credibility in independent cinema using her portrayal as Pinky Rose in Robert Altman’s classic 3 Women (1977), costarring Shelley Duvall and Janice Rule, and Heart Beat (1979), costarring Nick Nolte.
Spacek also appeared in the 1980 biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter, about country singer Loretta Lynn. In addition to playing Lynn from the age of 13 to her forties, Spacek insisted on singing all of her songs herself rather than lip-syncing. Her portrayal won her worldwide acclaim, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. In the film, she and Beverly D’Angelo, who played Patsy Cline, performed their characters’ vocals.
After positive reviews from film critic Roger Ebert and Andre Sarris, Spacek was nominated for a Grammy Award for her performance on the film’s soundtrack CD. The soundtrack prompted Hangin’ Up My Heart (1983), her first country album, and it produced one hit single, “Lonely But Only For You,” written by K. T. Oslin, which peaked at No. 15 on the Billboard Country list.
Spacek portrayed Carolyn Cassady in the 1980 film Heart Beat, who succumbs to monotony and debauchery under the influence of John Heard’s Jack Kerouac and Nick Nolte’s Neal Cassady. Spacek was so determined to obtain the part that she poured over 4,000 pages of study into her character. Producer Ed Pressman and director John Byrum took her out to dinner to tell her she didn’t get the part. Spacek was so upset by the news that she destroyed a glass of wine she was holding. Pressman then approached her with a shattered piece of glass and informed her that she had been cast.
Following Coal Miner’s Daughter, Spacek chose to feature in her husband’s directorial debut, Raggedy Man (1981), as a divorced mother who has a perilous connection with a sailor played by Eric Roberts. Spacek had two further Oscar nominations for Best Actress for her next two significant efforts, the political thriller Missing (1982), costarring Jack Lemmon, and The River (1984), costarring Mel Gibson. She co-starred with Anne Bancroft in ‘night Mother in 1986, and garnered her seventh Best Actress nomination for her role as the most eccentric of three sisters in Crimes of the Heart, co-starring Jessica Lange.
Taking a Break and Re-establishing Her Reputation:
Both Spacek and Fisk then took a long sabbatical from filmmaking to spend time with their two kids, Schuyler and Madison, at their Virginia property, Beau Val. After that, she only took up acting gigs on the side, returning to the cinema in 1990 in the civil rights drama The Long Walk Home, co-starring Whoopi Goldberg. The following year, she portrayed the wife of Kevin Costner’s Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone’s controversial film JFK.
A number of high-profile television projects followed, including the HBO films A Private Matter (1994) and If These Walls Could Talk (1996), as well as the TNT film The Good Old Boys (1995), co-starring and directed by her Coal Miner’s Daughter co-star Tommy Lee Jones, for which she received her first Emmy nomination. In the 1995 film adaptation of Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp, she reteamed with another previous costar, Laurie.
Spacek gave a superb supporting performance in the dark drama Affliction, co-starring Nolte, in 1997. In the underappreciated Blast From the Past (1999), she played the matriarch of a family that lives 30 years underground in a bomb bunker. She appears in David Lynch’s ‘The Straight Story’ the same year; playing a lady whose father (Richard Farnsworth) goes a long distance on a lawnmower to see his distant brother.
For the independent film In the Bedroom, costarring Tom Wilkinson, Spacek received some of her greatest reviews, multiple critical honors (including a Golden Globe Award), and her sixth career Oscar nomination for greatest Actress in 2001. Spacek and Wilkinson had two of the year’s most talked-about performances as a Maine couple whose teenage son is murdered by the estranged spouse of his older girlfriend (played by Marisa Tomei), and the film received five overall Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.
She appeared in the live-action Walt Disney picture Tuck Everlasting in 2002. That same year, she received a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for her performance as Zelda Fitzgerald in the Showtime television film Last Call (2002).
She shared the screen with Jeremy Irons and Neve Campbell. Spacek portrayed an unfaithful wife Ruth in Rodrigo Garca’s Nine Lives (2005) and an Alzheimer’s patient in the television film Pictures of Hollis Woods (2007). She appeared in the 2008 Christmas comedy Four Christmases and the indie film Lake City as a supporting actress.
In the year’s 2005 and 2006, she narrated audiobooks Carrie and To Kill a Mockingbird, then went on to get a star for Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2011. In 2012, Spacek and co-author Maryanne Vollers released their memoir, My Extraordinary Ordinary Life.
Spacek became the only actor to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture in each of the last four decades- Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), Missing (1982), JFK (1991), In the Bedroom (2001), and The Help (2011) which were all released at the start of their respective decade. Spacek also featured in the 2012 criminal drama thriller Deadfall. She also co-starred with Robert Redford in his next-to-last part before retirement in the critically acclaimed biographical crime drama The Old Man & the Gun (2018).
In the late 2010s, Spacek also starred in a number of television shows. She starred as Sally Rayburn, the matriarch, in the Netflix thriller series Bloodline, that aired from 2015 to 2017; as Ruth Deaver in the Hulu psychological series Castle Rock (2018), which intertwines characters as well as concepts from Stephen King’s fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine; and as Ellen Bergman, Julia Roberts’ character’s mother, in the Amazon Prime Video series Homecoming (2018).
In Darren Le Gallo’s directorial debut, Sam & Kate (2022), she co-starred with Dustin Hoffman. That same year, she co-starred with J.K. Simmons in the Amazon Prime Video science-fiction series Night Sky. After the first season, the show was canceled.
Personal Life:
After meeting on the set of Badlands, Spacek got married to production designer and art director Jack Fisk in 1974. They have two children, Schuyler Fisk (born July 8, 1982) and Madison Fisk (born September 21, 1988). Schuyler has been following in the footsteps of her mother as an actress and singer. In 1982, Spacek and her family relocated to a farm in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Conclusion
Sissy Spacek is a singer and actress from the United States who has won an Academy Award and other prestigious awards for her realistic and versatile performances. She was born on Christmas Day in 1949 in Texas and lost her brother to leukemia when she was 18. She moved to New York to pursue a singing career but switched to acting after being dropped by her record company. She made her breakthrough in the horror film Carrie (1976), which earned her an Oscar nomination. She also starred in other acclaimed films, such as Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), In the Bedroom (2001), and The Help (2011). She is married to production designer Jack Fisk and has two children.
