Cloris Leachman mini-bio: Cloris Leachman (born April 30, 1926) is an Academy Award, nine-time Emmy and Golden Globe winning American actress of stage, film and television. She has won eight primetime Emmy Awards—more than any other female performer—and one Daytime Emmy Award.
Leachman, the eldest of three sisters, was born in Des Moines, Iowa, U.S., to Buck and Cloris Leachman. She majored in drama at Northwestern University, where she was a member of Gamma Phi Beta and a classmate of future comic actor Paul Lynde. Leachman began appearing on television and in films shortly after competing in Miss America as Miss Chicago 1946.
After winning a scholarship in the beauty pageant, Leachman studied acting in New York City at the Actors Studio with Elia Kazan. She appeared in the Broadway production of William Inge's Come Back, Little Sheba.
She appeared in many live television broadcasts in the 1950s, including such programs as Suspense and Studio One. She was also one of the Raisonette Girls in the 1960's.
She made her feature film debut in Robert Aldrich's film noir classic Kiss Me Deadly, released in 1955. Leachman was several months pregnant during the filming, and appears in one scene running down a darkened highway barefoot and wearing only a trenchcoat. A year later she appeared opposite Paul Newman and Lee Marvin in The Rack (1956).
Nonetheless, she continued to mainly work on television, her appearances including the classic It's a Good Life episode of The Twilight Zone, in which she played Billy Mumy's mother, Rawhide, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Lassie, in which she played Timmy's mom, Ruth Martin, for one season before being replaced by June Lockhart.
Leachman has won numerous awards during her lengthy career. She won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in The Last Picture Show (1971), based on the bestselling book by Larry McMurtry. She played the high school gym teacher's wife, with whom Timothy Bottoms' character has an affair. Director Peter Bogdanovich had predicted to Leachman during production that she would win an Academy Award for her performance. The part was originally offered to Ellen Burstyn, who wanted another role in the film.
Leachman has also won a record-setting eight primetime and one daytime Emmy Awards and been nominated over 20 times for her work in television over the years, most notably as the character of neighbor/landlady/nosy friend Phyllis Lindstrom on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The character was a fixture on the program for five years and was subsequently featured in a spinoff series, Phyllis (1975-1977), for which Leachman garnered a Golden Globe award. In 1978 she won the Sarah Siddons Award for her work in Chicago theatre.
In 1986, Leachman returned to television, replacing Charlotte Rae's character Edna Garrett as the den mother on The Facts of Life. Leachman's role, as Edna's sister, Beverly Ann Stickle, could not save the long-running series, and it was canceled two years later.
Leachman (second from left) appearing in Herbie Goes Bananas (1980).
Leachman (second from left) appearing in Herbie Goes Bananas (1980).
She has voice acted in numerous animated films, including My Little Pony: The Movie, The Iron Giant, and most notably as the voice of the cantankerous sky pirate Dola in Hayao Miyazaki's 1986 feature Castle in the Sky. Dubbed by Disney in 1998, Leachman's performance in this film received nearly unanimous priase.
Leachman played embittered, greedy, Slavic “Grandma Ida” on the Fox sitcom Malcolm in the Middle, for which she won two Emmy Awards, both for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series (once in 2002, then again in 2006). She was nominated for the same role in that category six consecutive years.
Later television credits include the successful Lifetime Television miniseries Beach Girls with Rob Lowe and Julia Ormond.
Leachman was nominated for a SAG Award for her role as the wine-soaked, former jazz singer and grandmother Evelyn in the Sony feature Spanglish opposite Adam Sandler and Tea Leoni. She had replaced an ailing Anne Bancroft in the role. The film reunited her with her Mary Tyler Moore Show writer-producer-director James L. Brooks. That same year she appeared with Sandler again, in the remake of The Longest Yard. She also appeared in Kurt Russell comedy Sky High.
In 2006, Leachman's performance alongside Sir Ben Kingsley and Annette Bening in the HBO special Mrs. Harris earned her an Emmy nomination for outstanding supporting actress in a miniseries or TV movie as well as a SAG Award nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries.
On May 14, 2006, she was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from Drake University.
Leachman has appeared in three Mel Brooks films. She played Frau Blücher in Young Frankenstein (1974), in which the mere mention of her character's name frightens all horses within earshot (merely a silly joke: Blücher is rumored to be German for "glue," although the actual word for glue is Klebstoff). She also appeared in High Anxiety, as demented psychiatric nurse Charlotte Diesel, and as Madame Defarge in the segment of History of the World: Part I which parodied Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. In 2006 rumors have surfaced that she would have been reviving her role from Young Frankenstein in the upcoming Broadway production opposite Megan Mullally (replacing formerly cast Kristin Chenoweth) and Roger Bart. Leachman showed her interest in reprising her role, but in July 2007 it was announced that Leachman won't. Instead the role went to Andrea Martin in favor of having an entirely new cast for the stage musical.
Leachman was married for 26 years (1953 to 1979) to the Hollywood impresario George Englund, with whom she had four sons and one daughter, most of whom are in show business. One son is currently a firefighter in California. Leachman and Englund divorced in 1979. Englund had a reputation of being a ladies' man and was reportedly unfaithful during the marriage, including having an affair with Joan Collins.
One of her sons, Bryan Englund, died from a drug overdose in 1986. Some reports state that it was an overdose of ulcer medication, while others, such as in the Lifetime television program Intimate Portrait: Cloris Leachman (in which Leachman participated), state that it was from cocaine.
Another son, George Englund, Jr., was the second husband of actress Sharon Stone. Leachman's other children include Adam Englund, Dinah Englund and Morgan Englund. She has several grandchildren.
Leachman's former mother-in-law was the character actress Mabel Albertson, best known for playing Samantha's mother-in-law on the ABC sitcom Bewitched. Mabel's brother, the actor Jack Albertson, won his Academy Award three years before Leachman did.
Leachman is a longtime resident of Brentwood, California.
Leachman posed "au naturel" on the cover of "Alternative Medicine Digest" (issue 15, 1997) body-painted with images of fruit. This was a parody, or imitation, of the famous Demi Moore body painted nude Vanity Fair photo.
Leachman was a friend of Marlon Brando, whom she met while studying under Elia Kazan in the 1950s. She introduced him to her husband, who became close to Brando as well, directing him in The Ugly American and writing a memoir about their friendship called Marlon Brando: The Way It's Never Been Done Before (2005).
Cloris Leachman is the name eventually given by Pat Morita at the end of an episode of Robot Chicken as he is trying to pronounce Corey Feldman.
In the Family Guy episode Petarded, Peter Griffin imagines what it would be like to legally buy Cloris Leachman; he orders her to juggle, though she says she can't.
She is left-handed.
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