Sally Kirkland, a prolific Golden Globe-winning performer on stage and screen who was also nominated for an Academy Award, has died. She was 84.
The actor died early Tuesday morning in Palm Springs, her manager confirmed to the Associated Press, after being placed in hospice care last week with a diagnosis of dementia.
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Kirkland’s honors came from the 1987 film “Anna,” in which she co-starred with Paulina Porizkova. The movie, which also won her an Independent Spirit Award for lead actress, was one of hundreds of Kirkland’s credits that included 1991’s “JFK,” 2003’s “Bruce Almighty,” “80 for Brady” in 2023 and the television series “Charlie’s Angels.”
Born Oct. 3, 1941, in New York City, Kirkland was encouraged by her mother to start modeling when she was 5. She graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York and studied with Philip Burton, Richard Burton’s mentor. Kirkland got into Lee Strasberg’s Method acting class at the Actors Studio by the time she was 18 and started her career working in off-Broadway theater. She would study with Strasberg for 20 years and later taught Shakespeare for him. Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino were among her fellow students.
At one point, Strasberg had her work a scene from “Richard III” for months, playing Lady Anne opposite classmate Rip Torn as the title character.
“I spit on Rip, but he didn’t know I was actually going to do it, and he picked me up by the back of my neck, by my clothes, and had me suspended in midair, and everyone in the studio stood up like ‘Ah! What’s going to happen?’ ” she told The Times in 1991. “The Actors Studio. I, of course, loved it.”
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Decades after she connected with Strasberg, around the time “Anna” was hitting theaters, Kirkland told The Times about advice she had gotten from legendary “Gone With the Wind” producer David O. Selznick when she was only 17 and dating one of Selznick’s stepsons.
“David said, ‘You’re going to be a major star, but not before you’re in your late 30s or 40s.’ ” Kirkland was 43 when she played the award-winning title role in “Anna.”
“She plays a Czech film star in exile in New York, drowning in alcohol and despair but clinging to the shards of a career,” Times film critic Charles Champlin wrote in 1987. “It is one of those incandescent parts which, as has been observed, actors will mortgage their souls to get.”
Kirkland called Selznick’s advice “terrific.”
“He said I should keep working, do everything, rack up as many credits as I can. ‘Get 300 women under your belt. It’ll all pay off,’ he said. “Was he psychic? Did he program my mind? I’ve never stopped acting.”
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She didn’t hit quite 300 women in her film and TV work, but she came close, notching about 270 credits on screens both big and small, per IMDb, by the time she died. In the industry, she had a reputation as a serious professional who was also fearless and unconventional. She removed her clothes in the name of art and in social protest with three of her films “artfully intended but also X-ratable,” according to the late Champlin.
Kirkland told The Times in 1991, when she was set to perform in a fundraiser for the Grove Shakespeare Festival in Garden Grove, that she believed in reincarnation.
“There’s no question in my mind,” she said. “I was an actor in Shakespeare’s day.”
Kirkland also taught motivational workshops and was a longtime member of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness church, whose followers believed in soul transcendence. She was a student of John-Roger, the church’s founder, who stepped down as its spiritual leader in the late 1980s after allegations of financial irregularities were made and the church was described by former followers in California as a cult.
While other celebrities distanced themselves from MSIA, Kirkland remained. She said in the early 1990s that she meditated two hours a day and had visited prisons and counseled “kids off drugs,” having been through a bout of her own with drugs as a youth.
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Kirkland’s movie credits also included “The Sting,” “The Way We Were,” “Coming Apart,” “Revenge,” “ED TV” and “Archaeology of a Woman.” On TV, she had roles on “Roseanne,” “Lou Grant,” “Kojak,” “Three’s Company” and “Hawaii Five-O.” She had a 31-episode arc on the daytime drama “Days of Our Lives” in 1999.
Even so, she was a “working actor” rather than a movie star, according to friends who started a GoFundMe campaign last year to raise money for her ongoing medical care.
“While Sally has had a successful career as a working actor, due to bad advice from a financial advisor-business manager in 2007 during the market crash Sally lost the bulk of her investments and the money she made during the peak of her career (1988-1998),” friends Paige Dylan, Coty Galloway and Mel England wrote on GoFundMe, an online crowdfunding website. They also cited a 2021 change to SAG-AFTRA’s insurance coverage for older actors as contributing to her financial struggles.
Kirkland had fallen repeatedly in recent months, fracturing four bones in her neck, right wrist and left hip. While recovering, she also developed infections, requiring hospitalization and rehab — more than Medicare would cover, the friends said.
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“For those of us putting together this campaign, Sally has been more than just a friend — she has been a maternal figure, offering encouragement, wisdom, and love when it was needed most,” the trio wrote. “For those who know Sally personally, she has been a limitless source of generosity, kindness, and unwavering spirit.”
Kirkland never married, choosing instead, they wrote, to prioritize “being there for others [and giving] everything she has to her craft, her church, her friends, and her community.”
The actor’s mother, also named Sally Kirkland, worked for Vogue and was the editor of Life magazine for more than 20 years. The elder Kirkland died in 1989.
Former Times staff writer Zan Dubin, the late arts editor and critic Charles Champlin and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.