Beatrice Straight

At her death, her son, Tony Cookson, said that although some reference books listed her birth year as 1918, it was actually 1914, making her age 86 when she passed away.

Father Willard Straight was an investment banker who died of septic pneumonia while serving in France in 1919. Mother, heiress Dorothy Payne Whitney, subsequently married British educationist who founded Dartington Hall School in Devon. Beatrice moved with her family to England in 1925.

In her long career, Beatrice Straight actually did very little work in the movies, plying her trade mostly onstage. But when she did grace the silver screen, she did it with great skill. Her first love was theater, having debuted on Broadway in the 1935 "Bitter Oleander".

Under the auspices of acting teacher Michael Chekhov, she played Viola in "Twelfth Night" and Goneril in "King Lear" in 1937, with the Dartington Hall Players in England.

In the 1940s, she co-founded Theatre, Inc., which instigated the United States visit of the Old Vic Company.

It was through her work in the theater that she met her husband Peter Cookson, appearing opposite him as leading lady in "The Heiress" in 1948.

Gave birth to her first child at age 35, a son Gary Straight Cookson on July 31, 1950. Child's father is her second husband, Peter Cookson.

Her son, Willard Whitney Straight Dolivet, drowned on September 7, 1952, in a pond at her home.

Her work garnered her much acclaim, including laurels in her Tony-winning performance for which she won the award for best supporting actress as Elizabeth Proctor in the 1953 production of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible". In addition to theater and movies, she gave us notable work on television.

No less stately, she played the part of Lynda Carter's Queen Mother in the 1970s Wonder Woman (1975) series. Her life was touched by that same kind of elegance and stateliness that she often portrayed onstage and on-screen. She was born Beatrice Whitney Straight in Old Westbury on Long Island. Her father, banker and diplomat Willard Dickerman Straight, associated with the likes of J. P. Morgan. Her mother, Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight, was an heiress of the Whitneys, a dynastic (in the sense of TV's own "Dynasty"), moneyed family on the eastern seaboard. Beatrice went to the best schools and caught the acting bug while a student in Devonshire, England, rendering a critically acclaimed performance in a school production of Ibsen's "A Doll's House. " Her studies subsequently turned to acting, and she studied under the tutelage of Michael Chekhov, nephew of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov and a member of the Moscow Art Theatre. Their relationship was somewhat symbiotic in that she persuaded him to start an acting school, later teaching there herself.

Her Oscar-winning role in Network (1976) lasted a mere five minutes and two seconds on screen, making her performance the briefest ever to win an Academy Award.

Was the 78th actress to receive an Academy Award; she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Network (1976) at The 49th Annual Academy Awards (1977) on March 28, 1977.

In 1978, she won an Emmy nomination for her part as the matriarch Alice Dain Leggett in the miniseries The Dain Curse (1978).

Her final film appearance was playing Goldie Hawn's mother in the thriller Deceived (1991). Her role was a mere five seconds long.

Following her death, she was interred at William Henry Lee Memorial Cemetery in New Marlborough, Massachusetts. She passed away on April 7, 2001, four months away from what would have been her 87th birthday on August 2.