Madeleine Sherwood

Madeleine Sherwood was born on November 13, 1922 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada as Madeleine Louise Helene Thornton.

Trained for acting under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in New York and made her debut on Broadway in 1952, aged 29. She would go on to appear in eighteen original Broadway productions. She was one of the first women to direct a short film for the American Film Institute. Her The Flying Nun (1967) co-star Sally Field credited her for getting her into the Actor's Studio.

She created the role of Abigail Willliams in The Crucible by Arthur Miller at the Martin Beck theater in New York in January 1953.

She was an actress, known for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), The Changeling (1980) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1962). She was married to Robert Sherwood.

After undergoing therapy in the 1960s (playing one villainess after another had finally taken its toll), Sherwood became so fascinated with psychiatric work that, from 1970-71, she studied at the GROW institute to become a psychotherapist and group counselor.

A great believer in civil rights, working with Martin Luther King, Jr. and being a member of CORE (Congress on Racial Equality), she was blacklisted. Arrested during a freedom walk, she received a sentence of six months hard labor but evaded deportation although she remained a Canadian national and never took out United States citizenship. Her activities on behalf of the Civil Rights movement landed her in a Southern jail in 1962, a fact which forever remained a source of pride for her. She was, at one point, represented by Fred Grey, the first African American to represent a Caucasian woman in the American South.

Her best remembered role was as the Mother Superior in The Flying Nun (1967), and she was born in a town founded, interestingly enough, by an order of nuns.