Sally Kellerman

California native Sally Clare Kellerman was born in Long Beach, California on June 2, 1937 to Edith Baine (Vaughn), a piano teacher, and John Helm Kellerman, a Shell Oil Company executive.

played Gloria, a tough inmate who bosses around the other prisoners, in Tom Eyen's R-rated spoof of 1940s women's prison films 'Women Behind Bars'. Reportedly, her role in Great Performances: Verna: USO Girl (1978) led her to join the production, director Ron Link saw her in the PBS project and when Adrienne Barbeau decided to leave the play at the Roxy Theater, he asked Kellerman to replace her. [1983]

Sally Kellerman arrived quite young on the late 1950s film and television scene with a fresh and distinctively weird, misfit presence. It is this same uniqueness that continues to make her such an attractively offbeat performer today.

Raised along with her sister in the San Fernando Valley area, Sally was attracted to the performing arts after seeing Marlon Brando star in the film Viva Zapata (1952). Attending the renowned Hollywood High School as a teenager, she sang in musical productions while there, including a version of "Meet Me in St. Louis". Following graduation, she enrolled at Los Angeles City College but left after a year when enticed by acting guru Jeff Corey's classes.

Initially inhibited by her height (5'10"), noticeably gawky and slinky frame and wide slash of a mouth, Kellerman proved difficult to cast at first but finally found herself up for the lead role in Otto Preminger's "A"-level film Saint Joan (1957). She lost out in the end, however, when Preminger finally decided to give the role of Joan of Arc to fellow newcomer Jean Seberg.

Hardly compensation, 20-year-old Sally made her film debut that same year as a girls' reformatory inmate who threatens the titular leading lady in the cult "C" juvenile delinquent drama Reform School Girl (1957) starring "good girl" Gloria Castillo and "bad guy" Edd Byrnes of "777 Sunset Strip" teen idol fame, an actor she met and was dating after attending Corey's workshops. Directed by infamous low-budget horror film Samuel Z. Arkoff, her secondary part in the film did little in the way of advancing her career. During the same period of time, Sally pursued a singing career and earned a recording contract with Verve Records.

The 1960s was an uneventful but growing period for Kellerman, finding spurts of quirky TV roles in both comedies ("Bachelor Father," "My Three Sons," "Dobie Gillis" and "Ozzie and Harriet") and dramas ("Lock Up," "Surfside 6," "Cheyenne," "The Outer Limits," "The Rogues," "Slattery's People" and the second pilot of "Star Trek"). Sally's sophomore film was just as campy as the first, but her part was even smaller.

Studying later at Los Angeles' Actors' Studio (West), Sally's roles increased toward the end of the 1960s with featured parts in more quality filming, including The Third Day (1965), The Boston Strangler (1968) (as a target for serial killer Tony Curtis) and The April Fools (1969). Sally's monumental break came, of course, via director Robert Altman when he hired her for, and she created a dusky-voiced sensation out of, the aggressively irritating character Major Margaret "'Hot Lips" Houlihan.

Part of the original cast in the short-lived Broadway musical production of Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961). [1966]

As an ill-fated victim of the Hands of a Stranger (1962), the oft-told horror story of a concert pianist whose transplanted hands become deadly, the film came and went without much fanfare.

Reportedly turned the role of Dianne Cluny in The Boston Strangler (1968) but reconsidered after she received a phone call from acquaintance Shirlee Fonda, on behalf of Henry Fonda, he extended his admiration for Kellerman's work that he insisted she join the film.

After reading for "Maj. Margaret 'Hot Lips' O'Houlihan", realized the character was to be demeaned and objectified. Incensed, not only did Kellerman almost talk herself out of the role but confronted Robert Altman on his vision. As it turned out, Altman had preemptively rejected Kellerman as being "too attractive" for the part but found her attitude and passion appropriate for the character. Ironically, the dreaded scenes in the movie are the most memorable, particularly the famous prank scene, in which a shower tent is lifted to expose the character in the nude, evoked a large number of imitations in movie history. [1969]

The willowy, swan-necked, flaxen-haired actress shot to film comedy fame after toiling nearly a decade and a half in the business, and is still most brazenly remembered for her career-maker in the irreverent hit Korean War dramedy MASH (1970), for which she received supporting Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. From there she would go on to enjoy several other hallmark moments as both an actress and a vocalist.

Her highlighting naked-shower scene in the groundbreaking cinematic comedy MASH (1970) had audiences ultimately laughing and gasping at the same time. Both she and the film were a spectacular success with Sally the sole actor to earn an Oscar nomination for her marvelous work here.

She lost that year to the overly spunky veteran Helen Hayes in Airport (1970).

Becoming extremely good friends with Altman during the movie shoot, Sally went on to film a couple more of the famed director's more winning and prestigious films of the 1970s, beginning with her wildly crazed "angelic" role in Brewster McCloud (1970), and finishing up brilliantly as a man-hungry real estate agent in his Welcome to L. A.

Films continued to be a priority and Sally was deemed a quirky comedy treasure in both co-star and top supporting roles of the 1970s.

Took hiatus from acting to focus on her career as singer. [1971]

Still pursuing her singing interests, she put out her first album, "Roll with the Feelin'" for Decca Records in 1972.

She was well cast neurotically opposite Alan Arkin in the Neil Simon comedy Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972) and again alongside ex-con James Caan as a sexy but loony delight in Slither (1973), a precursor to the Coen Bros. ' darkly comic films.

She also co-starred and contributed a song ("Reflections") to the Burt Bacharach/Hal David soundtrack of the Utopian film Lost Horizon (1973), a musical picture that proved lifeless at the box office.

Sally later regretted not taking the Karen Black singing showcase role in one of Altman's best-embraced films, Nashville (1975), when originally offered.

(1976), directed by Alan Rudolph.

Wanted to play Erica in An Unmarried Woman (1978) but Jill Clayburgh got the part.

More impressive work came with the movies A Little Romance (1979) as young Diane Lane's quirky mom; Foxes (1980) as Jodie Foster's confronting mother; Serial (1980), a California comedy satire starring Martin Mull; That's Life! (1986), a social comedy with Jack Lemmon and Julie Andrews; and Back to School (1986), comic Rodney Dangerfield's raucous vehicle hit.

Sally's films from the 1980s on were a mixed bag.

Krane in 1980. They have two adopted children. Sally is also the adoptive mother of her niece, Claire Graham.

Performed stand up comedy at An Evening at the Improv (1981). Jim Carrey was the following act. [1982]

While some, such as the low-grade Moving Violations (1985), Meatballs III: Summer Job (1986), Doppelganger (1993), American Virgin (1999) and Women of the Night (2001) have been beneath her considerable talents, her presence in others have been, at the very least, catchy such as her Natasha Fatale opposite Dave Thomas' Boris Badenov in Boris and Natasha (1992); director Percy Adlon's inventive Younger and Younger (1993), which reunited her with MASH co-star Donald Sutherland, and in Robert Altman's rather disjointed, ill-received all-star effort Ready to Wear (1994) in which she plays a fashion magazine editor. When her film output waned in later years, Sally lent a fine focus back to her singing career and made a musical dent as a deep-voiced blues and jazz artist. She started hitting the Los Angeles and New York club circuits with solo acts.

Along those same lines, Sally played a nightclub singer in the comedy Limit Up (1989) Kellerman's seductively throaty voice has also put her in good standing as a voice-over artist of commercials, feature films, and television.

During the filming of Ready to Wear (1994) director Robert Altman flew Kellerman and co-star Lauren Bacall from Paris to New York City to present at his tribute at Lincoln Center.

(April 19 to May 21, 1995) Played the titular role in Maltz Jupiter Theatre's Auntie Mame (1958). Around this time, Kellerman played in back-to-back plays in Boston and Edmonton. In Boston, she played Martha in the Hasty Pudding Theatricals Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), and starred as Mary Jane Dankworth in a two-month, two character production of The Lay of the Land (1997) with Michael Hogan in Edmonton. The latter was eventually made into a film (same title) in which Kellerman repeated the role (opposite Ed Begley Jr..).

Joined actresses Kathleen Turner and Beverly Peele in a Planned Parenthood press conference supporting a proposed law introduced to the U.S. Congress. [June 1999]

Among her offbeat output in millennium films were prime/featured roles in the soft-core thriller Women of the Night (2001), written and director by Zalman King, in which she plays a lady deejay (she also gets to sing); the real estate musical Open House (2004) in which she plays an agent (who gets to sing again); the Florida senior citizens' romantic comedy Boynton Beach Club (2005); the comedy Night Club (2011) where friends and residents start a club in a retirement home; the social dramas A Place for Heroes (2014) and A Timeless Love (2016); and the family dramedy The Remake (2016). Divorced from Rick Edelstein, Kellerman married Jonathan D.

Appeared with Regina Taylor and Teri Hatcher in Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues (2002). [2000]

(2004 - 2005) Played host Madame ZinZanni in 'Teatro ZinZanni', and Delores Montoya in Blank Theatre Company's revival of 'The Wild Party'.

In 2009, Kellerman released her first album since "Roll with The Feelin'" simply titled "Sally," a jazz and blues-fused album.

Volunteered at a memory care unit as means to dig deeper into her role as Dorothy, a woman with Alzheimer's disease in a retirement home, in Night Club (2011). Her performance earned an Accolade Competition Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Recipient of the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Award at Cinema Paradiso-Fort Lauderdale. [April 2013]

Daughter Hannah Krane died from heroin and methamphetamine overdose on October 22, 2016 at age 27.