Bonnie Bedelia

The native New Yorker was born Bonnie Bedelia Culkin on March 25, 1948, the daughter of Phillip Harley Culkin, a journalist, and Marian Ethel Wagner Culkin, a writer and editor. Trained in ballet, her parents guided all of the children at one time or another into acting (which included Kit Culkin, Terry Culkin and Candace Culkin). Bonnie herself attended Quintano School for Young Professionals in New York at one point and Bonnie and Kit went on to appear on the local stage and TV. Brother Kit would later be known more for siring a handful of talented child actors and/or stars (Macaulay Culkin, Kieran Culkin, and the rest). It was Bonnie who was first spotted among the other acting siblings by a talent scout who happened to catch her in a school production of "Tom Sawyer", and encouraged her.

Bonnie nabbed a five-year role as young teen "Sandy Porter" in the New York-based daytime soap Love of Life (1951) starting in 1961.

She made her professional debut at age 9 in a 1957 North Jersey Playhouse production of "Dr. Praetorius" and then was handed a full scholarship to study at George Balanchine's New York City Ballet. But the acting bug had bitten and after dancing in only four productions (including playing the role of Clara in "The Nutcracker"), she decided to hang up her ballet slippers. She proceeded to study at both the HB Studio and Actors Studio in New York.

During that time, she took her first Broadway bow in "Isle of Children", a show that lasted but a week in March of 1962. She was also a replacement in the established hit comedy "Enter Laughing", a year later.

After appearing in the stage play "The Playroom" in 1965, she earned strong reviews for her touching performance in "My Sweet Charlie", for which she won the 1967 Theatre World Award for "promising new artist". In it, she played a pregnant young Southern girl on the lam with a black lawyer. Patty Duke recreated the role a few years later on TV and captured an Emmy.

Wanted to play the role of Margaret 'Mick' Kelly in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968), but lost out to Sondra Locke. Bedelia confided to the 8 October 1967 Los Angeles Times that "they decided I was too old" when she auditioned for the same part as Locke. As it turned out, Bedelia was four years younger than Locke, who had lied about her age.

Films beckoned at this point and Bonnie made her debut lending topnotch support in The Gypsy Moths (1969) which reunited From Here to Eternity (1953) stars Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. She earned even better marks in her next two films, one performance simply haunting and the other one hilarious.

Once again playing pregnant and once again delivering a touching pathos, she played the dirt-poor marathon dancer who pitches songs for pennies and the almost-mother of Bruce Dern's child in the superb, award-winning, Depression-era drama They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969).

She married scriptwriter Ken Luber on April 24, 1969, and bore him a son, Yuri, the following year.

On the other end of the acting spectrum, she played the lovable bride-to-be in the side-splitting comedy classic Lovers and Other Strangers (1970). By this time, Bonnie had started concentrating on family values.

The time off to focus on motherhood (she had second son, Jonah Luber, in 1976) proved detrimental to her rising star. The remaining decade was uneventful at best, despite some fine showings in a splattering of TV-movies.

Her picture appears on the cover of the book "The Films of Don Shebib" by Piers Handling (Canadian Film Institute, Ottawa, 1978). Donald Shebib was her director for Between Friends (1973).

She appears in two films based on Stephen King books where there's an evil antique shop owner in the plot (Salem's Lot (1979) and Needful Things (1993)).

Her big comeback came again on the movie trail in the early 1980s when she absolutely nailed the role of race car driver Shirley Muldowney in Heart Like a Wheel (1983). She was surprisingly overlooked at Oscar time, however, despite the praise she received. Despite respected work in subsequent movies such as Violets Are Blue. . .

(1986), The Prince of Pennsylvania (1988), Presumed Innocent (1990) and a running role as Bruce Willis's put-upon wife in Die Hard (1988) and its sequel, she found better and more frequent parts on TV.

She found her niche in TV-movies with social themes and tugged at more hearts in Switched at Birth (1991), A Mother's Right: The Elizabeth Morgan Story (1992), Any Mother's Son (1997) and To Live Again (1998).

In a change of pace, Bonnie joined the ensemble cast of the low-budget cult comedy Sordid Lives (2000), as "Latrelle", a homophobic woman dealing with her mother's death, the imprisonment of her gay brother and her own son's "coming out".

She also managed a few regular TV series roles: The Division (2001) as a police captain, and Parenthood (2010) as a family matriarch opposite Craig T. Nelson.

The movie evolved into the TV series Sordid Lives: The Series (2008) which reunited her with original cast members Leslie Jordan and Olivia Newton-John.

She repeated her role again in still another film -- A Very Sordid Wedding (2017)More recent independent movie credits include Berkeley (2005), Broken Links (2016), The Scent of Rain & Lightning (2017), A Stone in the Water (2019).