| Beatrice Straight dies at 86 Actress won Oscar for 'Network' role 04/11/2001 By Myrna Oliver / Los Angeles Times Beatrice Straight, who earned the best- supporting-actress Oscar in 1976 for playing William Holden's estranged wife in Network, has died. She was 86.
Ms. Straight, who also earned a Tony and was nominated for an Emmy, died Saturday in Los Angeles, her son Tony Cookson said.
Ms. Straight was a distinguished actress long before her memorable turn in Network. She made her Broadway debut in 1935 in Bitter Oleander, and in 1953 earned a Tony for best supporting actress as Elizabeth Proctor, a Puritan woman accused of witchcraft, in the original production of Arthur Miller's play The Crucible.
For more than 40 years she also had a continuing presence on television, earning an Emmy nomination in 1978 as Alice Dain Leggett, matriarch in the miniseries The Dain Curse. In a lighter vein, she was also the Queen Mother to Lynda Carter's late-1970s comic-book-inspired Wonder Woman.
Dignified, competent and strong-willed, the elegant red-haired Ms. Straight was often cast as the doyenne, the matriarch or the professional. She was Mother Christophe in the 1959 film The Nun's Story, the investigator of the paranormal in the 1982 film Poltergeist and Rose Kennedy in the 1985 CBS miniseries Robert Kennedy and His Times.
Born to the wealth, privilege and prominence she sometimes emulated as an entertainer, Beatrice Whitney Straight grew up in Old Westbury on New York's Long Island. Her father was banker and diplomat Willard Dickerman Straight, and her mother was the Whitney dynasty heiress Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight.
She married actor Peter Cookson in 1949, and they shared 41 years in New York and Los Angeles until his death in 1990.
Her early TV work included a 1951 role in the soap opera Love of Life, and her first film was the 1952 Phone Call From a Stranger. Her final film, in which she portrayed Goldie Hawn's mother, was Deceived in 1991.
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