Oscar Nominee Hartman Leaps to Her Death

Actress Elizabeth Hartman, who won an Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of a blind girl in the 1966 movie “A Patch of Blue,” leaped to her death Wednesday from a window in her fifth floor apartment in Pittsburgh, Pa.

She was 43, and had not appeared in a film for more than a decade.

“She didn’t leave a note,” Pittsburgh Homicide Detective Paul McCabe said, “but she called her doctor and said she was depressed and was going to do it. He called the police, but by the time anyone could get here, she was gone.”

Allegheny County Deputy Coroner Fred Bell said her body was found on the ground just below the open window, a few minutes after noon. She was pronounced dead at the scene. Bell said she had recently been an outpatient at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh.

Career Lost Steam

Friends and members of her family said the actress had never been able to deal with the fact that nothing much had happened to her professionally after the Oscar nomination.

Pittsburgh newspaper film critic George Anderson agreed.

“Hers,” he said “was a tragic American career that peaks at the beginning and has no follow-up.”

“A Patch of Blue,” in which she starred opposite Sidney Poitier, was her first film.

“And her best,” film historian James Danner wrote in a 1983 book about Hollywood actresses. “That was the trouble--after a role like that, you’re famous and you’re a ‘bright discovery’ who ‘can’t miss stardom’ and everyone knows it. But it still takes a lot of breaks. And sometimes they don’t come.”

Lesser Roles

What came, instead, were roles as one of the drabber of Mary McCarthy’s heroines in “The Group,” and as a freaked-out Greenwich Village go-go dancer in Francis Ford Coppola’s “You’re a Big Boy Now,” as a neurotic young woman who brings disaster on Alan Bates in “The Fixer,” and then another starring role with Geraldine Page and Clint Eastwood in “The Beguiled.” Later, there were roles in “Walking Tall” and “Full Moon High.”

She had stage stints in a revival of “Our Town” and in touring company productions of “Becket,” “The Madwoman of Chaillot” and “Everyone Out at the Castle Is Sinking.” There were also a few television appearances.

But her only film work in recent years was to provide the voice for Mrs. Brisby, the leading mouse character in the animated fantasy, “The Secret of NIMH.”

“She hadn’t done anything for quite a while as an actress,” said her brother-in-law, Robert H. Shoop Jr. of Oakmont, Pa. “That was part of it. She had unbelievable talent. She was able to portray so many people . . . and yet, none of them were her.”

Services Saturday

Private funeral services were scheduled for Saturday in Youngstown, Ohio.

Born Dec. 23, 1943, in Youngstown, she attended Carnegie Tech and appeared at the Cleveland Playhouse before making her motion picture debut.

“After ‘A Patch of Blue,’ she told The Times’ Kevin Thomas in a 1971 interview, “everybody told me I would be a big star, and I thought that, too.”

“I came right in before all the disintegration at the studios.

“I (was) the last product of the star buildup--but there was no follow-through.

“It got to the point where I died. . . .”