AN APPRECIATION : Dewhurst: An Earth Mother Bigger Than Life : The actress made her characters forceful yet understanding, imparting the image of a secure refuge in a storm.

If the words Earth Mother ever applied, they clung to Colleen Dewhurst, like fresh loam to garden boots. The Tony- and Emmy-winning actress died Thursday night in her Westchester, N.Y., home surrounded by her children and grandchildren.

That image came, in part, from the roles in the theater with her personal stamp, towering Eugene O’Neill matriarchs and misbegotten New England farm women, and the young widow in James Agee’s “A Death in the Family.” And it came partly from her voice, which one observer said sounded as though she had eaten cigarettes her life long, and partly from a sense she gave of being the rock, the safe harbor, the one secure refuge in a storm.

But more than anything, on the stage and especially on screen and in a way that was unique, Dewhurst projected an enveloping sense of understanding of the world and its frailties. It seemed to come from a knowledge of who she was: unshy, forceful, opinionated, a gutsy, ribald 5-foot-8 woman who could seem 6 feet tall onstage and who was congenitally unsuited to roles with the slightest equivocation about them.

We have too few women like that in films. Regrettably, there is not much call for them.

Dewhurst’s most recent role, in “Dying Young,” in which she appeared with Campbell Scott, one of her two sons by actor George C. Scott, was a decent enough one. She played a savvy, earthy Mendocino winery owner who had outlived three husbands. But, by and large, film never made the use of Dewhurst that it could have. Women with a strong sense of themselves seem more intimidating than they should to today’s filmmakers.

Television did better by her, not only bringing some of her finest stage roles to mass audiences, including “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” but also memorable roles in the miniseries “Anne of Green Gables.”

She got widespread attention for her role as Avery Brown, Murphy Brown’s salty mother, for which she won an Emmy in 1989 and for which she is nominated again in the non-televised segment of the awards ceremony scheduled for tonight.

It is wrenching, on the morning after her death, to hear her voice on an Amtrak commercial; those cello tones unmistakable.

In one of the many times she provided voice-over for a film, in “The Good Fight: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War,” she read the words of Dolores Ibarruri, the Loyalist’s fiery “La Pasionaria.” Actress and role could not have been more perfectly matched.