Kim Stanley; Longtime Film, Stage Actress

Kim Stanley, best known on Broadway in the 1950s for such roles as Cherie, the small-town “chantoosie” of William Inge’s “Bus Stop,” died Monday in Santa Fe, N.M., of uterine cancer. She was 76.

Her acting career, which afforded her memorable turns as a variety of sensitive souls and obsessive monsters, included a brief apprenticeship with the Pasadena Playhouse. More crucially, she became a student at the Actors Studio in New York under the mentorship of Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg.

Stanley appeared in five motion pictures, beginning with “The Goddess” in 1958 and ending with “The Right Stuff” in 1983. In “The Goddess” she portrayed a Marilyn Monroe-style star, somewhat against type given Stanley’s down-home, frayed-edges appeal. On screen, Monroe took the “Bus Stop” role introduced on stage by Stanley.

Despite her limited film output, Stanley received two Oscar nominations: for her portrayal of the crazed medium in “Seance on a Wet Afternoon” (1964), then--after an 18-year screen absence--for the raging mother of Frances Farmer in “Frances” (1982).

Reclusive by Hollywood standards, Stanley preferred the stage, her daughter, Dr. Rachel Ryder Zahn of San Diego, said Monday. “She got a lot of pleasure later in life from teaching.”

Most recently, Stanley taught at the College of Santa Fe; she also taught acting in Los Angeles over the years.

Born Patricia Beth Reid in Tularosa, N.M., Stanley was raised in Texas. She attended the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and Texas State University in Waco.

After being spotted by a Pasadena Playhouse scout while performing in a college production, she moved west, briefly, after World War II. Thereafter she got work doing winter stock in Louisville, Ky.

She then boarded a Greyhound bus to Manhattan.

“When I arrived, in the spring of ‘47, I had $21,” she told the New Yorker magazine. “It was raining. I got off at the 34th Street station, and took the first room I saw--a rooming house in the West 30s. I didn’t know one single person in the city. I still had a heavy Texas accent. Theater people told me to go back to Texas.

“But by then I’d made up mind to be an actress.”

In New York, Stanley worked as a dress model (employed by composer Stephen Sondheim’s dressmaker father), and as a cocktail waitress.

Stanley developed her stage chops laboring in the fledgling off-Broadway movement. She did everything from e.e. cummings to Gertrude Stein and claimed to understand little of the often unconventional material.

Reviewing the Stein play “Yes Is for a Very Young Man,” Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times didn’t care for the text’s discombobulating circularities. But in Stanley he detected “a talented actress with temperament, craft, and, if there is any justice on Broadway, a future.”

Stanley’s first major Broadway success came as the moony tomboy in Inge’s “Picnic,” directed by Joshua Logan. In it a 27-year-old Stanley, at the time in the first of her three marriages, played a convincing and heartfelt 12-year-old. Inge’s “Bus Stop” provided Stanley with an even greater Broadway success two seasons later.

Her extensive television credits, dominated in the 1950s and early ‘60s by such anthologies as “Goodyear TV Playhouse” and “Magnavox Theater,” led to two Emmy awards. The first came for her 1963 episode of “Ben Casey”; the second, the PBS/American Playhouse airing of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in 1984. In “Cat,” Stanley played Big Mama.

Katharine Hepburn Was an Inspiration

Nearly three decades earlier, she had played Maggie in the Tennessee Williams play’s London premiere.

She told the Los Angeles Times in 1982 that at 16 she saw her first professional play--Katharine Hepburn in “The Philadelphia Story,” touring in San Antonio.

“I was overcome; I was transfixed,” Stanley said. “It was a comedy, but after the curtain came down I sat there and cried, because I wanted it to go on all night.”

She is survived by a son, Jamison Clift of Santa Fe, and two daughters, Zahn and Lisa Conway of Walnut Creek, Calif. She is also survived by a brother, Justin Reid of Crestone, Colo., and three grandchildren.

The family invites memorial contributions to the Justin Zahn Foundation for Childhood Cancer Research, 3830 Valley Center Drive, No. 705-211, San Diego, CA 92130.