Maureen Stapleton, 80; Character Actress Won Tony, Emmy, Academy Awards in 50-Year Career

Maureen Stapleton, the acclaimed stage, screen and television character actress who won an Academy Award for her supporting role in the 1981 film “Reds,” died Monday. She was 80.

Stapleton, a longtime smoker, died of complications from respiratory ailments at her home in Lenox, Mass., said her daughter, Katharine Allentuck Bambery. She had been ill for about two years.

Stapleton once noted that her friend Marilyn Monroe, a fellow Actor’s Studio member whose talent she admired, was not taken seriously as an actress because of her beauty.

“I never had that problem,” Stapleton said. “People looked at me on stage and said, ‘Jesus, that broad better be able to act.’ ”

During her more than 50-year career, Stapleton was known as an outstanding character actress who excelled in dramatic and comedic roles. At the heart of her acting was what one critic referred to as her “remorseless honesty.”

Stapleton’s breakthrough role came in 1951, when she played the grieving, love-struck Sicilian American widow, Serafina delle Rose, in the original Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’ “The Rose Tattoo.” The role earned Stapleton her first Tony Award.

She went on to play leading roles in Williams’ “27 Wagons Full of Cotton” in 1955 and “Orpheus Descending” in 1956.

“On stage, you couldn’t take your eyes off her,” actor-comedian Dom DeLuise, a longtime friend, told The Times on Monday. “She was a grand actress, and she had something that made it all seem like she was making it up.”

Among Stapleton’s many Broadway credits are Lillian Hellman’s “Toys in the Attic,” and Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite” and “The Gingerbread Lady,” for which she won her second Tony Award in 1971.

“I just loved her,” Simon told The Times on Monday. “She was just a wonderful person to work with and personally she had the most marvelous sense of humor. I remember doing ‘Plaza Suite’ with George C. Scott, who’s a great actor and sometimes difficult to deal with. But she knew how to calm him down, and it was always wonderful to watch her do that. But she was just a brilliant actress.

“She was so unique -- not many actresses are like her. There was always a play that I wrote that I could have used her, still today.”

Stapleton was nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actress in her first film role -- as a frustrated wife who seduces a cub reporter played by Montgomery Clift in “Lonelyhearts,” the 1958 film version of Nathanael West’s novel.

She also received Oscar nominations for her performances in “Airport” (1970) and Woody’s Allen’s “Interiors” (1978).

In Warren Beatty’s epic “Reds,” she portrayed anarchist-writer Emma Goldman. Asked backstage by a reporter whether she had expected to win the Oscar, the always-candid Stapleton replied: “Yes, because I’m old and tired and I lost three times before.”

Among her other film credits are “The Fugitive Kind,” “Bye Bye Birdie,” “Plaza Suite,” “The Fan,” “Cocoon,” “The Money Pit,” “Nuts” and “The Last Good Time.”

Stapleton, who appeared frequently in television dramatic showcases such as “Studio One,” “Kraft Playhouse” and “Playhouse 90” in the 1950s, won an Emmy for her leading role in “Among the Paths to Eden” in 1967.

She was nominated for an Emmy in the title role of “Queen of the Stardust Ballroom.” In the 1975 TV-movie, she played a lonely widow who finds romance in a local dance hall with a letter carrier played by Charles Durning.

“There are many roads to good acting,” Stapleton said in “A Hell of a Life,” her 1995 autobiography. “I’ve been asked repeatedly what the ‘key’ to acting is, and as far as I’m concerned, the main thing is to keep the audience awake.”

One of two children, Stapleton was born June 21, 1925, in Troy, N.Y., to a working class family of Irish descent.

During her early years, she endured fights between her mother and her alcoholic father, who deserted the family when Stapleton was 5. Stapleton found frequent escape at the movies, which fueled her ambition to become an actress.

“Looking back,” she wrote, “I don’t feel I had a choice. For a fat, struggling kid like me, the only way out was to be someone else -- an actor.”

In a 1987 interview with the Toronto Star, Stapleton said her desire to act had nothing to do with “lofty ideas about artistic urges.” Instead, it was those Hollywood movies starring Jean Harlow, Clark Gable and other glamorous stars, in which “everybody was beautiful, rich and happy.”

“I thought if you got to be an actress you automatically ended up looking like that, thin and beautiful,” she recalled in a 1965 New York Times interview.

After graduating from high school, Stapleton arrived in Manhattan in 1943 with $100 in savings from odd jobs and a determination to become an actress. She supported herself by posing nude for artists, keeping books at a hotel and doing other odd jobs while spending her evenings studying acting with Herbert Berghof.

She made her Broadway debut in 1946, with a walk-on part as a village girl in a revival of J.M. Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World.”

She graduated to better roles and joined the Actors Studio, whose members included Marlon Brando, who used to crash in her one-room apartment.

Offstage, Stapleton has been described as being feisty, boisterous, prone to cursing and having a bellowing laugh.

The first time she met Burt Lancaster at a party in the 1950s, she asked him why he was wearing sunglasses indoors. When he didn’t answer, she took a swing at him and missed.

For many years, alcohol played a role in her behavior.

In her autobiography, Stapleton was frank about her strengths and weaknesses, which included heavy drinking (though never while performing) and a string of phobias, including fears of flying, elevators and heights.

She had two failed marriages (to theatrical manager and producer Max Allentuck and screenwriter David Rayfiel), and a long affair with Broadway legend George Abbott that began when she was 43 and he was 81 and ended 10 years later with the director “stepping out” on her with another, younger woman.

But Stapleton always maintained a self-deprecating sense of humor.

For her Oscar-nominated role in “Airport,” she wore a favorite old dress that she had bought during her slimmer days. “I actually think my girdle should have won for technical achievement,” she wrote in her book.

“She was full of fun,” DeLuise said. “When she came to your house, she sat down, you ate, you laughed -- you just didn’t want to go anywhere because she was there. You wanted the time to last forever.”

In the mid 1980s, Stapleton moved to Lenox to be closer to her daughter and her grandchildren.

She had been semi-retired for the last 10 years.

In addition to her daughter, she is survived by a son, Daniel Allentuck; two grandchildren; and a brother, John Stapleton.