Kim Stanley

Kim Stanley (born Patricia Kimberley Reid; February 11, 1925 – August 20, 2001) was an American actress, primarily in television and theatre, but with occasional film performances. She began her acting career in theatre, and subsequently attended the Actors Studio in New York City, New York. She received the 1952 Theatre World Award for her role in The Chase (1952), and starred in the Broadway productions of Picnic (1953) and Bus Stop (1955). Stanley was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her roles in A Touch of the Poet (1959) and A Far Country (1962). In the 1950s Stanley was a prolific performer in television; she later progressed to film, with a well-received performance in The Goddess (1958). She was the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), and starred in Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), for which she won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She was less active during the remainder of her career; two of her later film successes were as the mother of Frances Farmer in Frances (1982), for which she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and as Pancho Barnes in The Right Stuff (1983). Stanley received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress – Miniseries or a Movie for her performance as Big Mama in a television adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1985. That same year, she was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. Early life Stanley was born in Tularosa, New Mexico, the daughter of Ann (née Miller), an interior decorator, and J. T. Reid, a professor of philosophy and education at the University of New Mexico, located in Albuquerque. Her father was of Irish or Scottish descent, born and raised in Texas, where he met her mother (who was of German and English ancestry). She had three older brothers (Howard Clinton Reid, a psychiatrist; Kenneth Reid, killed in pilot training during World War II; and Justin Truman Reid, a lawyer); and a half-sister (Carol Ann Reid). She was a drama major at the University of New Mexico, and later studied at the Pasadena Playhouse and adopted her maternal grandmother's surname as her stage name.