Trish Van Devere

Trish Van Devere (born Patricia Louise Dressel; March 9, 1941) is a retired American actress. She was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for the film One Is a Lonely Number (1972), and won a Genie Award for the film The Changeling (1980). She is the widow of actor George C. Scott, with whom she appeared in multiple films. Early life Van Devere was born March 9, 1941 as Patricia Louise Dressel in Tenafly, New Jersey. Her father owned a Pontiac dealership and real estate business, which was inherited by her mother after her father's death when Van Devere was 9 years old. After attending Tenafly High School, she graduated in 1958 from Northern Valley High School before attending Ohio Wesleyan University, where she met and married fellow student Grant Van Devere. The marriage lasted only 8 months, though she retained Van Devere as her stage name. Career In 1966, Van Devere moved to New York City and began pursuing a career in acting, studying at the Actors Studio. She co-founded the Free Southern Theater with Scott Cunningham, an African American fellow actor, staging plays in fields and at churches in the Southern United States for indigent African Americans who had never seen live theater before. Two years later, Van Devere and Cunningham founded an offshoot theater company, the Poor People's Theater in New York City, headquartered in the basement of Manhattan's Riverside Church, which held similar theatrical productions in churches, schools, and streets. Van Devere had her breakthrough portraying the original Meredith Lord in the soap opera One Life to Live in 1968 — the income from which she largely used to help maintain the Poor People's Theater Company. In 1970, she co-starred with George Segal and Ruth Gordon in the comedy Where's Poppa? She subsequently garnered significant notice for her lead role in the film One Is a Lonely Number (1972), for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe award.