Carolyn Coates

Carolyn Owen Coates (April 29, 1927 – March 27, 2005) was an American actress who worked across stage, film, and television, and who appeared on Broadway between 1965 and 1969. Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, she was the younger of two daughters of Jessica Owen and Glenn Clinton Coates. Her parents divorced early in her childhood, and a series of subsequent remarriages produced a turbulent upbringing. In a 1973 interview, Coates recalled attending ten different schools before reaching the tenth grade, an instability that she later credited with deepening her attachment to the theater, which she described as providing the sense of family and home she had lacked as a child.

After settling in Santa Monica, Coates pursued acting studies at UCLA, where she took on roles including Shakespeare's Juliet, Margaret in Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday — appearing opposite a young William Schallert — and Cybel in Eugene O'Neill's The Great God Brown. During the same period she performed in summer stock with the Bolton Landing Players, playing Millie in Frederick Jackson's The Bishop Misbehaves and Aunt Connie in Mark Reed's Yes, My Darling Daughter. In 1954, she appeared as Agatha in the American premiere of Jean Giraudoux's Electra at the Henry Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village. The following year she married actor James Noble, whom she had first met in 1951 when the two played opposite each other in a summer stock production of Pygmalion in Worcester, Massachusetts. Shortly after their marriage, Coates and Noble became featured performers in Paul J. Curtis's American Mime Theatre, a commitment that continued for roughly six years.

Coates earned a Theatre World Award in 1965 for her portrayal of Hecuba in Euripides' The Trojan Women, a role that brought her to wider attention and exemplified her noted ability to portray formidable women. Her Broadway credits from this period include the play American Dream, Fire!, the comedy The Country Wife, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and The Condemned of Altona. In December 1965 she narrated Sibelius: A Symphony for Finland, a ninety-minute television documentary marking the composer's centennial, broadcast on NET's Festival of the Arts series. In May 1967, she co-starred with Martin Sheen, Eugene Roche, Frederick Rolf, and Eleanor Phelps in a four-episode run on The Catholic Hour examining the question of God's existence.

In 1985, Coates stepped away from performing for a period described variously as a nine-year sabbatical or retirement, during which she volunteered at hospitals and worked on the phones for AIDS Project Los Angeles and the Gay Men's Health Crisis. She returned to the stage, and in 2001 Long Wharf Theater in New Haven hosted her final performance, in which she played Gladys in Kenneth Lonergan's The Waverly Gallery. Hartford Courant critic Malcolm Johnson described her portrayal of the mentally deteriorating eighty-five-year-old character as a performance that shifted between lucidity and humor to disoriented speech, calling it sweet, charged with nostalgia, and complicated by deafness, and writing that it dominated the production.

Coates and James Noble had one daughter together. She died of cancer on March 27, 2005, at the Connecticut Hospice in Branford, Connecticut, survived by her husband and daughter. Her remains are interred at the family plot in Muskogee, Oklahoma.