Carrie Nye

Carrie Nye, born Carolyn Nye McGeoy on October 14, 1936, in Greenwood, Mississippi, was an American stage, film, and television actress whose career extended across more than three decades. The only child of Frank Rice McGeoy, a local bank president, and Emma Evelyn Reddett McGeoy, she pursued formal training at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, before enrolling at the Yale School of Drama, where she graduated in 1959. It was at Yale that she met Dick Cavett, whom she married on June 4, 1964. The marriage lasted until her death, and the couple had no children.

Nye's professional stage work began early, with her joining the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 1955 and continuing to perform there through the 1960s and 1970s. Her festival credits included lead roles in The Skin of Our Teeth and A Streetcar Named Desire. She was also part of the American Shakespeare Festival, which performed Troilus and Cressida at the White House during the Kennedy administration. Her Broadway debut came in 1960 in A Second String, and the following year she appeared in the original cast of Mary, Mary, portraying Tiffany Richards.

Her Broadway career spanned from 1960 to 1980 and encompassed productions including Half a Sixpence, A Very Rich Woman, Cop-Out, Home Fires, and a 1980 revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner, in which she played Lorraine Sheldon. Her performance as Helen Walsingham in Half a Sixpence earned her a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical in 1965. Her work in The Man Who Came to Dinner brought her a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play in 1981.

Beyond the stage, Nye built a substantial screen career. She made her feature film debut in The Group in 1966, an adaptation of Mary McCarthy's novel, and subsequently appeared in The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979), Creepshow (1982), Too Scared to Scream (1985), and Hello Again (1987). Her television work during the 1970s included the movies Screaming Skull (1973), Divorce His, Divorce Hers (1973), which starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and The Users (1978). She also contributed a humorous essay to Time magazine in 1973 reflecting on her experience making Divorce His, Divorce Hers. In 1978 she served as a semi-regular panelist on the PBS quiz program We Interrupt This Week. Her portrayal of Tallulah Bankhead in the 1980 television film The Scarlett O'Hara War earned her a Primetime Emmy Award nomination.

In 1984, Nye joined the cast of the daytime drama Guiding Light as Susan Piper, a villainous real estate agent whose storyline culminated in a location shoot in Barbados and a death scene involving quicksand. When writer Ellen Weston became head writer of the series in 2003, she created a new role for Nye, the character Caroline Carruthers, though that storyline was discontinued after approximately six months.

Outside of her professional life, Nye and Cavett owned Tick Hall, a Montauk, New York residence designed by Stanford White. After the house burned down in 1997, the couple worked with architects and preservationists to construct an exact replica, an effort that became the subject of the 2003 documentary From the Ashes: The Life and Times of Tick Hall. Nye died of lung cancer on July 14, 2006, at her home in Manhattan, at the age of 69.