Elizabeth Ashley

Elizabeth Ashley, born Elizabeth Ann Cole on August 30, 1939, in Ocala, Florida, is an American actress whose career in theatre, film, and television spans seven decades. She was raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, by her mother, Lucille Ayer, a music teacher's former wife who separated from Ashley's father, Arthur Kingman Cole, shortly after her birth and never remarried. Ashley left Louisiana State University after her freshman year and relocated to New York City, where she trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre alongside classmates Jessica Walter and Brenda Vaccaro. To support herself during that period, she worked as a showroom model and appeared as the Jell-O pudding girl on a television program.

Ashley's Broadway career began in 1950 with an appearance in Daphne Laureola. She went on to win the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play in 1962 for Take Her, She's Mine. The following year, she originated the role of Corie in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park, directed by Mike Nichols, earning a Tony nomination for the performance. The production ran for four consecutive years. During its run, Ashley experienced a mental breakdown and entered a psychiatric hospital, an episode initially reported publicly as bronchitis. She ultimately left the play permanently, paying producer Saint Subber $35,000 as a breach-of-contract penalty.

After approximately a decade working in Hollywood, Ashley returned to Broadway in 1974 in the American Shakespeare Theatre's revival of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, playing Maggie the Cat. Critics including John Simon, Mel Gussow, and Clive Barnes praised the performance extensively, and it earned her a second Tony nomination. She subsequently appeared on Broadway as Dr. Livingstone in Agnes of God in 1982 and later joined the original Broadway run of August: Osage County as a replacement in the role of Mattie Fae. Ashley was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2024.

Her film work includes The Carpetbaggers (1964), for which she received both BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for her supporting performance, as well as Ship of Fools (1965), The Third Day (1965), The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker (1971), Rancho Deluxe (1975), Coma (1978), Windows (1980), Paternity (1981), Dragnet (1987), and Vampire's Kiss (1989). George Peppard, her co-star in The Carpetbaggers, became her second husband; the couple had a son named Christian before divorcing. Her first husband was actor James Farentino, and her third, whom she married in 1975 and divorced in 1981, was James McCarthy.

On television, Ashley played Aunt Frieda Evans in Burt Reynolds's series Evening Shade from 1990 to 1994, a role for which she received an Emmy nomination in 1991. She appeared in 14 episodes of the HBO series Treme as Aunt Mimi and in several episodes of In the Heat of the Night as Maybelle Chesboro. She portrayed Kate in Sandburg's Lincoln, a six-part NBC dramatization that aired in the mid-1970s, and appeared in the 1987 miniseries The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. Her additional television credits include guest roles on Ben Casey, Route 66, Miami Vice, Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, The Larry Sanders Show, Homicide: Life on the Street, Russian Doll, and Better Things, among others. She was a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson 24 times.

Ashley's autobiography, Actress: Postcards from the Road, was published in hardcover by M. Evans and Co. on June 1, 1978, with a paperback edition following from Fawcett Publications on October 12, 1979. In the 1980s, she sustained injuries in a sailing accident in the Caribbean that required major facial reconstructive surgery.