Elizabeth Hartman

Mary Elizabeth Hartman was born on December 23, 1943, in Youngstown, Ohio, the daughter of Claire (née Mullaly) and B.C. Hartman. She grew up with a sister, Janet, and a brother, William. As a student at Boardman High School, where she graduated in 1961, Hartman distinguished herself in dramatic performance, earning a statewide award for best actress in a high school production for her portrayal of Laura in The Glass Menagerie. During her youth she also performed in multiple productions at the Youngstown Playhouse, among them A Clearing in the Woods by Arthur Laurents and Our Town. She went on to attend Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where she met her future husband, screenwriter and director Gill Dennis, and spent summers performing with the Kenley Players. Additional early stage experience came through several productions at the Cleveland Play House, including The Madwoman of Chaillot and Bus Stop.

Hartman relocated to New York City to pursue a professional acting career, and in 1964 she was signed to play the ingénue lead in the comedy Everybody Out, the Castle is Sinking. Though the production was not a success, her performance attracted the attention of film producers. That same year she was screen-tested by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Warner Brothers, and in the early autumn of 1964 she was cast in the leading role in A Patch of Blue (1965), playing Selina D'Arcy, a blind girl, opposite Sidney Poitier and Shelley Winters. The performance earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress — making her, at 23, the youngest nominee in that category at the time of the 1966 ceremony — as well as a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress. She won the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year for the role. That same year she received an achievement award from the National Association of Theatre Owners, and she starred as Laura opposite Mercedes McCambridge as Amanda in a production of The Glass Menagerie in Pittsburgh.

Her film work continued with Francis Ford Coppola's You're a Big Boy Now (1966), in which she played Barbara Darling, earning a second Golden Globe nomination. She also appeared in The Group (1966), which, like The Beguiled, featured Geraldine Page. In Don Siegel's The Beguiled (1971) she starred opposite Clint Eastwood and Page, and she portrayed Pauline Mullins, wife of former Sheriff Buford Pusser, in the box office hit Walking Tall (1973). In 1975 she starred in the premiere of Thomas Rickman's play Balaam, a work about political intrigue in Washington, D.C., mounted by the Pasadena Repertory Theatre in Old Town Pasadena, California, and directed by her husband Gill Dennis. Her Broadway career included an appearance in 1969 in the drama Our Town. In 1981 she starred in a touring production of Morning's at Seven, portraying Myrtle Brown, but left the tour due to declining mental health. That same year she appeared in the horror-spoof Full Moon High as Miss Montgomery. In 1982 she provided the voice of Mrs. Brisby, the film's protagonist, in Don Bluth's animated feature The Secret of NIMH — her only animated role and her final Hollywood film and television credit.

Throughout much of her life Hartman suffered from depression. In 1978 she received treatment at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut. She and Gill Dennis divorced in 1984 following a five-year separation. In the final years of her life she left acting and worked at a museum in Pittsburgh while receiving outpatient treatment. On June 10, 1987, Hartman died by suicide after leaping from the window of her fifth-floor Pittsburgh apartment. She was 43 years old. According to the Allegheny County Medical Examiner's Office, she had called her psychiatrist earlier that morning reporting that she felt despondent. She was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Mahoning, Ohio, a suburb of her hometown of Youngstown.