Lois Nettleton

Lois June Nettleton (August 16, 1927 – January 18, 2008) was an American actress whose career spanned film, stage, television, and radio. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, to Virginia and Edward L. Nettleton, she was also raised by her maternal aunt's family. She attended Senn High School, where Lee Stern was among her classmates, and went on to study at the Goodman School of Drama at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1948, she was crowned Miss Chicago and advanced to the semifinal round of the Miss America pageant that same year.

Nettleton's path to professional acting began with early stage work, including repertory performances alongside Geraldine Page at the New Lake Zurich Playhouse in 1946 and with the Woodstock Players in 1947. Her Broadway career launched in 1949 with Dalton Trumbo's The Biggest Thief in Town, and that same year she understudied Barbara Bel Geddes in the original Broadway production of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Also in 1949, she appeared on television in a production of "Flowers from a Stranger" on Westinghouse Studio One on CBS. A lifetime member of the Actors Studio, Nettleton remained active on Broadway from 1949 through 1979, appearing in productions that included Darkness at Noon, Silent Night Lonely Night, A Streetcar Named Desire, They Knew What They Wanted, Strangers, and The Wayward Stork.

Her Broadway work earned significant recognition. In 1973, she received critical praise for her portrayal of Blanche DuBois in a revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. Her performance as Amy in a 1976 revival of They Knew What They Wanted brought her both a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play and a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Actress in a Play. Away from Broadway, she appeared in the off-Broadway production of Look Charlie, written by humorist Jean Shepherd, which opened in late December 1958 and closed after a small number of performances in February 1959. Her final stage appearance came in the 2004 off-Broadway play How to Build a Better Tulip.

On television, Nettleton accumulated an extensive list of guest appearances across several decades, including roles on The Twilight Zone, Naked City, Route 66, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Hawaii Five-O, The Fugitive, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, and many others. In 1973, she appeared on The Mary Tyler Moore Show as Lou Grant's boss, and she was a recurring celebrity guest on various versions of the game show Pyramid from the 1970s through 1991. She appeared in the miniseries Washington: Behind Closed Doors and Centennial, as well as the pilot episode of The Eddie Capra Mysteries in 1978. In 1987, she played Penny Vanderhof Sycamore in the television series adaptation of You Can't Take It with You, alongside Harry Morgan and Richard Sanders. She later appeared in a 2006 Hallmark Channel Christmas film, The Christmas Card.

Nettleton won two Daytime Emmy Awards during her career. The first recognized her portrayal of Susan B. Anthony in the 1977 television film The American Woman: Profiles in Courage, and the second came for her work in "A Gun for Mandy," a 1983 episode of the religious anthology series Insight. She also received three Primetime Emmy nominations: for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Special for Fear on Trial (1975), for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for the Golden Girls episode "Isn't It Romantic?", and for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for a recurring role in In the Heat of the Night in 1989. Her film work included Period of Adjustment (1962), an adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play, in which she played a woman in a troubled marriage. In radio, she played Patsy in the soap opera The Brighter Day and appeared in episodes of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater. In her later years she provided voice performances as Athena in Herc's Adventures and as Maleficent in House of Mouse and Mickey's House of Villains.

In her personal life, Nettleton had been the first caller to Jean Shepherd's late-night radio program on WOR, eventually becoming known to his audience as "the listener" and later becoming his third wife. The two married on December 3, 1960, in Tarrytown, New York, and divorced in 1967. Nettleton made her last public appearance in August 2007 at a Twilight Zone convention in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. She died on January 18, 2008, in Woodland Hills, California, from lung cancer, at the age of 80.