Madeleine Sherwood

Madeleine Sherwood, born Madeleine Louise Hélène Thornton on November 13, 1922, in Montreal, Quebec, was a Canadian actress whose career spanned stage, film, and television across more than six decades. The granddaughter of the Dean of Dentistry at McGill University, she made her first stage appearance at age four in a church Passion Play. Her professional career began in Montreal, where Rupert Kaplan cast her in CBC dramas and soap operas. She relocated to New York City in 1950 and made her Broadway debut in Horton Foote's The Chase, stepping into the production as a replacement for Kim Stanley.

Sherwood's Broadway career extended from 1952 to 1971 and encompassed numerous original productions. In 1953 she created the role of Abigail in Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Elia Kazan cast her as Mae, also known as Sister Woman, in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1954, and again as Miss Lucy in Williams's Sweet Bird of Youth in 1959. She reprised both roles in the respective film adaptations. Her additional Broadway credits include The Night of the Iguana, in which she succeeded Bette Davis, Invitation to a March, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Do I Hear a Waltz?, Inadmissible Evidence, All Over, and The Garden of Sweets. She became a member of the Actors Studio in 1957, studying under Lee Strasberg, and held lifetime membership in the organization.

Off Broadway, Sherwood earned an Obie Award for Best Actress in 1963 for her performance in Hey You, Light Man. Her other off-Broadway credits include Getting Out, Brecht on Becket, and Older People, which was produced at Joseph Papp's Public Theater.

On television, Sherwood is perhaps best known for playing Reverend Mother Placido opposite Sally Field's Sister Bertrille in the comedy series The Flying Nun, a role she held from 1967 to 1970. She appeared across multiple soap operas over the years, including Guiding Light, where she played Mrs. Eilers and later returned briefly as Diamond Lil, the madame of Roxie Shayne. She also portrayed diner owner Carmen on The Secret Storm, and had cameo appearances on All My Children and Another World. She was featured in one of the final episodes of Capitol.

During the McCarthy era, Sherwood was blacklisted. She was active in the civil rights movement, working alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in the late 1950s and 1960s and joining the Congress of Racial Equality. In May 1963, she was arrested while participating in a Freedom Walk in Gadsden, Alabama, jailed, and sentenced to six months of hard labor for, in the words of the charge, endangering the customs and mores of the people of Alabama. In the 1970s, she attended the First Women's Sexual Conference at Barnard College in New York City, where she met Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and other activists, and subsequently founded consciousness-raising groups and counseling workshops addressing women and incest.

During the 1980s, Sherwood received a grant from the American Film Institute as one of the first women the organization supported in directing short films, alongside recipients including Cicely Tyson and Joanne Woodward. She wrote, directed, and acted in her film Good Night, Sweet Prince. In the early 1990s she returned to Canada, resettling in Victoria, British Columbia, and Saint-Hippolyte, Quebec. Though a long-term permanent resident of the United States, she retained Canadian citizenship throughout her life and was a member of the Society of Friends. Sherwood died on April 23, 2016, at her childhood home in Lac Cornu, Quebec, and was survived by her daughter.