Mercedes McCambridge

Carlotta Mercedes Agnes McCambridge was born on March 16, 1916, in Joliet, Illinois, to Irish-American Catholic parents Marie and John Patrick McCambridge. She graduated from Mundelein College in Chicago and went on to build a career spanning radio, stage, film, and television. She died on March 2, 2004.

McCambridge launched her professional life as a radio actress in 1938, simultaneously pursuing work on Broadway. Her radio credits were extensive and ranged across multiple programs, including recurring appearances on Lights Out, Inner Sanctum, Gang Busters, Murder at Midnight, and Studio One. She played Judy's friend in A Date with Judy in 1941, portrayed Rosemary Levy on Abie's Irish Rose, and took on the role of Peggy King Martinson on This Is Nora Drake in 1948. From June 1953 to March 1954, she starred in the CBS soap opera Family Skeleton, and she held the title role of Martha Ellis Bryan in Defense Attorney, a crime drama broadcast on ABC from 1951 to 1952. She was also an original cast member on Guiding Light and performed frequently on the CBS Radio Mystery Theater. Orson Welles described her as the world's greatest living radio actress.

Her Broadway career extended from 1945 to 1991 and included productions such as The Young and Fair, Man Bites Dog, The Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks, Agnes of God, and Lost in Yonkers. Her performance in The Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks earned her a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play in 1972.

McCambridge's film career began with her casting as Sadie Burke opposite Broderick Crawford in All the King's Men in 1949. The role brought her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress, and the Golden Globe for New Star of the Year. In 1954, she co-starred with Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden in the western drama Johnny Guitar. Two years later, she appeared as Luz in George Stevens's Giant, alongside Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean, earning a second Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. In 1958, she appeared as a leather jacket-wearing hoodlum in Touch of Evil, directed by Orson Welles, with whom she had previously worked in radio. The following year she joined Katharine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift, and Elizabeth Taylor in the Joseph L. Mankiewicz adaptation of Tennessee Williams's Suddenly, Last Summer.

McCambridge provided the dubbed voice of the demon Pazuzu in The Exorcist in 1973. To achieve the required vocal quality, she swallowed raw eggs, chain-smoked, and drank whiskey before recordings. Director William Friedkin also had her bound to a chair during sessions. A dispute over screen credit followed the film's premiere, and with the assistance of the Screen Actors Guild, McCambridge was ultimately credited for her vocal work. During the 1970s, she toured in a road company production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as Big Mama, opposite John Carradine as Big Daddy, and starred in Come Back, Little Sheba at the University of North Alabama Summer Theatre Productions alongside Lyle Talbot.

On television, McCambridge played Katherine Wells in Wire Service, an ABC drama series that ran from 1956 to 1957 and was produced by Desilu Productions. In March 1966, she appeared in the Lost in Space episode "The Space Croppers" as Sybilla, the matriarch of a family of supernatural space farmers. In October 1968, she played a witch named Carlotta in the Bewitched episode "Darrin Gone! and Forgotten."

McCambridge married writer William Fifield in 1939; the couple had a son, John Lawrence Fifield, born in December 1941, and divorced in 1946. In 1950, she married Canadian actor, producer, and director Fletcher Markle, and her son subsequently took the name John Markle. She and Markle divorced in 1962. During and after her marriages, McCambridge battled alcoholism and was hospitalized on multiple occasions. She achieved sobriety in 1969 through Alcoholics Anonymous. In the mid-1970s, she briefly served as director of Livengrin, a Pennsylvania rehabilitation center for alcoholics. Her autobiography, The Quality of Mercy, was published by Times Books in 1981.