Rosemary Murphy

Rosemary Murphy (January 13, 1925 – July 5, 2014) was an American actress whose career spanned stage, film, and television across more than six decades. Born in Munich, Germany, to Mildred (née Taylor) and Robert Daniel Murphy, an American diplomat, she was the elder of two daughters. The family departed Germany in 1939 as World War II began. Murphy attended Manhattanville College and pursued formal actor training at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., followed by study in New York at the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Actors Studio under Sanford Meisner.

Her acting career began in Germany with a 1949 production of Peer Gynt, and she made her Broadway debut the following year, in 1950, in The Tower Beyond Tragedy. Over the subsequent five decades she appeared in approximately fifteen Broadway productions, earning Tony Award nominations for Best Featured Actress in a Play in 1964 and Best Actress in a Play in 1967. Her Broadway credits include The Devil's Disciple, John Gabriel Borkman, Cheaters, and Ladies at the Alamo. Her final Broadway appearance came in 1999 in Noël Coward's Waiting in the Wings.

Murphy's screen work brought her additional recognition. She portrayed Maudie Atkinson in the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird and Callie Hacker in Walking Tall (1973). On television, she played Sara Delano Roosevelt in the 1976 miniseries Eleanor and Franklin and reprised the role in Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years (1977), a performance for which she won an Emmy Award. In 1974 she appeared in the television film A Case of Rape as a defense attorney who cross-examines a rape victim played by Elizabeth Montgomery and secures an acquittal for her attacker. That same year she also appeared in an episode of Columbo, and from 1974 to 1975 she played high school principal Margaret Blumenthal in the series Lucas Tanner.

Murphy had a recurring presence in daytime television as well. She played Nola Hollister on The Secret Storm from 1969 to 1970, appeared on All My Children in 1977 as Maureen Teller Dalton, and in 1988 portrayed Loretta Fowler, the kleptomaniac mother of Mitch Blake and Sam Fowler, on Another World. The following year she joined As the World Turns as Gretel Aldin, a role previously held by Joan Copeland, whose character's son James Stenbeck had allegedly been murdered. She also appeared in a 1987 episode of Murder, She Wrote. In addition to her Emmy, Murphy received a Clarence Derwent Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award. Her résumé also included work in French and German films. Murphy never married and had no children. She died on July 5, 2014, in Manhattan, from esophageal cancer.