Shelley Plimpton

Shelley Plimpton is an American former actress born on February 27, 1947, in Roseburg, Oregon, best known for originating the role of Crissy in the musical Hair. She is the mother of actress Martha Plimpton.

Plimpton grew up in Roseburg in an Episcopalian family. Her father, William Sherman Plimpton, was a Portland native and University of Washington graduate who ran an auto parts store in Roseburg; her mother worked as a medical researcher. Plimpton had one brother, Sherman Jr., and is a distant cousin of writer George Plimpton. Her parents divorced when she was five, and her father died of cancer at age fifty when Plimpton was twelve. At fourteen, she moved with her mother to New York City, where her mother took a position as a researcher for a Manhattan fertility doctor. The two settled in an apartment in Greenwich Village, and Plimpton attended Washington Irving High School in Gramercy Park, Manhattan. After graduating, she worked as a cashier in a nightclub.

Her acting career extended from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s. She created the role of Crissy in the original 1967 Off-Broadway production of Hair, performing the song "Frank Mills" in that role, and continued as a member of the original Broadway cast when the production transferred to Broadway in 1968. Her Broadway career spanned from 1968 to 1970.

During her time with Hair, Plimpton took a leave of absence to appear in Arlo Guthrie's 1969 film Alice's Restaurant, playing a fourteen-year-old who offers herself to Arlo's character and is gently turned away. That same year she appeared in Robert Downey Sr.'s film Putney Swope, opposite Ronnie Dyson, as one half of an interracial college couple featured in a satirical pimple cream television spot. In 1971, she portrayed Randa in Jim McBride's post-apocalyptic drama Glen and Randa, playing a young woman among a group of nuclear apocalypse survivors who sets off with her lover Glen, played by Steve Curry, to explore a devastated world and search for a city Glen has seen depicted in comic books. Plimpton worked with McBride again in the 1974 comedy film Hot Times, and her final film role came in the 1975 film Foreplay.

She made a brief return to acting in 1986 with a guest appearance on the short-lived television sitcom Throb, which starred Diana Canova, Paul Walker, and Jane Leeves, after which she retired from performing.

In 1970, Plimpton gave birth to Martha Plimpton, whose father is Keith Carradine, and raised her on Manhattan's Upper West Side. From 1970 to 1971, she was married to Steve Curry. From 1990 to 1997, she was married to theatre director Daniel J. Sullivan, who had worked as an assistant director on Hair and later directed the Seattle Repertory Theater. In 2002, Plimpton was reported to be living in Seattle and working at a gift center. As of September 2017, Vanity Fair reported that she was residing in Oregon.