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From
"Bad Seed" to First Lady:
The
Durable Career of Patty McCormack
di
LindAnn
Lo
Schiavo
Born in
Brooklyn
,
New York
on
21 August 1945
, Patricia Ellen
Russo became a professional model by 4 years old and an acclaimed
Broadway star by age 9. During
the past six decades, she has played a variety of roles — — a
Norwegian immigrant, a homicidal hellion, a grieving Italian-American
mamma, an evil parent, etc. — — and
has continued to balance film work with primetime television appearances.
This year she will portray former First Lady Patricia
Nixon in the motion picture "Frost/ Nixon."
Meet the actress who is equally at home in
Times Square
or Tinseltown,
and adept with marinara sauce or ruby red stage blood.
During
the 1940s, little Patty's father Frank Russo was earning a modest living
as a firefighter. Her
ambitious mother Elizabeth [McCormack] Russo, who had entertained as a
professional roller skater, saw a special talent for the spotlight in her
youngster. Renamed
"Patty McCormack" and sporting a dazzling pair of golden
pigtails, the cute little girl attracted offers.
In 1951, she won her first motion picture role in "Two Gals
and a Guy." Shortly
after, she made her Broadway debut on
3
February 1953
at the Music Box Theatre during the short-lived run of "Touchstone."
Though the play didn't last, the exposure helped Patty win the
coveted role of Ingeborg Gunnerson in the popular CBS-TV family series
"I Remember Mama"; she played the part from 1953 — 1956
at a time when television episodes
were performed live. Interestingly,
in the 30-minute episode broadcast on
8
January 1954
,
Ingeborg has trouble collecting a prize she believes she has won (a theme
that will soon resurface in another script). While simultaneously
appearing in the live weekly television show, Patty returned to The Great
White Way in December 1954. Though
only 9 years old, she created the role that would make her a cult icon —
— Rhoda Penmark, the tiny,
braided-blonde monster with a murderous mind in "The Bad Seed."
In one scene, Rhoda is outraged over losing a penmanship medal to
schoolmate Claude Daigle. Claude
soon turns up dead after a class picnic.
Running for 334 performances, "The Bad Seed" won
Hollywood
's
interest. The motion picture
adaptation was filmed with the original Broadway cast and released on
12
September 1956
.
With its dramatic mayhem at once horrifying and hilarious, "The
Bad Seed" blazed a new trail for child stars and set a new
standard, earning Patty McCormack an Oscar nomination [then the youngest
person ever to receive one] and providing a model for future
demon-children epics such as "Children of the Damned"
[1964] along with "The Exorcist" and "The Omen."
Decades later, Patty
McCormack recalled the on-set experience of working in
Burbank
,
California
under the director Mervyn LeRoy as lots of fun.
"I had been acting since I could breathe, so it was nothing new to
me. I knew it was a movie. There was an aura of strangeness around the
set, a sort of quiet eeriness to it all. I will never forget that,"
she said. And though Warner
Brothers Pictures toned down the demon-daughter's evilness a bit, Patty
McCormack knew her lines and cues very well indeed since she was using to
being onstage in Rhoda's skin for nine months.
Portraying a famously dark persona
can haunt an actor. For
instance, when the late actor Heath Ledger was cast in "Batman"
in the role of the Joker, it took a frightening toll.
Ledger admitted that he "slept an average of two hours a
night" while playing "a psychopathic, mass-murdering,
schizophrenic clown with zero empathy."
Ledger added, "I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted,
and my mind was still going."
In contrast, Patty McCormack's star turn as a young serial killer was
child's play. "Everything
has an impact on us at that age, but I can say that it didn't mess me up.
I didn't end up holding up any 7-Elevens. Though come to think of it, that
probably could have been fun," she explained. "You know what? If
anything, I think I went out of my way for a while to prove that I was a
really nice person. I think I went overboard with that."
Between
her Broadway blockbuster and the success of the follow-up film, producers
tried to harness Patty in the bad girl mode.
Briefly, she starred as Torey Peck in her own CBS-TV series: "Peck's
Bad Girl" [1959] when she was 14 years old.
Despite
these star-studded experiences, her parents wanted their daughter to have
a normal growing-up. They sent
her to
New
Utrecht
High School
in
Brooklyn
,
New York
instead of settling for a tutor or a professional
children's school.
Her
late teen years found her in several TV roles as well as "rebellious
youth" movies such as "The Explosive Generation"
[1961], where she played Janet Sommers, an unruly pupil in a sex education
class taught by William Shatner. She
kept busy with a continuing role as Lisha Steele on NBC-TV's "Young
Dr. Malone" [1962] along with a steady stream of "juvenile
delinquent" motion pictures where she played a motorcycle mob member
in "The Mini-Skirt Mob" [1968], a marijuana-lover in
"Maryjane" [1968] opposite teen-idol Fabian, and a gang
member in "The Young Animals" [1968].
In 1967, when she was 22, she married Italian-American restaurateur Bob
Catania. They had two children
— — Danielle and Robert, Jr. — — before their marriage was
dissolved. In 2004, Danielle
made Patty a proud grandmother. Patty McCormack has had many a chance to
play all sorts of mothers onscreen, too.
She was cast as an evil parent in the horror films "Mommy"
and "Mommy 2: Mommy's Day."
On "The Sopranos," she played Italian-American Liz LaCerva,
Adrianna's sympathetic mother, for five episodes on HBO in 2000.
Fans who applauded her performance in a pivotal role in Sheldon
Wilson's gory "Shallow Ground" [2004] may be quite
mesmerized to see her portraying a strait-laced White House resident.
"I'm not afraid to take risks in a role," said Patty
McCormack. It's not
every day that an actress dons Pat Nixon's Republican cloth coat.
In
"Frost/ Nixon," fans will see her as a stiff-upper-lip
First Lady surrounded by her daughters and a household rocked by a
history-making presidential impeachment.
There will be no blood, however.
Dick Nixon resigned.
IDEA
GIUGNO 2008
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