The young actress Sissy Spacek who shone in Brian de Palma's classic Carrie had a prolific career in film and television, without accumulating sc@nd@ls in Hollywood.
In 1976 Brian de Palma brought one of Stephen King's most terrifying novels to the cinema: Carrie. A young Sissy Spacek played the young daughter of an ultra-religious mother, who discovers her telekinetic powers while she tries to deal with the raw bullying she suffers in high school.
What happened to Sissy Spacek's life after the success of her horror classic?
In several interviews, she explained that her decision to enter acting was following the tragic death of her brother Robbie from leukemia, in 1967 and when she was only 17 years old. "It was the defining event of my entire life," she remarked, and that was the driving force that drove her not to waste time and achieve her goals. She first tried her luck as a singer but it was thanks to her cousin, the actor Rip Torn, that she ended up at the Actor's Studio drama school and the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York.
Before Carrie, the Texan actress had made her film debut in 1972 alongside Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman in the thriller Live Flesh in the role of a woman sold into the white slave trade and was later part of the leading cast of Terrence's rural drama Malik Badlands (1973), opposite Martin Sheen.
Carrie: the nightmare that marked her artistic life
Spacek, who marveled with his incredible talent for creating a vulnerable Carrie while transmitting to the viewer a fear that penetrated the bones, was accompanied in the cast by a young John Travolta, William Katt, Amy Irving and the veteran Piper Laurie, who played the protagonist's unbalanced mother. The film was a total box office and critical success, grossing nearly $34 million in the United States alone. The 1999 sequel, Carrie 2: The Wrath, and the 2013 remake did not have the same reception and became absolute failures.
The truth is that Sissy Spacek was not De Palma's first choice to play Carrie White, since he thought she was too old to play a teenager and the director had in mind Betsy Slade, an actress who had caught his attention. in the dramatic thriller Terror on the Beach (1973). Without giving up, the actress put Vaseline in her hair, put on a light blue dress that she had worn to school and passed perfectly for a 16-year-old girl. Also passing through the castings was a very young and unknown Carrie Fisher, who would later rise to fame for playing Princess Leia in Star Wars.
For the brilliant composition of a vulnerable but bone-deep horror Carrie, she received her first Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Something really unusual since the horror genre has a very bad press in the Academy. Perhaps that was the reason why the award ended up going to Faye Dunaway for Network. Even so, Sissy's name already predicted glory and total success.
After Carrie, her next important role was in Michael Apted's I Want to Be Free (1980), where she played country music star Loretta Lynn. Her applauded performance earned her a string of awards: Oscar for best actress, Golden Globe, best female performance from the critics of New York, Los Angeles, the American Film Critics Association and the National Board of Review. Sissy also demonstrated in this biopic that she knew how to sing well and she was nominated for a Grammy for her participation in the soundtrack.
During the '80s she navigated projects of different genres, which is why it was always difficult to pigeonhole her into a role. Disappeared (1982), by Costa-Gavras, in the role of the wife of an American journalist who disappears in Chile after Pinochet's coup d'état; When the River Rises (1984), with Mel Gibson; the psychological drama Goodnight, Mother (1986) and Crimes of the Heart (1986), where she shared a camera with her fictional sisters Jessica Lange and Diane Keaton. In total she accumulated 5 Oscar nominations for Best Actress.
After The Long Walk Home (1990) and J.F.K: Cold Case (1991), the detailed analysis of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy directed by Oliver Stone, Sissy took time away from her profession to dedicate more time to her family. During the filming of Badlands (1973) she met art director Jack Fisk, whom she married a year later and they were parents of two girls: Schuyler and Madison. Her return to the big screen after some television films was with Affliction (1997), by Paul Schrader, and the moving cult film A True Story (1999), by David Lynch, playing a disabled woman.
