NEW YORK — Sally Kirkland, a former model who regularly appeared on stage, film and television, is best known for sharing the screen with Paul Newman And Robert Redford in the film “Alo” and for the main role in the film “Anna”, nominated for an Oscar in 1987. She was 84.
Her spokesman, Michael Green, said Kirkland died Tuesday morning at a Palm Springs hospice.
Friends founded GoFundMe I'll have to pay for her medical care this fall. They said she had four broken bones in her neck, right wrist and left hip. During her recovery, she also developed infections that required hospitalization and rehabilitation.
Kirkland has appeared in films such as The Way We Were with Barbra Streisand, “Revenge” with Kevin Costner, “Cold Feet” with Keith Carradine and Tom Waits, “EDTV” with Ron Howard, “JFK” with Oliver Stone, “Heat Wave” with Cicely Tyson, “High Stakes” with Kathy Bates, “Bruce Almighty” with Jim Carrey and the 1991 TV movie “The Haunting” about a family involved in the paranormal. She had a cameo role in the Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles.
Her biggest role was in the 1987 film Anna: a fading Czech film star turns her life around in the United States and mentors younger actress Paulina Pozkova. Kirkland won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar alongside Cher in Moonstruck, Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, Holly Hunter in Broadcasting News and Meryl Streep in Irongrass.
“Kirkland is one of those actresses whose talent was an open secret to her fellow actors but a mystery to the general public,” the Los Angeles critic wrote in her review. “After this powerful performance, there should be no confusion as to her identity.”
Kirkland's small screen acting credits include roles on Criminal Minds, Roseanne, The Case of the Head, and she has also made regular appearances on Valley of the Dolls and Charlie's Angels.
Born in New York, Kirkland's mother was a fashion editor at Vogue and Life magazines and encouraged her daughter to take up modeling at age 5. Kirkland graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and studied with Philip Burton, Richard Burton's mentor, and Lee Strasberg, a master of the Method school of acting. Her first breakthrough came as Andy Warhol in 13 Most Beautiful Women in 1964. She appeared nude as a kidnapped rape victim in Terrence McNally's off-Broadway Sweet Eros.
Some of her early roles were Shakespearean, including the lover Helena in New York Shakespeare Festival producer Joseph Papp's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Miranda in the off-Broadway production of The Tempest.
“I don't think any actor can really call himself an actor unless he or she spends time on Shakespeare,” she said. Los Angeles Times in 1991. “It shows up, it always shows up in the work, at some point, whether it’s simply an inability to control your breathing, or an inability to appreciate language like poetry and music, or a lack of the power that Shakespeare automatically instills in you when you take on one of his characters.”
Kirkland was a member of several New Age groups, taught seminars on insight transformation, and was a longtime member of an affiliate church of the Spiritual Inner Awareness Movement, whose followers believe in the transcendence of the soul.
She reached her career nadir when she rode naked on a pig in the 1969 film Futz. Guardian columnist named the worst movie he's ever seen. “It was about a man who fell in love with a pig, and even by the bleak standards of the time it was bleak,” he wrote.
Kirkland was also known for stripping off for many other roles and public engagements, which Time magazine dubbed her “The New Isadora Duncan of Nudothespism.”
Kirkland volunteered for people with AIDS, cancer and heart disease, fed the homeless through the American Red Cross, participated in hospice telethons and advocated for prisoners, especially young people.
