Elizabeth Ann Cole (born August 30, 1939), known professionally as Elizabeth Ashley, is an American actress of theatre, film, and television. She has been nominated for three Tony Awards, winning once in 1962 for Take Her, She's Mine. Ashley was also nominated for the BAFTA and Golden Globe awards for her supporting performance in The Carpetbaggers (1964), and was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1991 for Evening Shade. Ashley was a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson 24 times. She appeared in several episodes of In the Heat of the Night as Maybelle Chesboro. She also appeared in an episode of Mannix, "The Dark Hours", in 1974. She is a 2024 inductee into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

Early life

Ashley was born Elizabeth Ann Cole in Ocala, Florida, to music teacher Arthur Kingman Cole and the former Lucille Ayer. She grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Ayer left Elizabeth's father shortly after she was born and did not remarry. Ashley compared her to the Southern matriarch Amanda Wingfield from The Glass Menagerie.

Ashley left Louisiana State University after her freshman year and moved to New York. There, she studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in the same class as Jessica Walter and Brenda Vaccaro. She supported herself financially by working as the Jell-O pudding girl on a television program and as a showroom model.

Career

Ashley has acted in film, television, and theater roles in seven decades, starting in the 1960s.

Theater career

Ashley won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for Take Her, She's Mine.

In 1963, she starred as the female lead, Corie, in the original Broadway production of Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park. Ashley earned a Tony nomination for the role. The play was also a significant success that ran for four consecutive years. After a mental breakdown, Ashley took a sabbatical from the play to attempt a film career in Hollywood. At the end of the break, she decided to leave permanently, paying producer Saint Subber $35,000 in a breach-of-contract penalty. Ashley resented Subber for exacting the penalty when the show was financially successful, but said she regretted leaving due to her appreciation for director Mike Nichols.

After ten years in Hollywood, Ashley returned to Broadway as Maggie the Cat in the American Shakespeare Theatre's 1974 revival of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Her performance earned strong praise from critics. John Simon wrote that Ashley "performs with such astonishing, such uncanny precision that not even her heady loveliness distracts us from her acting. Miss this performance at your soul's peril." Mel Gussow wrote that she "richly conveyed" Maggie's complexities. Clive Barnes concluded that while she was praised extensively for the role, she was still undersold. Ashley received a Tony nomination for the performance.

Ashley appeared on Broadway as Dr. Livingstone in Agnes of God (1982) and was a replacement in the role of Mattie Fae during the original Broadway run of August: Osage County.

Film and television career

She has been featured in major motion pictures over five decades, including early roles in The Carpetbaggers (1964), Ship of Fools (1965), and The Third Day (1965). Her other film credits include The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker (1971), Rancho Deluxe (1975), Coma (1978), Paternity (1981), Dragnet (1987), and Vampire's Kiss (1989), and she starred as the villain in the controversial film Windows (1980).

She first appeared with Burt Reynolds in a 1969 season episode of Love, American Style, then later in the movie Paternity in 1981, as a guest star in his television series B.L. Stryker in 1989, and finally as a cast member in his final television series, Evening Shade, from 1990 to 1994 as Aunt Frieda Evans.

Ashley had the role of Kate in Sandburg's Lincoln, a six-part dramatization that ran on NBC in the mid-1970s. Her other television appearances include the 1987 miniseries The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, and guest roles in Ben Casey; Route 66; Sam Benedict; Stoney Burke; The Six Million Dollar Man; Family; Miami Vice; Caroline in the City; Mission: Impossible; Murder, She Wrote; Dave's World; Law & Order; Law & Order: Special Victims Unit; Touched by an Angel; The Larry Sanders Show; Homicide: Life on the Street; Russian Doll; and Better Things. She was featured in 14 episodes of the HBO series Treme as Aunt Mimi.

Book

Ashley's autobiography Actress: Postcards from the Road was published in a hardcover edition on June 1, 1978, by M. Evans & Co (now part of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group). A paperback publication followed on October 12, 1979, through Fawcett Publications.

Personal life

Ashley is thrice married and divorced. Her first and second husbands were actors James Farentino and George Peppard. The latter was her leading man in her first movie, The Carpetbaggers (1964). The couple had a son, Christian. Her divorce from Peppard is rumored to have caused the cancellation of his television series Banacek. According to an unconfirmed story, he quit the show to prevent her from receiving a larger percentage of his earnings as part of their divorce settlement. Filmink called the account of Peppard in Ashley's memoirs "fascinating – paying tribute to his talent, charisma and kindness, as well as his violent, abusive, alcoholic nature."

At 25, Ashley retired from acting "to make a home for my husband, see that he had his dinner on time, realize myself as a woman." She resumed her career four years later. In a 1974 profile in The New York Times, she denounced her ex-spouse and the institution of marriage: "A man I was married to once said to me, ‘Everything you do I could hire done better.' [...] And I thought to myself, oh my God. Is that what it's about? Loving, in marriage, becomes for a woman doing for free what he can hire done better. Well, I don't care for that, myself. I found marriage to be mutilating, barbaric, inhumane. People get married for social reasons, for convenience, for emotional safety. It wasn't for me."In 1975, Ashley married James McCarthy. They divorced in 1981. Between her second and third marriage, she also dated writer Tom McGuane and credits their liaison with reawakening a sexuality that she used when she portrayed Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

While starring in the long-running Barefoot in the Park on Broadway, Ashley suffered mental issues and checked into a psychiatric hospital. Though it was originally reported as bronchitis, the breakdown ended up informing her decision to leave the play entirely.

In the 1980s, Ashley injured herself in a sailing crash in the Caribbean and received major facial reconstructive surgery.

Filmography

Film

Television

Stage

References

External links

• InnerVIEWS with Ernie Manouse: Elizabeth Ashley (TV Interview)