Elizabeth Hartman Would Be 80 Today

Elizabeth Hartman (1943-87) burst onto American movie screens nearly 60 years ago, and remained there, in many prominent and notable films, for nearly a decade. Then a variety of factors combined to thwart her future progress, and then her future, period.

A Youngstown native, Hartman gained her first experiences in the region, at the Youngstown Playhouse, at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon) in Pittsburgh, and then the Cleveland Playhouse, prior to making the move to New York. In 1964 she was cast in the play Everybody Out, the Castle is Sinking, by Henry and Phoebe Ephron, Norah Ephron‘s parents, featuring Marge Champion, Nigel Patrick, and Richard Mulligan. It opened in Boston, but didn’t make it to New York. But it did grab the attention of scouts, resulting in her first movie, Guy Green’sA Patch of Blue (1964).

I watched this Civil Rights era relic on television several times over the years. It’s earnest and faultless moral makes one wish it was better, but it hasn’t aged well. It’s always stuck out in my mind for containing one of the funniest unintentionally funny lines I know of in any movie: “Here’s your choppers, Ole Pa”, repeatedly uttered by Hartman as she hands a set of dentures to her grandfather, played by Wallace Ford in his last role.

A Patch of Blue is basically a fairy tale, Chaplin’s City Lightsremade as a Sidney Poitier vehicle: misfit falls for pretty blind girl in a world where their romance can’t possibly work out. Their main obstacle is Hartman’s cruel, shrewish, and stupidly racist mother, played by Shelley Winters in one of her long line of prostitute roles. Filmmaker Green, a Brit, was plainly fascinated by this tragic and absurd element of American culture: that a family of ignorant, illiterate “poor white trash” would be so blind in their own way, that they’d reject this handsome, educated, and well-off suitor just because of something as superficial and meaningless as the color of his skin. And of course the blind girl lives in perfect innocence and can “see” him for who he really is. It’s simplistic, by-the-numbers stuff, this entire sub-genre, but it worked wonders on me as a young person 10 and 20 years later. And audiences loved it when it was initially released. Hartman was nominated for an Oscar (the youngest person ever nominated for Best Actress up ’til the time), and won a Golden Globe award.

So Hartman started out at the top — and stayed there for awhile. The ensuing stretch of her career seems charmed. After A Patch of Blue, she was a prominent part of the ensemble in Sidney Lumet’s 1966 adaptation of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, and then played the female lead in the early Coppola film You’re a Big Boy Now (1966). She then went on to co-star with Jason Robards in Dan Curtis’s TV adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which was interrupted by an actor’s strike. (When the strike was over, the actors were unavailable so Curtis recast it and reshot it; it aired in 1968 with Jack Palance). She was also announced to play Neely O’Hara in Valley of the Dolls, but then Patty Duke (the bigger name) beat her out at the last minute.

In 1968 Hartman played a supporting role in John Frankenheimer’sThe Fixer. And something else happened that year. She married aspiring screenwriter and director Gill Dennis, whom she had first met at Carnegie Mellon. This move would prove to have some pretty unfortunate repercussions for her career, though not at first. She had great roles in two more hit films: Don Siegel’s The Beguiled (1971) with Clint Eastwood and Geraldine Page, and the low-budget surprise smash Walking Tall (1973) with Joe Don Baker. As well as guest shots on Night Gallery,Love American Style, and The Wide World of Mystery.

Meanwhile, Dennis was attending the AFI Conservatory, a member of its first graduating class in 1971. One can’t help but notice that Hartman has no screen roles between 1968 and 1971. Among her credits from this time are the botched, unreleased In Pursuit of Treasure (1971) by AFI student Stanton Kaye, alongside Scott Glenn, Bonnie Bedelia and Jay Silverheels; and her husband’s student film Intermission (1973) opposite fellow AFI student Thomas Rickman. She then appeared in a 1975 stage production of Rickman’s play Balaam, again, directed by her husband. Rickman was no slouch; he would go on to write Coal Miner’s Daughter — but that was in the future. All of this under the radar activity definitely seems to have spoiled the momentum of her career.

In 1978 Hartman entered a psychiatric facility. She separated from Dennis the following year. Those who knew her say she was depressed and insecure. But wouldn’t you be, at this stage? Still, she managed to pull it back together for a couple of years. She was in a 1980 TV pilot called Willow B: Women in Prison, with Deborah Clinger, Trisha Noble, Carol Lynley, Sally Kirkland, and Liz Torres. This was followed by Larry Cohen’s teenage horror comedy Full Moon High (1981) with Adam Arkin and Ed McMahon. That same year she appeared in the touring production of the 1980 Broadway revival of Morning’s at Seven. But she was beset by anxiety, paranoia, and depression. She attempted suicide with sleeping pills, and had to bow out. Her last screen credit was the voice of Mrs. Brisby in the animated film The Secret of NIMH (1982). In 1984 her divorce from Gill Dennis was finalized. His first major screen credit, as co-writer of Return to Oz,was the following year.

Hartman returned to Pittsburgh after The Secret of NIMH. There, she received treatment for her mental illness at an outpatient clinic and worked in a museum. After years of this, in 1987, she leapt out the fifth floor window of her apartment and silenced her demons. She was only 43.