Sissy Spacek

Sissy Spacek was born Mary Elizabeth Spacek on December 25, 1949, in Quitman, Texas. Her father, Edwin Arnold Spacek Sr., was a county agricultural agent, and her mother, Virginia Frances, was a homemaker. Before acting became her profession, she pursued music in New York, recording a 1968 novelty single as Rainbo. She also worked as a photographic model and at Andy Warhol’s Factory. Her early screen appearances included Prime Cut, released in 1972. A far more consequential opportunity arrived when Terrence Malick cast her as Holly Sargis, the teenage narrator and accomplice in Badlands, his 1973 feature debut as director. Spacek’s breakthrough came with Brian De Palma’s Carrie in 1976. Playing Carrie White, a bullied high-school student whose telekinetic powers erupt after humiliation at prom, she earned her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. She followed it with Robert Altman’s 3 Women and worked again with Malick in Days of Heaven. In 1980 she portrayed country singer Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter, directed by Michael Apted. Spacek performed the film’s songs herself, including “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” and won the Academy Award for Best Actress. The performance brought her a Golden Globe Award and established her as a star. Her subsequent Academy Award nominations came for Costa-Gavras’s Missing, Mark Rydell’s The River, Bruce Beresford’s Crimes of the Heart, and Todd Field’s In the Bedroom. In Missing, she played Beth Horman, searching Chile for her journalist son after the 1973 coup. In the Bedroom, she and Tom Wilkinson portrayed parents devastated by their adult son’s murder; the 2001 film returned Spacek to Oscar contention. She also appeared in David Lynch’s The Straight Story and The Help, playing the sharp-tongued Mrs. Walters in the latter. Her six Best Actress nominations, from 1977 to 2002, produced one win, for Coal Miner’s Daughter. Spacek married production designer and director Jack Fisk in 1974; they had met while making Badlands, on which Fisk served as art director. Their daughters, Schuyler Fisk and Madison Fisk, have both worked in entertainment. On television, Spacek played Sally Rayburn in Netflix’s Bloodline from 2015 to 2017, receiving a Primetime Emmy nomination for the role. She later starred as Ruth Deaver in Castle Rock and as Ellen Bergman in Homecoming. In 2012, she published the memoir My Extraordinary Ordinary Life. Her screen career includes collaborations with Malick, De Palma, Altman, Lynch, and Field. Fisk directed her in Raggedy Man.