- published: 10 Jan 2012
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Sissy Spacek (born Mary Elizabeth Spacek; December 25, 1949) is an American actress and singer. She came to international prominence for her role as Carrie White in Brian De Palma's 1976 horror film Carrie (based on the first novel by Stephen King) for which she earned her first Academy Award nomination. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as country star Loretta Lynn in the 1980 film Coal Miner's Daughter. She has been nominated for an Oscar a total of six times, and is also known for her role as Holly Sargis in Terrence Malick's 1973 film Badlands.
Spacek is mainly a dramatic actress, but also has made comedies. The films that Spacek has starred in have earned more than $1 billion worldwide.
Spacek was born on Christmas Day, 1949, in Quitman, Texas. She is the daughter of Virginia Frances (née Spilman) and Edwin Arnold Spacek, Sr., a county agricultural agent. Spacek's paternal grandparents, Mary Červenka and Arnold A. Špaček (who served as Mayor of Granger, Texas in Williamson County), were of Czech (Moravian) and German ancestry. Her mother, of English and Irish descent, was from the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.
Theodore Scott Glenn (born January 26, 1941) is an American actor. His roles have included Wes Hightower in Urban Cowboy (1980), astronaut Alan Shepard in The Right Stuff (1983), Emmett in Silverado (1985), Commander Bart Mancuso in The Hunt for Red October (1990), Jack Crawford in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Roger in Training Day (2001), Ezra Kramer in The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), and The Wise Man in Sucker Punch (2011).
Glenn was born Theodore Scott Glenn in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Elizabeth, a homemaker, and Theodore Glenn, a business executive. He grew up in Pittsburgh and has Irish and Native American ancestry. During his childhood he was regularly ill, and for a year was bed-ridden. Through intense training programs he recovered from his illnesses, also overcoming a limp. After graduating from a Pittsburgh high school, Glenn entered The College of William and Mary where he majored in English. He then joined the Marine Corps for three years and worked roughly five months as a reporter for the Kenosha Evening News. He then tried to become an author, but found he could not write good dialogue. To learn the art of dialogue, he began taking acting classes.
The River is a 1984 film which tells the story of a struggling farm family in the Tennessee valley trying keep its farm going in the face of bank foreclosures, floods, and other hard times. The father faces the dilemma of having to work as a strikebreaker in a steel mill to keep his family farm from foreclosure. The film was based on the true story of farmers who unknowingly took the jobs as strikebreakers at a steel mill after their crops had been destroyed by rain. It stars Mel Gibson, Sissy Spacek, Scott Glenn and Billy Green Bush.
The film was written by Robert Dillon and Julian Barry. It was directed by Mark Rydell.
Director Mark Rydell viewed the characters in this drama as iconically American, and he was eager to cast Sissy Spacek as the farm wife because of her performance in Coal Miner's Daughter and her home on a farm in near Charlottesville, Virginia. Rydell said, "She is the consummate American rural young woman, with strength and fiber and a luminous quality." Mel Gibson begged Rydell to let him play the Tennessee farmer who reminded him of his father, but the director was reluctant because of Gibson’s Australian accent. Before Gibson left for England to film The Bounty, he begged Rydell not to cast the part yet. Rydell recalled, "He came back to my house in Los Angeles and started reading the script, talking, reading the newspaper, in this perfect Tennessee accent. I was really impressed, even when he stood next to Sissy, who's like a tuning fork when it comes to accents, he had damn well done it."