1. Beatrice Whitney Straight was an American theatre, film, television and radio actress and a member of the prominent Whitney family.
15 Facts About Beatrice Straight
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Beatrice Straight was both an Academy Award and Tony Award winner, as well as a Primetime Emmy Award nominee.
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Beatrice Straight's performance is the shortest ever to win an Academy Award for acting.
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Beatrice Straight received an Primetime Emmy Award nomination for the miniseries The Dain Curse.
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Beatrice Whitney Straight was born in Old Westbury, New York, the daughter of Dorothy Payne Whitney of the Whitney family, and Willard Dickerman Straight, an investment banker, diplomat, and career US Army officer.
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In 1918, when Straight was four years old, her father died in France of influenza during the great epidemic while serving with the United States Army during World War I Following her mother's remarriage to British agronomist Leonard K Elmhirst in 1925, the family moved to Devon, England.
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Beatrice Straight returned to the United States and made her Broadway debut in the play The Possessed.
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From its inception, Beatrice Straight was a member of the Actors Studio, attending the class conducted three times weekly by founding member Robert Lewis; her classmates included Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Jerome Robbins, Sidney Lumet, and about 20 others.
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Beatrice Straight was active in the early days of television, appearing in anthology series such as Armstrong Circle Theatre, Hallmark Hall of Fame, Kraft Television Theatre, Studio One, Suspense, The United States Steel Hour, Playhouse 90, and dramatic series such as Dr Kildare, Ben Casey, The Defenders, Route 66, Mission: Impossible and St Elsewhere.
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Beatrice Straight worked infrequently in film and is perhaps remembered best for her role as a devastated wife confronting husband William Holden's infidelity in Network.
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On February 22,1942, Beatrice Straight married Louis Dolivet, Free French Leader, in Polk County, Iowa.
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At the time, Dolivet was a speaker at the National Farm Institute and Beatrice Straight was in the middle of the midwest road show of Twelfth Night.
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At the time of the wedding, her elder brother, Whitney Beatrice Straight, had been missing since August 1941, when his plane was shot down on the French coast.
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Beatrice Straight obtained a divorce from Dolivet in Reno, Nevada, on May 24,1949.
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Beatrice Straight's interment was at William Henry Lee Memorial Cemetery in New Marlborough, Massachusetts.