Cloris Leachman

About the Cloris Leachman

Cloris Leachmanwas an American actress and comedienne whose career spanned nearly eight decades. She won many accolades, including eight Primetime Emmy Awards from 22 nominations, making her the most nominated and, along with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, most awarded performer in Emmy history. Leachman also won an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, and a Golden Globe Award. In her early career, she was known for her versatility. Another unique trait of Leachman’s acting style was her distinctive physicality, where she utilized props to accentuate and express her roles’ characterizations.

Born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa, Leachman attended Northwestern University and began appearing in local plays as a teenager. After competing in the 1946 Miss America pageant, she secured a scholarship to study under Elia Kazan at the Actors Studio in New York City, making her professional debut in 1948. In film, she appeared in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Showas a neglected 1950s housewife who has an affair with a student of her husband, a high-school gym teacher; she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. She was part of Mel Brooks’s ensemble cast, playing Frau Blucher in Young Frankensteinand Madame Defarge in History of the World, Part Iand a Golden Globe for the spinoff Phyllisand Malcolm in the Middle (2000-06). Her other television credits include Gunsmoke (1961), Wagon Train (1962), The Twilight Zone (1961; 2003), and Raising Hope (2010-2014). She also acted in the films Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), WUSA (1970), Yesterday (1981), Castle in the Sky (1986), Spanglish (2004), and Mrs. Harris (2005). She wrote her memoir Cloris: My Autobiography (2009).