People magazine article from 9/7/87
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Elizabeth Hartman
BunnyCake — 13 years ago(October 03, 2012 05:31 AM)
www.people.com/people/archive/article/0%2C%2C20097064%2C00.html
The story ran after her death. People archives do not include the photos that accompanied the original articles.
"That's why her hair is so big - it's full of secrets!" -
Ariane1998 — 12 years ago(December 22, 2013 08:16 PM)
Elizabeth Hartman
By Michael Ryan
UPDATED 09/07/1987 at 01:00 AM EDT Originally published 09/07/1987 at 01:00 AM EDT
Her final days were bound together by routine. On June 10 she probably rose early and made coffee, as she always did. She dressed as she always did, in a crisp cotton shirt, chino trousers and sensible Rockport walking shoes. She gathered her strawberry blond hair in a bun at the back of her neck; the style was severe, but it did not obscure her delicate beauty. Later, some of the neighbors would tell reporters that they had heard that this quiet, anonymous 45-year-old woman had once acted in a movie; she was certainly striking enough.
She almost surely read the paper; she took the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette every morning and worked her way through it. Perhaps, that morning, she listened to her records: She knew hundreds of Broadway tunes by heart; she could listen to them endlessly. We know that she became very upset. We will probably never know why, exactly, she opened the window next to her turntable, five stories above the ground, stepped out, and became, in the words of a Pittsburgh detective, "an ordinary suicide."
Those words were unintentionally cruel, and very wrong.
Elizabeth Hartman was an actress, and there was nothing ordinary about her. Before her life went wildly, tragically wrong in the last decade, she seemed destined to be one of the great stars of our lifetime. But fate, and illness, intervened. Her marriage, to a man she adored, unraveled; a succession 5b4of psychiatrists and medical professionals found no curenor even an exact diagnosisfor her illness. Hidden demons made her uncomfortable, eventually drove her to her deathand perhaps the greatest tragedy is that no one else will ever know what they were.
"There was an old-line producer at MGM who likened her to Katharine Hepburn," says Howard Rubin, her first agent. "When you looked at her screen test, her raw talent leapt out of the film. She was nominated for an Academy Award for her first screen performance." The film was A Patch of Blue, and in 1965 it was a startling, powerful picture. Sidney Poitier, at the height of his acting career, played a young black manthe film used the word "colored"who befriended a young white girl blinded by her mother in a drunken brawl. Elizabeth Hartman, just out of Boardman, Ohio, played the girl, Selina, with such a shimmering, transparent frailty and emotion that the film seemed not in the least contrived and patronizing, but powerful and true. The shy midwestem girl was soon competing with Julie Andrews, Simone Signoret, Samantha Eggar and Julie Christie for the Best Actress Oscar.
Christie won, for Darling, but frankly, that didn't bother Hartman. "Biff didn't act for the applause," says her sister, Janet Shoop. "She just loved the process of acting. She was the kind of girl who didn't want to go to the senior prom when2000 she was nominated for prom queen. Applause just didn't mean that much to her."
Elizabeth Hartman was born on Dec. 23, 1941, to an upper-middle-class family in Boardman, a suburb of Youngstown. Her father was a construction executive, her mother a housewife. Because Janether elder by only a yearcould not pronounce her sister's given name, Elizabeth was known to everyone by her sibling's childish pronunciation: She was always "Biff." She was a sensitive child. "I protected her," her sister recalls. "When she wouldn't make her bed, I would, so that she wouldn't get into trouble. The joke in the family always used to be that people would say, 'Jan, you move the piano; Biff, you sit down, you look tired.' "
Some children decide to become actresses; as Janet Shoop tells it, her sister simply knew that she was one. "Our aunt took us to New York when Biff was 11 or so; unbeknownst to anybody, Biff had written to a number of model agencies and set up appointments. She was interested in modeling as a way to get into acting. We went around to all the appointments. They were very nice and said, 'Go back home and let us know when you finish school.' "
Hartman acted in high school; her interpretation of Emily in Thornton Wilder's Our Town made her a local celebrity. A few years later, she played the same role opposite Henry Fonda on Broadway. She spent a year at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, studying theater. But everybody who knew her agrees that she hated schooland few thought she needed to learn much more about her craft in any case. For two summers she worked as an apprentice with John Kenley's theater company in Warren, Ohio. "She had a quality," Kenley recalls. "She was ethereal, really spiritual. She was very pretty in a Victorian way. She could have been as big a star as Meryl Streep." Kenley sent her to New York, importuning friends in the theater to give her a chance. "I've never done it for anyone else, before or since," he says. His confidence was well placed: Within months she was cast in A Patch of Blue. Publicly, she was an overnight success.
But the troubled side -
BugisStreetAnnie — 10 years ago(August 13, 2015 01:31 PM)
"Things were getting more difficult for her," Shoop says. "She was very frightened and fearfulwith paranoid kinds of fears, seeing signs and symbols nobody else could seenot frightening to other people, but frightening to her. Her doctor thought it would be better if she had the support of family nearby." After a quiet summer in her sister's suburban home, Hartman moved to her studio apartment in a stately, old-fashioned building popular with Pittsburgh dowagers. On good days she could walk to libraries and museumsand to the Western Psychiatric 1908Institute and her doctor's office. For a while she did volunteer work at a local museum and talked to local theater groups about returning to the stagebut the pressure was too much.
I can understand what it is like to suffer for that sort of crippling anxiety and depression because I have it. It's very difficult to face people. I recently quit a part time job I have because I could no longer handle it.
One of the things I'm curious about was how was she able to afford rent on an apartment and go to a Psychiatric Institute while only doing volunteering work. I would try to seek out treatments myself if there was a way to get it for free. I did wonder if she wasn't on SSI or Social Security disability and Medicaid was paying the expenses but for whatever reason they didn't mention this. Her family could have also been paying for it because it usually isn't that easy to get disability. I've tried before.
AN EDIT: Oh I guess that is what a dowager is. I had to look it up. But it's supposedly a title or money left by a late husband (even though I believe they mentioned her ex-husband was still alive.) -
fmpol — 10 years ago(February 04, 2016 05:26 PM)
One of the things I'm curious about was how was she able to afford rent on an apartment and go to a Psychiatric Institute while only doing volunteering work. I would try to seek out treatments myself if there was a way to get it for free. I did wonder if she wasn't on SSI or Social Security disability and Medicaid was paying the expenses but for whatever reason they didn't mention this. Her family could have also been paying for it because it usually isn't that easy to get disability. I've tried before.
Here's another very long and insightful article from the LA TImes. It includes many quotes from her former co-stars as well as the answer to your question (" she was subsisting on disability insurance, Social Security benefits and family handouts "): -
LuciaJoyce — 12 years ago(March 02, 2014 12:12 AM)
I'd always been curious about Ms Hartman, ever since seeing Secret of NIMH as a kid. Even in voiceover there was a quality to her that seemed tremulous yet determined, frail yet resolute. By chance I saw You're A Big Boy Now and was taken by her performance; and now I've just finished Patch Of Blue and feel devastated that, unlike her fragile Selina, she couldn't be rescued from her illness. Thanks for posting the article.