Patty McCormack

I’ll be honest—Patty McCormack is indeed one of those people who got moved up the schedule. She’s eighty, and the person whose place she took is 52. So, you know, I’ve made a choice. It can always go wrong, but the odds are that moving McCormack up the schedule is a wise choice. She’s actually over a year younger than my mother, but given my mother’s own health scare in the last few weeks, I’m over sensitive on this subject. My mother is now fine, and I have no reason to believe that McCormack’s health is bad, but this is a thing I sometimes do since this column was initially supposed to replace having to write obituaries all the time.

McCormack’s father was friends with Walter Matthau. Wikipedia claims it was as a favour that Matthau set her up with his own agent, but by the time she was a teenager, she was already well past her most famous performance, and her second lead role came out that year. She’d already made her Broadway debut in the play Touchstone with Ossie Davis. She was at the time the youngest Best Supporting Actress nominee in Oscar history—the second-youngest acting nominee full stop. She is still the fifth-youngest Supporting Actress nominee, though I don’t feel like figuring out where she is on the list as a whole. She lost to Dorothy Malone for Written on the Wind, a lesser-known Sirk.

I’ve long been of the opinion that there needs to be a committee set up for child actors, stars in particular, as they age. Mentors in the industry who have been there, done that, and can tell you how to just keep going on, and McCormack is a prime example. She is eighty years old and you and I both probably picture her as a blonde moppet with pigtails, unless you’re a particular fan of, say, The Ropers. But she’s had credits consistently the whole time. They aren’t all good, but she’s still working. She has three credits from this year alone, although two of them are podcasts.

Oh, they haven’t all been winners, and some of them are absolutely stunt-casting. Rob Lowe chose her to play the psychiatrist in his made-for-TV version of The Bad Seed for obvious reasons, of course. And she reprised the role three years ago in The Bad Seed Returns. And, yes, she’s had the Standard TV Career for a lot of her life. But also she was in The Master and Frost/Nixon and if casting her as Pat Nixon was stunt-casting, I don’t see how. “Psycho Hillbilly Cabin Massacre!” is a little more obvious that way.

I do have equal admiration for people who say, “Yeah, I’m done with Hollywood” and go on to be accountants and upholsterers and things as people who make a career on bit parts on Remington Steele and Emergency! But I’m also fully aware that making a living on bit parts is not easy. Even if you’re known as a pigtailed moppet who is also, you know, a psychotic killer. But let’s be clear—McCormack was so good as Rhoda Penmark that it’s not surprising her career continued after that.