Joan Hackett

“Difficult to work with.” That’s a phrase that’s depressingly common in the biographies of women I’ve written about for this column. Joan Hackett’s IMDb bio reads as though it’s written by someone in love with her, and it’s still in the second sentence. But apparently Dirk Wayne Summers, who directed her in the docudrama Harnessing the Sun, found her so great to work with that he willingly hired a “clairvoyant aura reader” to come on set for a week at Hackett’s request. And said he’d’ve hired Uri Geller if she wanted it because the experience of working with her was so great.

Joan Hackett is a prominent part of my childhood, in fact; I watched her many times in Support Your Local Sheriff. I’m not sure I ever saw anything else she was in until I was an adult except an uncredited appearance in The North Avenue Irregulars, and since she doesn’t have a listed character name on IMDb, I assume she’s basically an extra in that. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why I hadn’t seen her in anything else, even though there are several people in that who I’d seen in many, many things. Probably it was because she mostly did stuff for grown-ups, right?

True enough. Oh, Treasure of Matecumbe, and an extremely late Roy Rogers movie called Mackintosh and T.J., but that’s about it for kids’ movies. But most of what she did was for adults, be it The Last of Sheila, The Group, or The Terminal Man. To this day, I’m not sure I’ve seen a single episode of Bonanza, not because it’s for adults—after all, I am one now—but because it just didn’t appeal to me as a child and I haven’t sought it out. Even if I had, the odds that I would have seen her two episodes are fairly small.

But the issue was really that Hackett died young. She had ovarian cancer. She had to attend the Oscar ceremony for Only When I Laugh, for which she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, in a wheelchair. She had a few releases after that, including at least one posthumous one, but Hackett died before I was quite starting to pay attention. It would be quite a long time before it would occur to me to wonder what else people had done and why I hadn’t seen them in other things. And even longer before it became easy to look that sort of thing up.

Honestly, though, Hackett sounds like a hoot. She checked herself out of the hospital to throw a wedding party for Paul Simon and Carrie Fisher, and her mausoleum marker says, “Go away—I’m asleep.” I still only really know her as Prudy from Support Your Local Sheriff, but it’s a fine role and she’s a lot of fun in it. She’s so charming and has such great chemistry with James Garner. And she’s definitely not someone you’d want to cross. It’s not that I dislike Suzanne Pleshette, goodness knows, but Patience is no Prudy.