In Remembrance: Hope Lange

     Hope Lange, who was nominated for an Academy Award nomination for her role in 1957’s Peyton Place, has passed away on Friday, December 19, 2003 in Los Angeles. She was 72.

     Lange was born on November 28 1931 in Redding Ridge, Connecticut to show business parents. Her mother was a stage actress and her father was a composer and arranger for Broadway impresario Florence Ziegfeld. After her father’s death, her mother moved the family to Greenwich Village in New York City to open a restaurant. Growing up she studied dancing and appeared on Broadway. It was while waitressing at her mother’s restaurant that Lange met Eleanor Roosevelt, who had an apartment nearby, and was soon walking the Roosevelt’s famous Scottish terrier Fala. It was walking Fala that a picture of Lange appeared in a newspaper, which led to modeling offers.

     In 1956, she married actor Don Murray, who encouraged Lange to expand her career from modeling and advertising work to acting. Her first role was opposite Marilyn Monroe in the 1956 comedy Bus Stop, for which she received much critical praise.

     It was Lange’s second role that would make her a star on the rise. As Selena Cross, the poverty stricken teenage girl who is first raped by her stepfather and then suspected of his murder in the 1957 controversial melodrama Peyton Place, Lange wowed critics and earned herself an Academy Award nomination in the Best Supporting Actress category. She would also appear in such films as The Young Lions (1958) with Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando and The Best Of Everything (1959) with Joan Crawford. Despite fine performances in the films Wild In The Country (1961) with Elvis Presley, Pocketful Of Miracles (1961) with Glenn Ford and Bette Davis, the romantic comedy Love Is A Ball (1963) with John Ford and the 1968 mystery Jigsaw, she never quite caught the public’s attention to catapult her into Hollywood’s top tier.

     She migrated to television in 1968 to star in the series The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, for which she won two Emmy Awards. More recently she appeared in the films Blue Velvet (1984) and Clear And Present Danger (1996).