Piper Laurie and Portraying Guilt and Shame

The arc of Piper Laurie’s acting career is an unusual one. She started out like so many – doing guest spots on television and small roles in often nondescript films. But if you’re as good as Piper Laurie, and you keep at it, eventually you will find the right role. Or maybe it finds you. 

Regardless, when Laurie appeared as Sarah in Robert Rossen’s all-time great pool shark film The Hustler, she finally arrived after a decade of struggle in the industry, and she did so with force. There she is, just sitting in an ordinary bus stop diner, when Paul Newman’s Fast Eddie Felson catches sight of her and takes a presumptuous seat across from her in the diner booth. She realizes Felson is coming on to her and when she points out that her bus is arriving soon, she throws in, “That wouldn’t leave us much time, would it?” 

From there begins one of the great doomed romances of ‘60s cinema. Hell, of any era really. As Sarah embarks on a town-to-town pool hustling journey with the self-destructive Eddie, the lame-legged Sarah seems to know on some level that this will all end badly, and yet somehow allows herself to hope. That tough dame exterior breaks down after the midpoint of the film, and when she debases herself in the bedroom with Freddie’s benefactor (a repugnant George C. Scott), the die is cast. There is a scene of self-loathing in front of a hotel bathroom mirror that while comparably brief, is as painful and pungent as DeNiro railing against himself in the backstage mirror at the club his Jake LaMotta owns in Raging Bull. 

All of the outward toughness Sarah exudes crumbles before our eyes, revealing the frightened and fragile young woman underneath. She allowed herself to believe, and the cost of believing in Eddie is just too damn high.

It’s an extraordinary, fearless, and vanity-free performance. One that you might have thought would have led Laurie to more great film roles. When that didn’t happen, Laurie disappeared from film for fifteen years, appearing mostly on stage, and in a handful of one-off TV performances.

When Laurie finally returned, she once again proved what a magnificent actor she was. As Margaret White in Brian DePalma’s touchstone 1976 horror film Carrie, Laurie played the Christian fundamentalist mother to Sissy Spacek’s title character, and in doing so, she elevated the film well beyond its genre. 

Beneath DePalma’s Hitchcockian directorial moves, the pervy shower scene that opens the film, and his penchant for treating subtlety like an anathema, was a treatise on high school bullying and the suffocating nature of extremist religious beliefs. Nancy Allen’s vile young beauty covered the former, and Laurie’s Margaret staked claim to the latter. 

As Margaret White, Laurie perfectly pitches her hysteria to match that of DePalma’s style.  In doing so, she took great risks as an actor. Were she not so fully committed to playing a woman who shames her daughter for having her period and growing breasts (or “dirty pillows” as she called them), she might have seemed ridiculous. 

But there’s something in Laurie’s courageous work in Carrie that is so undeniable (and even predictive of the extremism that grips much of the world now), that she simply could not be dismissed. 

While The Hustler’s Sarah and Carrie’s Margaret might not seem to have much in common at first, with a deeper look, one can see that both were possessed by a form of self-hatred.  In both cases, there is a sexual element. Sarah thinks that’s mostly what her partially handicapped body has to offer, while Margaret hates herself for ever offering it to a man in the first place. In fact, she hates her sexuality so much that she wishes aloud to Carrie that she regrets not taking her own life after her first experience with intercourse, which she considers a great sin.

Sarah smothers her shame in alcohol, Margaret suffocates her and her daughter with “the good book.” Both performances are stunning, brutal, and exceptional in every way. The Motion Picture Academy noticed both, nominating Laurie as Best Leading Actress in the former and Best Supporting in the latter.

Laurie showcased the burden of guilt again in 1986’s Children of a Lesser God as a mother who sent her disabled child away to a school for the deaf because she believes her daughter’s malady caused the end of her marriage. It’s not easy to engender sympathy as a woman who turned her back on her deaf child, but Laurie somehow manages, and her scenes with Marlee Matlin (as the daughter) carry a sizable portion of the back half of this lovely film. For a third and final time, Laurie was nominated for Best Supporting Actress. 

After Children of a Lesser God, Laurie’s next (and perhaps last) great success was in David Lynch’s soap opera on hallucinogens TV series, Twin Peaks. In the dual role of Catherine and Mr. Tojamura, Laurie’s droll line-readings and upturned eyebrow stole many a scene. Laurie was nominated as Best Supporting Actress by the Television Academy for both seasons of the show. 

Post-Peaks, Laurie never scored another role quite up to her prodigious talents (although her work in Sean Penn’s deeply undervalued The Crossing Guard, the indie-flick The Dead Girl, and Robert Rodriguez’s high school horror film The Faculty are all worthy of note).

In looking over Laurie’s somewhat less than voluminous resume, what becomes clear is that we saw the best of Piper Laurie on screens both silver and small all too infrequently. But when her best was presented. It was absolutely unmissable.

Piper Laurie died on October 14, 2023. She was 91 years old.