Jill Clayburgh has died. She was sixty six. The Associated Press reports that she died at her home in Lakeville, Conn. The cause of her death was leukemia.
Ms Clayburgh was a stage and screen actress. Her best known movie is the 1978 film An Unmarried Woman, which brought her an Oscar nomination. She played "women who were confident and capable yet not completely flawless."
"There was practically nothing for women to do on the screen in the 1950s and 1960s," Clayburgh said in an interview with the Associated Press while promoting An Unmarried Woman in 1978. "Sure, Marilyn Monroe was great, but she had to play a one-sided character, a vulnerable sex object. It was a real fantasy."
I remember seeing her in the comedy movie, Starting Over, starring Burt Reynolds, on TV in Ally McBeal as Ally McBeal's mother, in Silver Streak with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor.
Jill Clayburgh, R.I.P.