Pat Carroll, who became known for her television performances as the self-described “dowager queen of game shows” before going on to earn critical acclaim for her stage work, died Saturday at her home in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. She was 95 years old.
The death of his spouse was announced on social media. His ex-girlfriend, Drury Karsian, told the AP that he died. She did not say how he perished.
Ms. Carroll began her career in television as a sketch comedian in the 1950s and later appeared on “Password,” “I’ve Got a Secret” and other game shows throughout the 1960s. She was also seen on a variety of shows, including “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Police Woman,” as well as dramatic series. However, when she was 50 in 1977, she decided to turn her career around after a part she played in that year.
During a 1979 interview with The New York Times, she recalled playing Pearl Markowitz, an overprotective mother, on the short-lived comedy “Busting Loose,” and asking herself if there was anything more for her to do on television as a mother.
Rather of happily becoming a part of this preconceived notion, Ms. Carroll hired Marty Martin, a twenty-something Texas playwright, to produce a one-person show about Gertrude Stein for her in response.
“Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein” opened in 1979 and received amazing reviews. MCarroll’s first onscreen appearance, in a short film called “Medea,” took place shortly after the play closed. She was 18 years old at the time and had never acted before. The role of Medea (played by Carroll) is one that has become iconic in many subsequent representations because its ambiguity as to who is insane – both mother and daughter — has been used to reflect upon women’s complex relationship with madness over time. In 1980, she won a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award for her performance, while her recording of the play received a Grammy Award for best spoken word in the same category.
“It was the jewel in my crown,” In 2011, when she was 75 years old and still spoke often to the press, Ms. Carroll recalled how the play evolved: “They asked me what my shortcomings were, and I said they were too many.”. “I was recently divorced, I had gained a lot of weight, and the phone was not ringing. It was not the agents’ or directors’ or producers’ fault that the phone was not ringing. I thought, ‘I am responsible for creating some kind of work.’ And I began thinking of people to do.”
In Washington, ten years later, Ms. Carroll, now seeking for difficult employment, was sought out for the part of the conniving, overweight — and clearly male — Falstaff in a production of “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”
“When Ms. Carroll makes her first entrance, a nervous silence falls over the audience at the Shakespeare Theater at the Folger here, as hundreds of eyes search for some trace of the woman they’ve seen in a thousand television reruns. What they find instead is a Falstaff who could have stepped out of a formal painted portrait: a balding, aged knight with scattered tufts of silver hair and whiskers, an enormous belly, pink cheeks and squinting, froggy eyes that peer out through boozy mists. The sight is so eerie you grab onto your seat.” Frank Rich wrote in The Times.
Patricia Ann Carroll was born on May 5, 1927, in Shreveport, Louisiana, and grew up in Los Angeles. Her father, Maurice, worked for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power; her mother, Kathryn (Meagher) Carroll, was a real estate agent and office manager.
In 1947, Ms. Carroll moved to Plymouth, Massachusetts, where she worked at the Priscilla Beach Theater and, she claimed, ate, drank and breathed about the theater. That same year she made her professional stage debut in “A Goose for the Gander,” directed by Gloria Swanson. She soon arrived in New York City and found employment as a shine boy.
