Madeleine Sherwood, 93, Actress on Stage, Film and ‘Flying Nun,’ Dies
By Sam Roberts
April 26, 2016
After Madeleine Sherwood, a Canadian actress, hitchhiked to New York in 1949, she slept on a stone bench outside the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue for two nights and subsisted on unbuttered rolls from the Automat.
She got a nursing job, but her patient died after 10 days, so she worked as a cigarette girl at the Havana Madrid nightclub on Broadway and modeled coats until, after two and a half years, her agent sent her to the stage director Jed Harris.
“I told him I’d done a TV show about witchcraft,” she recalled, “and he said, ‘You look like a witch.’”
It was a compliment. Harris was recruiting actors for the premiere of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.” Ms. Sherwood, who died on April 23 at 93, was cast as Mercy, the colonial servant who falsely accuses neighbors of witchcraft, and understudied Abigail, the minister’s niece whose accusations trigger the Salem trials. She was soon given the role of Abigail and originated it when the play opened on Broadway on Jan. 22, 1953, performing with “fire and skill,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times.
She went on to star in Broadway and film versions of Tennessee Williams’s plays but reached her widest audience as the strict but benevolent Rev. Mother Superior Placido in the proto-feminist 1960s television fantasy “The Flying Nun,” with Sally Field.
Reviewing that show in The Times in 1967, Jack Gould wrote that the premise of a 90-pound nun with an oversize, aerodynamic cornet offered the potential for “basically a one-joke event,” but added, “In the byplay with a bemused senior nun, played very effectively by Marge Redmond, and in the compassionate sternness of the mother superior, played by Madeleine Sherwood, there are the ingredients for a very human comedy in an uncommon environment.”
It ran for 82 episodes on ABC until April 1970.
In the 1950s, Ms. Sherwood was blacklisted for suspected Communist sympathies (around the time of her appearance in “The Crucible,” Arthur Miller’s allegory about McCarthyism), and in the 1960s she was an impassioned — and imprisoned — advocate for civil rights.
Madeleine Louise Helene Thornton was born in Montreal on Nov. 13, 1922, to Laurence Thornton and the former Yvonne Villard. The granddaughter of McGill University’s dean of dentistry, she first appeared in a church Passion play when she was 4 and was later cast in Canadian television dramas and soap operas. She attended the Yale School of Drama.
She never gave up her Canadian citizenship and returned to Canada in the early 1990s. She died at her childhood home in Saint-Hippolyte, Quebec, about 50 miles northwest of Montreal, according to Melissa Fitch, a family friend.
Her marriage to Robert Sherwood ended in divorce.
She is survived by their daughter, Chloe Fox; two grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
In a video interview by Miriam Laurence, titled “Madeleine’s Method: Recipe for the Actor,” Ms. Sherwood recalled going to New York after escaping from a hospital in Hartford, where she had been treated for postpartum depression and, she said, faced a lobotomy.
“All my life, since I was a tiny girl, my idea has been to be in New York and on the stage,” she told the columnist Ward Morehouse at the time, saying she had hitchhiked there.
In 1952, she filled in briefly for Kim Stanley on Broadway in Horton Foote’s “The Chase” before getting her big break as Abigail in “The Crucible.”
After “The Crucible,” Elia Kazan cast her as Mae Pollitt, the odious sister-in-law, in Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and as Miss Lucy, Boss Finley’s mistress, in Williams’s “Sweet Bird of Youth.” She reprized both roles on the screen. “She is perfection in the part,” the film historian John DiLeo wrote.
A member of the Actors Studio since 1958, Ms. Sherwood appeared again on Broadway in “Camelot” in 1961, “The Night of the Iguana” in 1962 and Edward Albee’s “All Over” in 1971.
Her film debut was in Williams’s “Baby Doll” in 1956, directed by Kazan. She also appeared in Otto Preminger’s “Hurry, Sundown” in 1969 and “The Changeling” in 1980 as well as on the soap operas “As the World Turns,” “One Life to Live” and “The Guiding Light.”
A member of the Congress of Racial Equality, Ms. Sherwood was arrested in 1963 during a freedom walk and, according to several profiles, was sentenced to six months’ hard labor, although it was unclear how much time she actually served.
During the blacklist, when performers were denied work because of their leftist ties, Ms. Sherwood was never called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. But Kazan, a former Communist, was and named names, which prompted critics to question his Oscar for lifetime achievement in 1999 when he was an ailing 89-year-old.
Interviewed on a 2003 PBS “American Masters” documentary, Ms. Sherwood was asked whether she would have testified if she had been summoned.
“I think I was not well known or important enough, but people have said to me, ‘What would you have done if you had been called up?’” she said. “I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows what they would do if they were not in that position.
“It’s all very well to say of Kazan, Why give him a lifetime achievement award? But the name of this documentary is ‘Not Without Sin.’ You have to look inside and question yourself. And it’s not easy to do.”
An obituary on Wednesday about the actress Madeleine Sherwood misstated the day she died. It was Saturday, April 23. The obituary also misidentified the type of headgear worn by Sally Field on the television show “The Flying Nun,” on which Ms. Sherwood was a co-star. It was a cornet, a kind of headdress worn by nuns — not a coronet, a kind of crown.
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