Stockard Channing was 33 when she played the teenager Rizzo in Grease
Grease cast Stockard Channing as the tough high-schooler Betty Rizzo in 1977, when she was 33 and a summa cum laude Radcliffe graduate. The role made her famous, yet her Hollywood career soon stalled, and she rebuilt it on the stage, winning a Tony before returning to screens as the First Lady in The West Wing.
She was born Susan Stockard in Manhattan on February 13, 1944, and raised on the Upper East Side; her father worked in shipping and her mother came from a large Brooklyn Irish Catholic family. After boarding at the Madeira School in Virginia she studied history and literature at Radcliffe, graduating in 1965, then trained at HB Studio in New York. Her first stage work was with the experimental Theatre Company of Boston, and her Broadway debut came in 1971 in a musical Two Gentlemen of Verona, beginning a long bond with the playwright John Guare.
Television gave her a first lead in 1973 in a Joan Rivers black comedy that required padded clothes and a wadded nose to make her look plain. Mike Nichols then paired her with Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson in The Fortune (1975); she was billed as the next big thing, but the film flopped. Grease followed, winning her a People's Choice Award, and then two CBS sitcoms in 1979 and 1980 that both failed quickly.
The theatre rescued her. Playing the mother in Peter Nichols's A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, first in New Haven and then on Broadway, won her the 1985 Tony for Best Actress in a Play. More Guare followed: The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation, as the Upper East Side matron Ouisa Kittredge, a role she took to London's Royal Court in 1992 and into the 1993 film, which brought an Oscar nomination. In interviews she described her job simply as fleshing characters out, leaving the rest to directors and audiences.
Abbey Bartlet arrived in 1999 as a recurring guest on The West Wing before she joined the regular cast in 2001. The following year brought two Emmys, one for that show and one for playing Judy Shepard in The Matthew Shepard Story, and a Daytime Emmy followed in 2005. Later she narrated Meerkat Manor and spent four years as Veronica Loy, the heroine's mother in The Good Wife.
Source: Stockard Channing
