Actress Sandy Dennis Dies

WESTPORT, Conn. - Sandy Dennis, who won an Oscar as a whimpering wife in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" and played a tourist on an everything-goes-wrong visit to New York in "The Out of Towners," has died at 54.

Doris Elliott, a longtime friend, said she learned of Dennis' death Monday from the actress' agent, Bill Treusch, but didn't know when she died. Treusch did not immediately return calls late yesterday and this morning.

New York Newsday reported that she died Sunday and her body was cremated yesterday. The newspaper said few details were released because Dennis had not wanted a fuss made of her death.

The actress had lived in Westport, but it wasn't immediately known where she died. She had suffered from ovarian cancer, said another friend, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Dennis made her film debut in 1961, playing a supporting role in Elia Kazan's "Splendor in the Grass."

But it was on Broadway where she emerged as a star. She won two Tony Awards in succession - for "A Thousand Clowns" and "Any Wednesday."

She followed that with the Academy Award for best supporting actress for the 1966 film "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" The searing story of a bickering couple also starred Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and George Segal.

Dennis played Honey, the wife of the younger of the two faculty couples who indulge in an all-night drinking spree in a house on an American university campus in the film adaptation of Edward Albee's scathing drama.

She stayed away the night the Oscar was awarded. "People always think that awards are very important, and they were very nice. . . but they were never anything I thought that much about," she once said.

She played leads in other films, notably the teacher in a tough New York school in "Up the Down Staircase" in 1967. She won the New York Film Critics' award and the Moscow Film Festival prize as best actress for that role.

In "The Out of Towners" in 1970, she starred opposite Jack Lemmon in the Neil Simon tale of hard-luck visitors to New York. Every time a disaster befell the couple, she whined, "Oh, my gawwwwwwd."

Some critics found her intense, almost nervous, mannerisms and her muttering speech pattern irritating. The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael once complained that Dennis "has made an acting style of postnasal drip," an assessment Dennis herself said was correct and worked to change.

Others were captivated by a winsomeness coupled with a disciplined craftsmanship that conveyed spontaneity, credibility and conviction.

"Let me tell you about Sandy Dennis. There should be one in every home," critic Walter Kerr wrote in the New York Herald Tribune of her 1964 performance as the businessman's tax-deductible mistress in the play "Any Wednesday."

Burton once described Dennis as "one of the most genuine eccentrics I know of."

Sandra Dale Dennis was born in Hastings, Neb., on April 27, 1937. She was reared in Kenesaw and Lincoln, where she went to high school with talk show host Dick Cavett.

She experienced what she called "a moment of truth" at age 14 while watching Kim Stanley and Joanne Woodward in "A Young Lady of Property," one of the masterpieces of the golden days of television.

"I knew then I had to be an actress," Dennis said.

After a stint at Nebraska Wesleyan University and some experience with local stock companies, she headed for New York and the Actors Studio and soon began appearing in off-Broadway.

Dennis told one interviewer she never went to the theater or movies and would rather stay at home and read a good book.

And she said her favorite film wasn't "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" but "Thank You All Very Much," an obscure 1969 British film about a girl who must raise a child she had out of wedlock.

Her other films included "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean," "The Four Seasons," "Another Woman" and "The Indian Runner." Her stage credits included "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

Dennis lived for many years with jazz musician Gerry Mulligan; they separated in 1976. She was also romantically linked with actor Eric Roberts.

Survivors include her mother and a brother.