Melinda Dillon, the actress best known for playing a stressed-out but loving mother in the holiday classic A Christmas Story, passed away on January 9 at 83, according to an obituary. However, at this time, there is no information regarding the cause of death.
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The famed actress, born in Hope, Arkansas, received two Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress during her illustrious career in Hollywood.
She has more than four decades of acting experience in theater, television, and film.
She is well-known for having won a Tony for her Broadway debut in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, in addition to playing Ralphie's tense mother in A Christmas Story.
She acknowledged in 1976 that the intense play had caused her to "go crazy," and she had spent time in a mental hospital.
"I was in Virginia Woolf, and I just went crazy; it was really that simple," she told the New York Times, at the time.
She continued:
"We had to have a whole different cast for that, but I was called in to do it many, many times because the gal would get sick. I would do it three hours in the afternoon, then study with Lee Strasberg for two hours, and do the play three hours at night... I just crumbled inside. I don’t know why."
Dillon received two Oscar nominations for her roles in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "Absence of Malice" after leaving the hospital and concentrating on acting.
She never won an Academy Award, but her long-lasting career as an actress spanned decades until she declared her acting career over in 2007. Her final credits included the Law and Order television series and Heartland medical drama.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Melinda and Richard Libertini first connected while she was serving as "the coat check girl" for the improv comedy group, The Second City. Richard Jr. was the son of the ex-couple.
In her filmography, she played Sylvester Stallone's wife in Norman Jewison's F.I.S.T. (1978), a woman who is contemplating suicide in The Prince of Tides (1991), and a single mother in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), in which aliens kidnapped her three-year-old son through her kitchen's dog door.
Sam Kashner, the author of A Christmas Story, praised Dillon for her "sweetly comedic presence."
In his 2016 Vanity Fair article, she is referred to as a "vigilant mom" who is "still a child at heart" in How A Christmas Story Went from Low-Budget Fluke to an American Tradition.
Dillon spent her early years living on various military bases before eventually finishing high school in Chicago and enrolling at DePaul University to study acting.
Her final acting role was in Adam Sandler's 2007 comedy Reign Over Me, which marked the beginning of her acting retirement.
She appeared in three episodes of the TNT medical drama Heartland that same year.
She also performed in You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running, A Way of Life, Paul Sills' Story Theatre, and Ovid's Metamorphosis on Broadway.
Her supporters used Twitter to express their sorrow and bid farewell to the "divine Melinda Dillon."
