It’s safe to say an actress whose film debut has her tied to a chair naked for 45 minutes is going to have an interesting career. For Sally Kirkland, her experiences as part of Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd set the tone for a life as offbeat and multi-faceted as the characters she portrayed. The Academy Award nominee died earlier this week in Southern California at 84.
A native Manhattanite, Kirkland was born on Halloween in 1941. Named after her mother, a magazine editor with Life and Vouge, Sally worked as a fashion model. She then began studying acting with Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio and eventually graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
Sally made her off-Broadway debut in 1963 and later played an abducted rape victim in Terrence McNally’s Sweet Eros. At the same time she was taken under the wing of Andy Warhol and became a regular part of New York’s Factory scene. Her 45-minute nude performance came in Warhol’s 1964 film The 13 Most Beautiful Women. She would doff her wardrobe again in 1969 for roles in the sexually graphic thriller Coming Apart with Rip Torn and the bizarre Futz, where she rides a pig in the style of Lady Godiva. These early turns led Time Magazine to proclaim Kirkland “the latter-day Isadora Duncan of nudothespianism.” ”I’m not your typical, delicate girl-next-door,” she once understatedly told an interviewer.
After repeated drug use led her to attempt suicide, Kirkland turned her life around through art and yoga, and found steady supporting work in Hollywood in the 1970s and ’80s. Among her film appearances were Going Home (1971) with Robert Mitchum; as burlesque dancer Crystal in The Sting (1973); as Barbra Streisand’s friend Pony in The Way We Were (also ’73); Breakheart Pass (1975) with Charles Bronson; and as a photographer in the 1976 Streisand/Kristofferson version of A Star Is Born. She also turned up in such B films as The Young Nurses, Big Bad Mama, Candy Stripe Nurses, and Crazy Mama. Sally’s ’70s TV roles included spots on Kojak, Starsky & Hutch, Three’s Company, The Incredible Hulk, and more.
Kirkland appeared with Neil Young, Dennis Hopper, Dean Stockwell, and DEVO in the oddball “nuclear comedy/musical” Human Highway (1982) and alongside Jamie Lee Curtis in the sensual drama Love Letters (1983). It was 1987’s Anna, however, that gave Sally her biggest role to date. As an exiled Czech film actress living in New York who takes a recent émigré (Paulina Poriskova) under her wing, Kirkland’s title turn earned her a Best Actress Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture–Drama.
Other notable film performances in the 1990s and 2000s included two movies with Kevin Costner, Revenge (1990) and JFK (1991); the action/comedy Bullseye! (1990) with Michael Caine and Roger Moore; Robert Altman’s Hollywood satire The Player (1992); Ron Howard’s EdTV (1999); and with Jim Carrey in Bruce Almighty (2003). Along with these A-list efforts, Kirkland turned up in dozens of smaller and independent efforts, with her final screen appearance coming in 2023’s 80 for Brady.
When she wasn’t acting, Sally was a noted painter, an advocate for women’s health issues, and even served as an ordained minister in the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness church. Suffering from financial and health issues after a serious fall in 2018, Kirkland had been living with dementia at a care facility in Palm Springs. After more medical setbacks, she was placed in hospice care and passed away on November 11th. Filmmaker Henry Jaglom once said about her, “I think Sally is unique in her intensity and courage, and Hollywood does not know what to do with unique people.” To call Sally Kirkland unique is indeed an understatement…as it is to say that her offbeat screen presence will be missed.