On Friday, the family of Melinda Dillon, the Oscar-nominated actress who starred in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and played Ralphie’s high-strung mother in “A Christmas Story,” announced that she passed away last month at the age of 83.
The “Absence of Malice” star passed away in California on Jan. 9. A cause of death was not revealed.
Dillon was born in Arkansas on Oct. 13, 1939, spending her childhood in Alabama, Germany and Chicago before joining The Second City troupe as the comedy club’s first coat check girl.
She would later move to New York City, making her debut on Broadway as Honey in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” The role would earn her a Tony nomination and Theatre World award in 1963.
Dillon claimed the intense play made her “go crazy,” and she spent time in a psychiatric hospital as a result.
“I think it was the way I was living; the play was so long, and the actors’ union wouldn’t let us play the matinee,” she explained to the New York Times in 1976. “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. Then, George Grizzard left to do ‘Hamlet,’ and a strange thing happened. I had learned to lean on George hard, and I just crumbled inside. I don’t know why.”
Dillon was nominated for best supporting actress at the Academy Awards twice, once for Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters” in 1978 and later for Sydney Pollack’s “Absence of Malice” in 1982.
One of Dillon’s most well-known roles was that of Ralphie’s mother in the 1983 holiday classic “A Christmas Story,” the only thing standing between Ralphie and a Red Ryder BB gun.
Dillon was the only member of the original cast not to make an appearance in 2022’s “A Christmas Story Christmas,” a followup film showing an adult Ralphie dealing with the passing of his father. Her character was instead portrayed by Julie Hagerty.
Dillon retired from acting in 2007, with her final appearance in “Reign Over Me” as Ginger Timpleman. She also appeared in three episodes of TNT’s medical drama “Heartland” that same year.
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