If Kathleen Chalfant is recognized by her Academy peers on January 22 for her work in Familiar Touch, she would become the oldest actor in Oscars annals to be nominated for a lead performance.
She would follow in the footsteps of Jessica Tandy, who was 80, when nominated and winning for Driving Miss Daisy (1989).
My Oscar Book:
Born on January 14, 1945, Chalfant has appeared in many plays, on Broadway and Off-Broadway, as well as making guest appearances on TV series, including the “Law & Order” franchise.
Born Kathleen Ann Bishop in San Francisco, she was raised in her parents’ boarding house in Oakland. Her father, William Bishop, was officer in the Coast Guard.
She studied acting in New York with Wynn Handman, who was a protégé of Sanford Meisner, and with Alessandro Fersen in Rome.
Chalfant worked as a Production Coordinator at Playwrights Horizons in the mid-1970s, beginning with Demons: A Possession by Robert Karmon.
She made her Off-Broadway debut in Cowboy Pictures in June 1974.
She has since appeared in over three dozen Off-Broadway productions.
In 2015, she appeared in the Women’s Project Theater production of Dear Elizabeth by Sarah Ruhl, and as Rose Kennedy in the Nora’s Playhouse production of “Rose” by Laurence Leamer.
Chalfant was nominated for her official Broadway debut role at the 1993 Tony Awards for Best Actress (Featured Role) in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches.
She earned the Outer Circle Critics, Drama Desk, Obie and Lucille Lortel awards for her performance as Vivian Bearing in Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit in 1998, for which she shaved her head.
During her work with Wit, she incorporated her experience of dealing with terminal cancer of her half-brother, Alan Palmer, who died in 1998.
For her 2003 performance in Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, Chalfant won a second Obie award. In 2009, Chalfant performed in The People Speak, a documentary feature film utilizing dramatic and musical performances of the letters, diaries, and speeches of everyday Americans, based on historian Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.”
Chalfant has played recurring roles in a number of television series including House of Cards, Law & Order, Rescue Me, and The Guardian.
Her roles in feature films have included Isn’t It Delicious and Kinsey.
Chalfant recently played Margaret Butler in The Affair on Showtime.
She was presented with the 2018 Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement.
In 2018, Chalfant read T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets at the Bard SummerScape Festival as part of a new performance with choreography by Pam Tanowitz, music by Kaija Saariaho, and images by Brice Marden.[15]
Chalfant played the lead role in the 2024 film Familiar Touch, for which she won the Orizzonti Award for Best Actress and the National Society of Film Critics Award (NSFC).
In 1966, Chalfant married Henry Chalfant, a photographer and documentary filmmaker. They have a son, David Chalfant, who was the bass player for the folk-rock band The Nields, and a daughter, Andromache, a set designer in New York.
Chalfant has spoken about the role of art and artists in advocating for civil rights and social justice, and “theater as a platform for social change.”
