Jessica Walter Teaches Seth the Lucille Bluth Wink
LOS ANGELES, Calif. (AP) — Jessica Walter, who played a scheming matriarch in TV's "Arrested Development" and a stalker in "Play Misty for Me," has died. Her career relied on her astringent screen presence more than her good looks. She was 80 years old.
Brooke Bowman, an entertainment industry executive, confirmed Walter's death on Thursday. There was no immediate word on the cause of death or any other details.
“It is with a heavy heart that I announce the death of my beloved mother, Jessica. "As a working actor for over six decades, her greatest joy was bringing joy to others through her storytelling both on and off-screen," Bowman said in a statement.
Walter will also be remembered for his "Her daughter praised her mother's "wit, class, and overall joie de vivre," or love life.
“She was a force, with unrivaled talent and timing "Tony Hale, her "Arrested Development" co-star, confirmed the news on Twitter.
“Jessica Walter, I adored you. I grew up admiring and watching you. "Viola Davis is always consistently excellent," she tweeted.
Despite the fact that her photogenic appearance qualified her for standard leading lady roles, Walter expressed no regrets about being viewed as a character actor.
She enjoyed playing difficult female characters because "those are the fun roles." They're much juicier than playing the vanilla ingénues, you know — Miss Vanilla Ice Cream,” Walter said in an interview with the AV Club website.
Her most memorable film role was as Evelyn Draper, the woman who becomes obsessed with Clint Eastwood's disc jockey character in Clint Eastwood's 1971 thriller "Play Misty For Me" — her first significant lead — in which she played Evelyn Draper, the woman who becomes obsessed with Eastwood's disc jockey character. Walter received a lot of praise for her eerie performance.
In a Roger Ebert review, she was compared to "flypaper; the more you struggle against her personality, the more tightly you're held."
In "Arrested Development," Walter's comedic talent as the deeply flawed mother of a dysfunctional family won her a new generation of fans. She spoke candidly about the success of the second act.
“It exposed me to a demographic of people who thought I was sick or dead,” Walter told The Associated Press in 2013.
"Jessica Walter's spectacular turn as the devilish Lucille Bluth is one of the great comedic performances of television history, and we loved working with her as much as audiences loved her on 'Arrested Development,'" said the series' producer, 20th Television.
Younger audiences discovered her talents in “Archer,” in which she played a petty, martini-swilling spymaster whose deeply dysfunctional relationship with her title character son was the focus of most of the show's early plots when it debuted in 2009.
Walter made his feature film debut in the 1964 film "Lilith," alongside Warren Beatty, Jean Seberg, and Gene Hackman, who was also in the film.
She appeared in John Frankenheimer's 1966 racing epic "Grand Prix" as the glamorous but dissatisfied wife of a Formula One racer who falls for another driver.
That same year, she appeared in Sidney Lumet's "The Group," a female-led ensemble about prestigious university graduates (Walter played the catty Libby), and acted for Lumet again in 1968's "Bye Bye Braverman."
Walter was the daughter of a Soviet immigrant mother who was a teacher and a father who played bass in the NBC Symphony Orchestra. He was born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens.
She graduated from New York's High School of the Performing Arts and was an established actress by her early twenties, working steadily for the rest of her life. She made her Broadway debut in 1963 with "Photo Finish," and from 1962 to 1965 she starred in the TV series "Love of Life."
She appeared on a number of popular 1960s shows, including "Naked City," "Route 66," "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour," "The Fugitive," and "Flipper."
In 1975, Walter won an Emmy for best actress in a limited series for her role as Amy Prentiss, the first female chief of detectives in the San Francisco Police Department. The show, which was a spin-off of "Ironside," starred Helen Hunt as Walter's adolescent daughter.
From 1966 to 1978, Walter was married to Ross Bowman, with whom she had a daughter, Brooke. From 1983 until his death in 2019, Walter was married to actor Ron Leibman.
Walter and Leibman, who won a Tony Award for playing Roy Cohn in 1993's "Angels in America," were frequent collaborators, including a Broadway run of Neil Simon's "Rumors" in 1988 and a recurring role as her husband on "Archer."
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