Biography

Sally Kirkland

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Overview

Born
October 31, 1941 · Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA
Died
November 11, 2025 · Palm Springs Hospice, CA, USA (Complications from a severe fall, infections and dementia)
Birth name
Sally Kirkland Jr.
Height
5′ 9½″ (1.77 m)

Mini bio

Sally Kirkland, Best Actress Oscar Nominee, Golden Globe winner, Independent Spirit Award winner, LA Film Critics Circle Award winner, and veteran of over 200 movies. Feisty, hard-working, famously liberal, with the trademark blonde hair, actress Sally Kirkland has certainly made an indelible mark on Hollywood history. Born in New York City, her mother was the fashion editor at Vogue and LIFE magazine. Sally began her career on the off-Broadway circuit and trained under Lee Strasberg. Sally Kirkland is a movie, television, and theater veteran since the 1960s and is probably best known for the drama movie Anna (1987), for which she garnered the Best Actress Oscar nomination and won the Best Actress Golden Globe, the Independent Spirit Award, and the LA Film Critic's Circle Award.

Sally's first director was Andy Warhol in The 13 Most Beautiful Women (1964). Her 220 movies also include Coming Apart (1969), The Sting (1973), The Way We Were (1973), Cold Feet (1989), Best of the Best (1989), Revenge (1990), JFK (1991), Edtv (1999), Bruce Almighty (2003), Coffee Date (2006) and Archaeology of a Woman (2012). In the past couple of years, she has starred in Buddy Solitaire (2016), Apartment 212 (2017), and The Most Hated Woman in America (2017) co-starring with Melissa Leo and Peter Fonda. And coming out soon, she has starred in Sarah Q (2018), Cuck (2019), Invincible (2020) and Hope for the Holidays (2020). She was nominated for Best Actress in a television movie by the Hollywood Foreign Press for The Haunted (1991). Her television credits include: guest starring on Criminal Minds (2005), and recurring roles on Head Case (2007) and The Simple Life (2003). She guest starred on Resurrection Blvd. (2000) and in the television movie Another Woman's Husband (2000).

Sally had a recurring role on Felicity (1998) and starred in the NBC movie Brave New World (1998). She also starred in the television episode Song of Songs (1994), and was a series regular on the television series Valley of the Dolls (1994). She also co-starred in the television movie The Woman Who Loved Elvis (1993). She had a recurring role as Barbara Healy in the original Roseanne (1988) series. She starred in the television movie Heat Wave (1990), and recurred as Tracy on Days of Our Lives (1965). Sally is also an exhibited painter, poet, renowned acting coach and ordained minister.
- IMDb mini biography by: anonymous

Family

Spouses
Parents

Trademarks

Platinum blonde hair
Sparkling blue eyes
Seductive deep voice

Trivia

Daughter and namesake of fashion editor Sally Kirkland. Her mother was fashion editor at first Vogue and later Life magazines. She was the only fashion editor at Life magazine during its history (1944-1969). She is legendary for putting Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Faye Dunaway and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on the magazine's cover, making them fashion icons.
Goddaughter of Shelley Winters.
Received humanitarian awards including Blue Cross and the Crippled Children's Society.
Began her acting career off-Broadway circa 1963.
Was a strong supporter of gay and lesbian rights and AIDS awareness. She taught various workshops for gay communities and campaigned for various AIDS organizations and was a caretaker of AIDS patients, as well as cancer patients through the 1980s.

Quotes

I grew up in a house on 89th Street that was always full of these gorgeous models: Veruschka von Lehndorff, Ali MacGraw, Lauren Hutton, no matter what I did, I would be the ugly duckling. As a little girl, I figured I'd have to be the most famous actress in the world...
[observation, 1969] When we come to the day when no one in this country feels funny about taking off his clothes, then we've come to a healthy time.
[performing nude] I have been nude many times in many movies, but I almost never do full frontal nudity because I think there's value in keeping some mystery.
[on when the New York Times asked her in 1968 why she gets naked onscreen so much] I said, "Look, you can't carry a gun on a naked body. I'm opposed to the war in Vietnam." That was very real. So it was all about tearing down the establishment. My mother was the establishment. She was telling people to put clothes on. I was telling them to take them off.
[getting over shyness and becomeming the first nude actress] I stopped being shy sometime in the early '60s,with what's called "the private moments" at the Actors Studio where I do my imitation of Marilyn Monroe on the calendar. I would find some way to take my clothes off in a private moment, and with Lee Strasberg's support. Pretty soon, everybody in the Actors Studio was waiting for me to take my clothes off.