For those who remembered Piper Laurie from her days as a contract player in a series of formulaic escapist pictures made by Universal Studios in the 1950s, it was hard to believe that the lonely young woman in Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961), who takes her own life when she is rejected by the pool shark Paul Newman, was one and the same. This Oscar-nominated performance was a surprise, and nothing Laurie did before or after touched it.
Having proved that she could act, Laurie, who has died aged 91, immediately retired from the cinema. She returned 15 years later, in another guise, this time specialising in playing harridans, principally in horror movies. The most celebrated was Brian De Palma’s repulsive and compulsive Carrie (1976), for which she was also Oscar-nominated, this time as the religious mother of the pubescent Sissy Spacek, intoning “the first sin was intercourse”.
