Sondra Locke didn’t like to tell people the year of her birth. The American actor and filmmaker’s death in 2018 took six weeks to make the news, so she probably wanted to keep that a secret, too. She had a certain quality to her. Unusual, inscrutable, neither here nor there, Locke could look wan and boyish or arrestingly hyper-femme. She could seem aged or ageless; resolutely human or pitched to our planet from the far reaches of space. She was one of 20th-century cinema’s most fascinating figures. You may have never once heard her name.
In 1969, Locke earned an Oscar nomination for her very first movie, a largely forgotten adaptation of Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. She followed it up by playing one of American film’s first trans characters in the lurid psycho-thriller A Reflection of Fear. A hard pivot like that reflected Locke’s tastes, her disinterest in the Hollywood game, and her unconventional approach to life and love.
