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The actress Sandy Dennis, whose nervous and fragile screen persona had very little to do with the real person, was born in Hastings, Nebraska, on April 17, 1937. Her father was a postal clerk. At the age of fourteen, after watching Kim Stanley and Joanne Woodward in the television production
Within three months Dennis had won her first professional role as a thirteen-year-old in Henrik Ibsen's
Dennis's movie breakthrough came in 1967, when she played Honey, the whimpering wife of the young faculty member in
Dennis was briefly married to her longtime companion, jazz musician Gerry Mulligan, from 1975 to 1976. However, a self-described "solitary person," she seemed to be more comfortable in the company of cats and dogs than of people. Sandy Dennis lived the final years of her life with her mother in Westport, Connecticut, where she died of ovarian cancer on March 2, 1992.