WHET to Stockard Channing

She'll be 80 next year. I've always found her fascinating. I want a very recent photo/video of her. Has she officially retired?

I'm still dewy enough to play a high school senior!

Lorraine never shuts the fuck up.

R2 Really, man! There was a weird cadence to this short interview. I felt bad for Channing, trying to splice in a response but Lorraine would “semi-pause” and add qualifiers to her questions.

Channing is pretty smart and more economical with her language. She’s older now but sharp and gracious about the strength of women in general and being in an ensemble. She’s still a really cool chick.

Has she just aged this way, or did she have plastic surgery?

[quote]Has she just aged this way, or did she have plastic surgery?

Bless your heart, TeriGarrfish...

I always loved that brassy tone she always has when she speaks.

Stockard Channing was robbed of the Oscar for Best Actress for "Six Degrees of Separation" at the Academy Awards n 1994:

WINNER:

HOLLY HUNTER: The Piano

NOMINEES:

ANGELA BASSETT: What's Love Got to Do with It

STOCKARD CHANNING: Six Degrees of Separation

EMMA THOMPSON: The Remains of the Day

DEBRA WINGER: Shadowlands

Stockard Channing (born Susan Antonia Williams Stockard), February 13, 1944 in New York City

Her surname is "Stockard;" her first husband's surname was "Channing." She was married four times (to men); last divorced in 1988; partnered (to a man) 1990-2014.

R9. And she was luminous in that role onstage.

She was great on The Good Wife.

I believe that her actual name is "Stoddard."

R9 Those are all wonderful performances. My favorites being Stockard and Emma Thompson. I hated The Piano but I love Holly Hunter. In comedies.

She doesn't look bad for her age in the OP's video, but some years back, she had plastic surgery and/or Botox to such a ridiculous degree that when she walked on stage in IT'S ONLY A PLAY on Broadway, many people -- myself included -- didn't recognize her. And I'm serious about that, no exaggeration.

She looked good in Grease. For a 49 year old.

CBS tried REALLY hard to make her a sitcom star in '79 and '80

She had a cute sitcom with Michael Keaton. They were an appealing couple, but I felt like he was cheating on Bernadette Peters with whom he had a shared a charming sitcom romance several years prior.

Stockard Channing was 33 when she appeared in Grease. She was 34 when the movie was released.

Olivia Newton-John was 30.

John Travolta was 24.

Jeff Conaway was 28.

Didi Conn was 27.

She was never a great beauty. Now she looks grotesque. I prefer to work in the theatre is code for no one wants to see my face up close on TV and in a movie.

To me, a huge pillowy face is not preferable to a wrinkled face.

We need a very recent outdoor photo

[quote]Has she officially retired?

There are worse things she could do.

[quote] She looked good in Grease. For a 49 year old.

Some people can be so touchy!

[quote] CBS tried REALLY hard to make her a sitcom star in '79 and '80

Around the time (generally speaking) that ABC tried to make a Madeline Kahn sitcom fly.

Both failed - for the same reasons. They were both quirky and both shows tried to fit them into a generic sitcom mold.

One of my favorite movies. Ugly girl gets beautiful and takes revenge ( in hysterical ways) on those who made fun of her or did her dirty when she was ugly.

The teleplay of THE GIRL MOST LIKELY TO was co-written by Joan Rivers, based on a story idea by her.

According to several reliable reports, Stockard got Christian Hoff fired from the Broadway revisal of PAL JOEY that had been planned around him before she was cast. The official reason for thie replacement was that Hoff had sustained an injury, but no one believed that. His replacement turned out to be a guy who was the boyfriend of the director (Joe Mantello) at the time, and he got mostly bad reviews for his performance.

R32 I heard she spoke highly of his performance

R32 That sounds more like Mantello pulling strings and not Stockard. Unless I'm missing a piece of the story?

Thank God a black version of "Pal Joey" is being performed this fall. That's what Broadway needs.

Didn't she go into a nursing home after Grease?

For decades I believed she was Carol Channings' daughter.

I thought she was Carol Channing's MOTHER!

OK OK I get it I'm done now.

[quote]That sounds more like Mantello pulling strings and not Stockard. Unless I'm missing a piece of the story?

I don't remember for sure, but I believe Matthew Risch was the understudy for the role of Joey before he took over for Christian Hoff in previews. So maybe you could say that Mantello pulled strings enough to get him the understudy job, but I'm not sure when they became a couple -- before or after Risch was cast as the understudy. Story I heard was that Channing was so unhappy with Hoff that she insisted he be replaced, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Mantello and the other creatives weren't also unhappy with him.

Stockard Channing is one of our finest actresses. She was outstanding in "Six Degrees of Separation" at Lincoln Center in the early 1990s and of course, Oscar-worthy in the movie a couple of years later. She's great in everything she does.

Looks a little cross eyed, to me.

From a May article about a British show

^ She looks kind of like Melissa Gilbert with a slow leak.

Believe it or not, Fall is a very busy time for Stockard, what with all the abundant need for terrifying, grinning Jack O'Lanterns.

[quote]Stockard Channing is one of our finest actresses. She was outstanding in "Six Degrees of Separation" at Lincoln Center in the early 1990s and of course, Oscar-worthy in the movie a couple of years later. She's great in everything she does.

No, she's great when she's well cast, as in JOE EGG and in SIX DEGREES -- in which, ironically, she was a replacement for Blythe Danner, who would have seemed a better fit for that role but who apparently left VERY early in rehearsals.

Stockard was not great in PAL JOEY, and although Rizzo in GREASE is her most famous role, I for one thought that performance was pretty bad, and not only because she was too old for the part. Aside from the fact that she couldn't sing that song properly ("There Are Worse Things I Could Do"), I just don't think she played the character as she's supposed to be played. Rizzo is supposed to act tough to hide her vulnerability, she's NOT supposed to be constantly bitchy and sarcastic -- although, admittedly, the screenplay adaptation of the stage script did Channing no favors as far as that's concerned.

R49 “ don't think she played the character as she's supposed to be played ”

That was the director, not her

[quote]That was the director, not her

Neither you nor I know for sure how much of the decision on how to play that character was Stockard's and how much was the untalented director's (Randal Kleiser).

Though she's not afraid of a bit of fun (see: Grease), she's always fancied herself a serious actress and thespian of the stage (wonder if/how much it rankles that Rizzo is arguably her most successful and recognizable role). As posters upthread noted, she came from a rich family and is not in need of money. Combine that with an attitude that keeps her from slumming for parts just for the sake of being in front of a camera, and her advanced age, it's sadly no wonder that she's not around as she once was. Even if the parts were there, it's difficult for someone pushing 80 to do 8 shows a week. And who knows if insecurity around her obviously botched surgery contributes to keeping her out of the limelight. Will forever be bitter that we were robbed of Stockard's Elizabeth Taylor after that TV show about Liz, Michael Jackson, and Marlon Brando on 9/11 got pulled a few years ago. She's not a name you hear bandied about when the subject comes up, but for her contribution to the American theater alone she deserves to be honored at the Kennedy Center.

[quote]She's not a name you hear bandied about when the subject comes up, but for her contribution to the American theater alone she deserves to be honored at the Kennedy Center.

Seriously? As I commented above, she has been excellent in roles in which she was well cast, but I really don't think her body of work -- on stage and/or on screen -- warrants a Kennedy Center honor. Especially not when there are far worthier actors who have not yet received the awards.

The Kennedy Center Honors... that's another one seems to have eluded... so many.

She deserves Kennedy Center recognition.

I think if she received a Kennedy Centre honour most people would be scratching their heads going, “Why is Rizzo up there?”

Plus, they’d probably have some young ingenue sing Sandra Dee and it would just be embarrassing.

They could get Allison Janney to do a tribute on her performance in Six Degrees and she could say, “It’s a LOT harder than it looks. Believe me, I tried…”

She's an actor's actor, as far as her work in the theater goes. Her performances on stage in the 80s and 90s are still talked about by those who were there. She's as close to living theatrical royalty as we have in this country, with a bit of old-school sheen. I think honoring her at the Kennedy Center with an emphasis on her theatrical work wouldn't be inappropriate at all.

She was terrific as Abbey Bartlett.

[quote]Her performances on stage in the 80s and 90s are still talked about by those who were there.

That's true, but...

[quote]She's as close to living theatrical royalty as we have in this country,

That's quite an exaggeration. Because however you feel about the quality of her performances (and there have been some bad ones), her body of work is pretty meager in quantity as compared to so many others.

Personally, I adore her work in the number painter interstitials on Sesame Street.

R63, with the late, great Paul Benedict!!! Classic!

I adore Stockard. Her performance in "Six Degrees of Separation" was a landmark in the American theatre and her role in the movie was also luminous.

I would love to see Stockard honored at the Kennedy Center--but on that same night, could we please honor Liza Minnelli and Johnny Mathis?!! They are long overdue.

r65 What a great combo that would be!

Are Liza and Johnny really old enough?

Well, Liza's barely alive enough.

I also think Angie Dickinson is worthy of a Kennedy Center honor as well...

I love this thread and I have always loved Stockard Channing.

r67 I just googled their ages to find out

She's certainly had her fair share of singing roles on Broadway.

Nepo baby. Born to rich, connected Park Ave parents. Went to Chapin, the Madeira School, Radcliffe and Harvard. She wouldn’t have got past 1st base without mom & dad.

Sometimes "nepo babies" are very talented.

[quote]Are Liza and Johnny really old enough?

What a weird question. How old do you think they are? And if you're not sure, can't you figure out an easy way to find out?

I saw her in The Rink and she was really wonderful. I also saw Liza in previews (when she was on her best behavior) and she was, of course, LIZA!!!! Before Liza was cast Lucie Arnaz auditioned.

Stockard is great. I will never forget her Ouisa from 6 Degrees at Lincoln Center. She was magnificent.

She began fucking with her face far too radically during The Good Wife.

R1 = a very bitter Ben Platt still trying to distract from that disastrous movie. And the fact that he’s engaged to the equally oppressive Galvin person.

[quote]CBS tried REALLY hard to make her a sitcom star in '79 and '80

Even though they didn't succeed, I'll always remember really liking her theme song.

R76, you're not very bright, are you?

R78 LOL you made it all worthwhile

The fucking motor mouth on Lorraine, Jesus wept.

Boy you could smell the stink from that sitcom from Mars.

Bit she’s a real talent.

Any relation to Carol? Or Tatum?

I think Stockard would have been an excellent sitcom star if she had had good writing behind her.

Stockard was in the lobby of my apartment building about five years ago. She was talking to the doorman about going up to visit one of her friends who lives in the building. She gave her name as Susan.

She was tiny and her plastic surgery was so shocking that my mouth literally dropped open. She knew I recognized her but probably thought she was looking sexy or something. She was in a black leather jacket and tight black pants and looked absolutely awful.

Again, she was almost unrecognizable when she did IT'S ONLY A PLAY on Broadway, presumably because she had just had a round of really unfortunate plastic surgery and/or Botox treatments right beforehand. I honestly didn't recognize her when she first came on stage, and I know I wasn't the only one, because several other people said the same thing. I actually think she looks better and much more like herself -- though, of course, a very old version of same -- in the more recent video someone posted above.

I guarantee you she hated Olivia.

Did she do a lot of coke back in the day? Trying to figure out why her nose completely changed shape à la Carrie Fisher.

She's a pro. Had knee (?) Surgery during the run of Other Desert Cities and only missed a few performances. They restaged some of her scenes so she could sit instead of stand and she used a cane.

Wonderful to glimpse DL Linda Lavin in that OTHER DESERT CITIES clip! She was miles better than Judith Light in the part -- I still remember the way she held the audience spellbound at the Act 1 curtain.

Too bad Lavin is such a nasty piece of work off stage.

I just read an interview with Dinah Manoff who talked about working on Grease and that Stockard was definitely the leader off-camera as well as on.

What an idiotic article at r46. That couldn’t have been written by a human being. Still sounds like a show worth seeking out since I like all three actresses.

I saw Other Desert Cities with Judith and Rachel Griffiths in the cast. I like Judith Light as a person but I’ve come to the conclusion she’s a terrible actress. Wish I’d seen La Lavin instead.

I first remember Stockard from being taken to see The Big Bus as a kid. I thought she was the same person as Elizabeth Taylor for a while.

[quote]I thought she was the same person as Elizabeth Taylor for a while

She modeled a Liz Night Music costume at the 1978 Oscars, r100.

By the way, this thread title is doubly annoying, because aside from perpetrating the silly and witless "WHET," it doesn't even use it correctly. The "T" in "WHET" (or "WEHT") stands for the word "to," so it should be "WHET (or WEHT) Stockard Channing," not "WHET (or WEHT) to Stockard Channing."

You're very sad and lonely r102. Every once in a while, it's ok to just laugh stuff off, and roll with it. I do genuinely hope things improve.

Come off it people! No one here hesitates to criticize thread titles even when they're really not bad, so I don't think it makes me "sad and lonely" to point out that "WHET to" is stupid because "to" is already included in "WHET."

R96 I'm not a huge Judith Light fan but I disagree with you. I thought Light was better than Lavin in the part of the sister.

She's like every other actress the snobs love. She's nearly the same in every role.

I've always like Channing but she has butchered her face with all of the plastic surgery.

[auote] Sometimes "nepo babies" are very talented.

She’s not. They tried to make her a TV star and she was so bad the critics called her Stockyard Channing because she stunk.

So very talented and diverse - lovely career

I wonder what she did to the animators of the Grease intro to make them hate her so.

One of the best actresses ever

What can I say, R109? The Tony voters certainly shared your delight in Judith Light's performance. To me she was 1-note and indicating all over the place. (I liked her better in her other Tony-winning turn, in THE ASSEMBLED PARTIES.)

R100 Rachel Griffith is so awful. She was promising at first, then she had the perfect character in Six Feet Under. But by Brothers and Sisters, she was insufferable.

Was Stockard ever in coversation to star in One Day at a Time. She would have been a game changer. Also, I think Bonnie Franklin would have been a terrific Rizzo in Grease. She was about the same age as Stockard and actually looked younger.

R119 Stockard was 31 in 1975, and you think she should have been playing the mother of a 17 and 15-year-old?

They should have had her play Mother Jefferson.

Amazing that she got to do the movie version of Six Degrees. I'm surprised Meryl or Glennie didn't snatch it up.

Reading her bio, she had a lot of advantages in life, a prosperous start in great schools. But that shouldn’t diminish perceptions of her talent, and longevity in a really competitive sector. It must be interesting to look back at a career like hers, the projects you chose and how they translated to large and small screens, and how they “fit” into different periods of entertainment. I watched that YouTube clip “Girl Most Likely To”, and it’s pretty fascinating. The “suspended reality” of that character’s transformation is a stretch, but I see that it was written by Joan Rivers, and it looks like part fantasy, part humor, but corny 1970’s humor like Airplane and Rabbit Test, another Rivers project about a pregnant male played by Billy Crystal. Channing’s work spans low and highbrow material. She is a bit like the last generation of true performers, willing and game to put herself out there and adapting over time. What a cool old broad.

R75 That clip is interesting, like a time stamp of chat show behaviors in that era.

She was good in her minor part in the 1983 movie

Without A Trace

The Big Bus is a guilty pleasure.

The Big Bus walked so Airplane could run.

Stockard was legendary in The West Wing, even if the writing for her character was gallingly uneven. Abbey Bartlet alternated between cool and savvy politician's wife and bitter (and probably boozy) elder-cunt, depending on the episode and her scenes in it. Sometimes she was funny and helpful to her husband, and other times she was vicious to him and his staff for no reason.

If you want to see her play a part that's contemporary AND close to her daily life, check out her guest role on Difficult People. She plays Julie's trashy Aunt Bonnie, who comes to Passover Seder just long enough to do coke in the bathroom and screech "DENIAL!" at her sister's suspect parenting. A total fucking dumpster fire, with a bad facelift.

"If a couple of guys show up asking for me... Javier and his cousin Carlos, both about 19... tell them to meet me at the Days Inn near JFK and bring the poppers but forget the rubbers!"

[quote] I watched that YouTube clip “Girl Most Likely To”, and it’s pretty fascinating. The “suspended reality” of that character’s transformation is a stretch,

You can say that again. One of the most ridiculous moments is when her transformation after plastic surgery to repair her broken face is revealed. The two doctors who remove her bandages are astounded, as is the audience, by how gorgeous she isnow. The problem being that, in order to help make Stockard look gorgeous, of course they had to put her in fairly heavy makeup -- which we're supposed to believe was somehow applied when her face was still completely bandaged.

It would have been easy enough for the writers and director to make the transformation far more believable if they had NOT shown us her face immediately upon the removal of the bandages. Instead, we could have seen the doctors' reaction but not her actual face, then there could have been a cut to a later scene where she's home after the surgery and has made herself up, then looks at herself in the bathroom mirror -- and that's when and where the reveal to the audience should have happened.

But that was only one of the movie's big flaws. Generally speaking, although I like the concept, I found the whole thing so blunt and obvious and predictable that the funny moments were very few and far between.

[quote]She was married four times (to men);

Before gay men could marry each other, they married Stockard Channing.

Tom Hanks was on the Tonight Show or some such late-night show years ago after he had become really famous and the host brought up one of his first big jobs on Bosom Buddies, the sitcom from the early '80s where he and Peter Scolari played two men who dressed up like women so they could live in a hotel for women. Hanks said he always felt bad for Peter Scolari because he made such an ugly woman, while he said that when he was dressed up as a woman he looked like Stockard Channing, which was totally true and which my 8 year old Grease loving self also thought when watching the show.

[quote]Amazing that she got to do the movie version of Six Degrees. I'm surprised Meryl or Glennie didn't snatch it up.

I assume Guare made sure she got the role, r123.

Streep wanted the part (and why wouldn't she?), R123, but Guare did indeed insist on Channing. (Streep of course had already collaborated twice with director Fred Schepisi, one [PLENTY] an interesting but semi-successful adaptation from the stage, the other [A CRY IN THE DARK] a good movie featuring one of Streep's very best performances.)

Incidentally, not that anyone cares, but I'm so tired of the cliché about how Streep allegedly "gobbles up" all the good roles for actresses. It's lazy, not to mention inaccurate.

She and John Guare are still very close. It’s good if him to have insisted she got the movie role. Every actress in Stockard’s age group must have wanted it.

R135. I'm hoping to do a remake in 20 years when I'm age appropriate.

Patty Duke losing weight was better than The Girl Most Likely to.

R137. Before and After. Love that movie and love Bradford Dillman.

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