Actress Carrie Nye Dies at 69

Stage, film and television actress Carrie Nye died of lung cancer on Friday, July 14 at her home in Manhattan. She was 69.

Nye received a Tony Award nomination in 1965 for her performance as Helen Walsingham in the musical Half a Sixpence. She also appeared on Broadway in A Second String (1960), Mary, Mary (1962), and Cop-Out (1969), a program of two one-acts by John Guare. In 1980, she played Lorraine Sheldon in the Circle-in-the-Square revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner, receiving a Drama Desk Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play.

Carolyn Nye McGeoy was born on October 14, 1936, in Greenwood, Mississippi. She attended Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri and then went to the Yale Drama School, where she met Dick Cavett. They married in 1964 and remained married until her death. Cavett is her only survivor.

Much of Nye’s acting was done outside of New York. She first appeared with the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 1955 and returned there regularly throughout her career, playing lead roles in such plays as A Streetcar Named Desire, The Skin of Our Teeth, and La Ronde. With the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, Nye appeared in Troilus and Cressida at the White House during the Kennedy administration. In later years, she performed with such companies as the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival in Madison, the Adelphi Festival Theater in Garden City, NY, and the Phoenix Theater Company in Purchase, NY.

Often compared to Tallulah Bankhead for her voice and manner, Nye got to play the legendary actress in the 1980 television movie The Scarlett O’Hara War, receiving an Emmy Award nomination for her performance. She also appeared on TV as Marguerite Gautier in an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Ten Blocks on the Camino Real that also starred Martin Sheen, Lotte Lenya, and Tom Aldredge; as Deborah Hartford in Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet, with Fritz Weaver, Nancy Marchand, Roberta Maxwell, and Donald Moffat; and as Tatiana in Maxim Gorky’s Enemies, with Ellis Rabb, Frances Sternhagen, and Josef Sommer. She also appeared in the two-part TV film Divorce His and Divorce Hers (1973), which starred Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

Nye appeared briefly on the soap opera The Guiding Light in 1984 until her character, Susan Piper, was killed off. She returned to the show in 2003 in a different role, Carrie Carruthers.

Among her film credits are The Group (1966), The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979), Creepshow (1982), and Hello Again (1987). Nye also appeared with her husband in the documentary From the Ashes: The Life and Times of Tick Hall, which chronicled the rebuilding after a disastrous 1997 fire of the Montauk house, designed by Stanford White, in which Nye and Cavett lived since the 1960s.