Carlin Glynn, Actress in ‘The Best Brothel in Texas’ and ‘Sixteen Candles’, Dies at 83

Carlin Glynn, who won a Tony Award for her portrayal of Mrs. Mona Stangley in The best brothel in Texas and has had strong supporting turns in films Sixteen candles AND The journey to Bountiful, is dead. He was 83 years old.

Glynn died July 13 after battling dementia and cancer, her daughter, actress Mary Stuart Masterson (Fried Green Tomatoes, Benny & Joon), announced in an Instagram post.

“My mother, Carlin Glynn Masterson, is dead. I was with her. I will always be grateful for those final moments, no matter how difficult,” she wrote. “Death is like birth in the strangest way. From my first breath to its last. This thread is as fragile as it is strong.

“She was the cutest awkward person you would ever meet. Strong, smart, goofy, intuitive, kind, generous, passionate and a deep listener. She was devoted to my father and to the huge circle of students and collaborators who were considered her chosen family”.

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Glynn, who attended high school in Houston, and her husband of 58 years, the late actor-director-writer Peter Masterson, began working The best brothel in Texas in the mid-1970s at the Actors Studio in New York. For the musical comedy revolving around the closure of the real Chicken Ranch brothel, Masterson wrote the book with Larry L. King and co-directed with Tommy Tune.

“I originally worked on the show just to help out,” Glynn recalled in a 1978 interview with The New York Times. “Peter was reluctant to impose his wife on his collaborators. Ultimately, all four organizations that wanted to bring the show to Broadway wanted me to stay in the part. So I stopped worrying about nepotism.

With Glynn making his Broadway debut, The best little brothel it opened on Broadway in June 1978 and ran in more than 1,500 performances. “For someone who’s never sung before, the Texas-raised Miss Glynn belts out country western songs like a pro and portrays Miss Mona as a complex, sensitive woman who has extra dimensions beyond the kind-hearted lady stereotype. gold”, the Times he wrote.

Glynn wanted to bring Mona to the big screen, but it was Dolly Parton who was hired to star opposite Burt Reynolds in the 1982 Universal Pictures adaptation.

In Horton Foote’s The journey to Bountiful (1985), which marked Masterson’s directorial debut, Glynn played Jessie Mae, the shrewish daughter-in-law of Mrs. Watts (Geraldine Page in an Academy Award-winning performance).

A year earlier, she and Paul Dooley played the forgetful parents of Molly Ringwald’s Sam Baker in John Hughes’ Sixteen candles (1984).

Born in Cleveland on February 19, 1940, Glynn grew up in Center Point, Texas, where her father was a gas station owner and later mayor of the town. In Houston, she attended Lamar High School with Tune and met her future husband when they apprenticed at the Alley Theater. (Carol Hall, who made the music and lyrics for The best little brothelwas also at the Vicolo at the time.)

At 19, Glynn headed to New York, where she studied acting with Stella Adler and appeared in an Off-Broadway production of Waltz of the Toreador.

She and Masterson were married in 1960, and as he built his acting career, appearing on Broadway in The Great White Hope and in movies like In the Heat of the night (1967), The exorcist (1973) and The Stepford Wives (1975), she put her parents aside to raise their children, Alexandra, Mary Stuart and Peter.

“I didn’t work for many years while raising my family. I’ve really been back to theater for the last four years,’ she She said in 1978. “It was difficult to get hired when you hadn’t worked for a long time. However, what I did was work at The Actors Studio; it was terribly important to have a place to function and be criticized by the Lee Strasbergs, the Elia Kazans of the world.

Glynn has also appeared in commercials and made her film debut in Sydney Pollack’s The three days of the condor (1975) before his resounding success in The best little brothel.

In Francis Ford Coppola Stone Gardens (1987), she, her husband and Mary Stuart were all in the cast.

It also included his big screen resume Resurrection (1980), Continental division (1981), The Escape Artist (1982), Blessing (1994) and Judy Berlin (1999), plus five other films directed by her husband: Red blood (1989), doomed (1991), West of here (2002), Lost crossroads (2003) and Whiskey school (2005).

Glynn also played the first lady opposite George C. Scott in 1987-88 in one of the first Fox network shows, the sitcom Mister President.