Buckley, Betty

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Betty Buckley

Singer, songwriter, actress

For her popular roles, from “Abby Bradford” to “Grizabella,” Betty Buckley has won a wide and devoted audience. She has received high critical praise on television, in film, on and off-Broadway, and in the recording studio. In twenty years in music and theater, she has become known as a performer who is not afraid to take chances with her appearence, her roles, her voice, and her career.

A self-described “Air Force brat” raised in Fort Worth, Texas, Buckley fell in love with the theater after seeing her first show, “Pajama Game,” as she later told the New York Post, “with Bob Fosse’s original choreography. And when they got to the ‘Steam Heat’ number, I said, Oh, wow. I want to do that, whatever that is, for the rest of my life.’” Buckley’s memories of her childhood also include a self-imposed apprenticeship to the great song stylists of recordings. “I remember a specific image of myself,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1985, “I’m 13 years old and I’m in a bathtub…listening to Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall …. I’m a very good listener and I knew every note of that album. Judy Garland taught me singing and Ella Fitzgerald taught me phrasing.” Buckley earned a degree in journalism and toured with a Miss America USO troupe (as Miss Fort Worth) before moving to New York to be in the theater. She was cast as “Martha Jefferson” in the Broadway hit “1776” after her very first audition in 1969 and spent the next five years playing leading roles in musical comedies on and off-Broadway and in London.

Buckley became famous nation-wide when, in 1977, she was cast as “Abby Bradford,” the stepmother to the “Eight is Enough” family on the ABC hit series. The dramatic role brought her fans and critical acclaim for her sympathetic portrayal of a young second wife. Film roles followed, including her portrayal of the ex-wife of a country-and-western singer (Robert Duvall) in the 1983 “Tender Mercies.” Buckley appeared in the feminist musical comedy, “I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road,” by Gretchen Cryer, in Los Angeles and New York during breaks from other projects in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

However, her greatest challenge came with her return to Broadway as “Grizabella” in “Cats.” The British musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and T.S. Elliot was still selling out every performance in London when auditions began for its New York run. The success of the show was due in part to the widespread popularity of “Grizabella’s” ballad, “Memories.” Not only was the London cast recording, with the “Grizabella” of Elaine Page, widely known in America, but new singles of the ballad by such stars as Judy Collins and Barbra Streisand were becoming top sellers. The song comes at the end of the long musical and precedes a dangerous ascent to the theatre ceiling (called “the heavyside layer”) on a

For the Record…

Full name, Betty Lynn Buckley; born 1948, in Big Spring, Tex.; father was in the U.S. Air Force and later worked in construction; mother worked for Ft. Worth (Tex.) Music Fair; married Peter Rood (an acting coach), 1972 (divorced, 1979). Education: Texas Christian University, B.A. in journalism, c. 1968. Religion: Jain Buddhist.

Actress in films, Broadway musicals, and on television; stage appearances include “1776,” 1969, “I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road,” “Cats,” 1982, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” 1985, “Song and Dance,” 1986, “Into the Woods,” 1987, and “Carrie,” 1988; feature films include “Carrie,” 1976, and “Tender Mercies,” 1983; regular member of cast of television series “Eight Is Enough,” 1977-81. Also has performed a cabaret act in clubs; songwriter, 1973—.

Awards: Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical, 1983, for “Cats.”

Addresses: Agent —International Creative Management, 49 West 57th St., New York, NY 10019.

cherry-picker/tire. To make things even worse, the show’s sophisticated body microphone system failed just before Buckley’s entrance. As she later told Tom Tomasulo of the New York Daily News: “It was a different kind of pressure where you had to deliver better than your best…. When you come from behind with a show, people don’t know what to expect—it’s easier to delight people. Whereas when you have such expectations placed upon you, its very hard to impress people…. I just went out and sang as loud as I could.”

Buckley impressed so many people as “Grizabella” that she was awarded the Tony Award as best featured actress in a musical in 1983. When the Broadway cast recording was released later that year, her performance of “Memories” received high praise. Buckley has never been afraid to appear in odd roles or, following her triumph with “Memories,” in roles premiered by other actresses. After “Cats” and dramatic film roles, she portrayed “Alice Nutting,” the male impersonator who appeared as Edwin Drood in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” a 1985 musical comedy by Rupert Holmes based on Charles Dickens’s final, unfinished novel. Since Dickens had never solved his mystery, the musical version invited the audience to vote on its own solution at each performance. The cast had to learn alternative final scenes depending on the audience’s interpretation of the clues. In recent seasons, Buckley has replaced Bernadette Peters in Lloyd Webber’s “Song and Dance” (1986) for the last six weeks of its Broadway run and has performed in the workshop version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” (1987).

Her most recent role on stage was a return to a film property with which she had long been associated. Having played the sympathetic role of the gym teacher in Brian De Palma’s thriller, “Carrie” (1976), she accepted the highly negative role of the mother, “Margaret,” in the 1988 musical version. Buckley had to replace Barbara Cook, the Broadway legend who created the role in England but, as she told Diana Maychick in the New York Post, she was thrilled by the challenge of creating the emotionally charged character of “a Bible-spouting hellfire.” “I gave Margaret a history. Although it’s not clear in the book [by Stephen King] or the movie or even in our version here, I chose to believe that Margaret wasn’t married when she had Carrie. Consequently, she feels tremendous guilt over her own sexuality…. She’s fearful for her daughter making the same mistakes at the same time she feels punished by Carrie’s existence…. The show is a metaphor for life … a ballad of high school as life.”

Buckley has been writing songs (”mostly heartbreak ballads”) since 1973 and often includes them in her cabaret acts. She described her 1987 Atlantic City act as “very musical, very soothing [with] a lot of really good songs in it, but songs people are not familiar with. I do ‘Memories,’ of course, but about 70% of the music people haven’t heard before.” She has recorded her own feminist ballads on the album that bears her name which was recorded live at St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York.