| Sissy Spacek  AKA Mary Elizabeth Spacek
Born: 25-Dec-1949
Birthplace: Quitman, TX
Gender: Female
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Actor Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Coal Miner's Daughter After graduating from high school, Spacek came to New York for an extended stay with her cousin, actor Rip Torn, and his wife, Geraldine Page. She briefly sang and played guitar at West Village bar called The Bitter End, under the painfully '60s-esque stage name "Rainbo". She wanted to act, so Torn pulled strings to get her into Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio. Later, when agents suggested she should change her unusual name, it was Torn who talked her out of it. Spacek made her movie debut in 1970 as "girl at bar" in Andy Warhol's Trash. She appeared in two episodes of The Waltons, was sold into sex slavery in 1972's Prime Cut, and played a girl 'in trouble' in a 1973 TV movie about a home for unwed mothers, The Girls of Huntington House. Playing a thinly fictionalized version of serial killer Caril Fugate, Spacek garnered good reviews in Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973), opposite Martin Sheen as Charles Starkweather. She soon married Badlands art director Jack Fisk.
Several months later, when Fisk was working on Phanton of the Paradise, one of his crew walked out on the first day of shooting, and Spacek volunteered to serve as a set dresser. Phantom's director, Brian De Palma, remembered Spacek two years later, when Fisk suggested that she would be perfect for the title role in the indelible Carrie. Spacek received an Oscar nomination, and Carrie is still one of De Palma's best films, and arguably the best adaptation of a Stephen King novel. Spacek won her Oscar playing Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter (1980). She has also been nominated for Missing (1982), The River (1984), Crimes of the Heart (1986), and In the Bedroom (2001). Also among her best films: Three Women, 'Night, Mother, The Long Walk Home, and Crimes of the Heart.
Fisk, Spacek's husband, appeared on camera as the man in the planet, yanking the lever to start the nightmare, in David Lynch's Eraserhead. Father: Edwin A. Spacek
Mother: Virginia Spilman
Brother: Robbie (d. leukemia)
Husband: Jack Fisk (art director, m. 1974, two daughters)
Daughter: Schuyler Fisk (actress, b. 1982)
Daughter: Virginia Madison Fisk (actress, b. 1988)
High School: Quitman High School, Quitman, TX (1967)
4-H Club
Oscar for Best Actress 1981 for Coal Miner's Daughter
Golden Globe 1981 for Coal Miner's Daughter
Golden Globe 1987 for Crimes of the Heart
Golden Globe 2002 for In the Bedroom
FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
Hot Rod (3-Aug-2007)
Gray Matters (21-Oct-2006)
An American Haunting (5-Nov-2005)
North Country (12-Sep-2005)
The Ring Two (17-Mar-2005)
Nine Lives (24-Jan-2005)
A Home at the End of the World (9-Jun-2004)
A Decade Under the Influence (19-Jan-2003) Herself
Tuck Everlasting (8-Sep-2002)
Last Call (25-May-2002)
Midwives (2-Apr-2001)
In the Bedroom (19-Jan-2001)
The Straight Story (21-May-1999)
Blast from the Past (27-Jan-1999)
Affliction (28-Aug-1997)
The Grass Harp (11-Oct-1996)
If These Walls Could Talk (11-Sep-1996)
Streets of Laredo (12-Nov-1995)
The Good Old Boys (5-Mar-1995)
Trading Mom (13-May-1994)
A Place for Annie (1-May-1994)
JFK (20-Dec-1991)
Hard Promises (14-Sep-1991)
The Long Walk Home (11-Sep-1990)
Crimes of the Heart (12-Dec-1986)
'Night Mother (5-Sep-1986)
Violets Are Blue (11-Apr-1986)
Marie (Oct-1985)
The River (19-Dec-1984)
Missing (12-Feb-1982)
Raggedy Man (18-Sep-1981)
Coal Miner's Daughter (22-Feb-1980)
Heart Beat (1980)
Verna: USO Girl (25-Jan-1978)
3 Women (11-Nov-1977)
Welcome to L.A. (12-Nov-1976)
Carrie (3-Nov-1976)
Katherine (5-Oct-1975)
Ginger in the Morning (Jul-1974)
Badlands (15-Oct-1973)
Prime Cut (28-Jun-1972)
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