Rosemary Murphy

A veteran actor of stage and screen who has won critical acclaim for her work on Broadway and television, Rosemary Murphy is best known for playing steadfast matriarchs such as Mary Ball Washington and Sara Delano Roosevelt in presidential film biographies. The daughter of a United States diplomat, Murphy was born in Germany and educated in Paris. After relocating to New York, she studied the Meisner technique at the Neighborhood Playhouse and briefly apprenticed at Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio, making her Broadway stage debut in Robinson Jeffers's "The Tower Beyond Tragedy" (1950). Murphy continued with a particularly fruitful decade as a stage actor in the 1960s, earning three Tony Award nominations for her roles in the plays "Period of Adjustment" (1961), "Any Wednesday" (1964), and "A Delicate Balance" (1966). The 1970s and '80s saw the actor making significant strides on TV, with long stints on the daytime soaps "All My Children" and "Another World," as well as an Emmy Award-winning performance as F.D.R.'s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, in the 1976 TV biopic "Eleanor and Franklin." Murphy went on to numerous other historical roles, including satirist Dorothy Parker in the 1977 film "Julia" and Mary Ball Washington (mother of George) in the 1984 miniseries "George Washington."