Piper Laurie Was A Volcano In Sheep’s Clothing, In Everything From ‘Carrie’ To ‘The Hustler’ To ‘Twin Peaks’

I first met Margaret White in the pages of Stephen King’s Carrie in elementary school and it was all because of a crush. After the release of Children of the Corn in 1984, I saw the prettiest girl in fifth grade carrying around Night Shift, the short story collection in which its source was anthologized. With no other way to get close to her, I got my parents to buy me the book and fast became obsessed by King and the illicit charge of what I’d read. Finished in a fever, I had gone in search of more King and landed on Carrie, his first book. King describes Margaret White in its first pages as a “holy roller” so obsessed by the notion of sin that she could not conceive she was pregnant until she birthed Carrie on her own on a blood-drenched mattress in an empty home surrounded by neighbors who hate her. The book, these stories and characters, have anchored themselves in me. The image of Margaret White — a person so pugnacious, so broken by experience and yet so resourceful, so driven and unknowable — immediately lodged itself in my imagination. When I finally saw Brian De Palma’s adaptation of Carrie on a VHS tape I wasn’t technically allowed to rent, the moment Piper Laurie appears on screen I knew immediately that this was Margaret White, a more-rounded, more terrifyingly human Margaret White: a volcano in sheep’s clothing. 

What Laurie captured so well was not just the monstrousness of a woman who refers to breasts as “dirty pillows,” not the middle-distance gaze, the sense that not all was well with Margaret who had one foot in reality and the other with the cruel angels of her own divining, but the woman who had her own sad stories to tell — but no one to tell them to. King says Margaret believed her pregnancy was a rapidly-spreading “cancer of the womanly parts” and that she was going to die soon. I can see her belief manifested in Laurie’s performance: the fatalism and mortality, the surety that comes with ignorance and unquestioned faith, the beatific arrogance of the saved forged in the fire of ostracization and isolation. Margaret first appears ten minutes into Carrie, a witch from a fairytale all in black with black cloak, her red hair an untamed thicket come to call on a hapless neighbor with a poisoned apple of the Good News promising salvation in a Godless time. She proselytizes with orgasmic bliss to an increasingly unnerved neighbor before being sent away with ten dollars. She experiences the same kind of rapture when she’s beating her daughter, Carrie (Sissy Spacek), and forcing the child to confess to sins she hasn’t committed. She’s transferring the rejection of her evangelism into rage at a daughter whose budding sexuality she can’t stem. Margaret can’t save her. She’s failed as a parent. Margaret’s humiliation is Carrie’s fault, Carrie who is learning how terrible the world is for young women despite all the precautions Margaret’s taken. Margaret wants to protect Carrie from the rejection and humiliation that she, herself, suffers daily. She’s a terrible mother but what makes her indelible in Carrie is how Laurie makes us believe she has good intentions.

A lot of actors would be up to the task of playing unhinged, but few could also do what Laurie does later when Carrie, fresh from a round of punishments and forced isolation, kisses her mother sweetly on the cheek before bed. Laurie underplays the moment. Her Margaret has no shame for her behavior — why should she? just pleasure over how things have returned to her sense of normal. Laurie underplays it but if you look close, her eyes are glassy and ecstatic. Margaret isn’t sliding up and down an emotional scale, she’s burning at the same temperature whatever her outward expression. When she’s not in the midst of an eruption, she’s still vibrating, maniacally, dangerously in place. I think among Laurie’s peers in the Hollywood of the 1950s, where she got her start as a contract player for Universal, only Ida Lupino had the same quality of dangerous, even explosive potential in stillness. I don’t know that even Lupino could have played Margaret White as something other than a camp caricature, some “psycho-biddy” refugee from a Robert Aldrich exploitation film. As played by Laurie, Margaret’s story has the awful weight of history and melancholy: her story becomes a blueprint for suffering for her daughter, of trauma left to metastasize into madness and of mental illness shunned rather than treated.

Laurie will be best remembered for Margaret White, but I think her best performance is as doomed alcoholic Sarah Packard in Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961). In love with pool hustler “Fast” Eddie (Paul Newman), himself in love only with losing, Sarah begs him to leave the gambling life but he chooses grift over any future with her. It destroys her and we can see it happening in brutal flashes flickering across Laurie’s face. Watch her during their first meeting in a bus station when Eddie asks her if she has a long wait. Laurie lifts her chin away from her book like her head weighs a hundred pounds, fixes him with a look, answers wary and irritated in a way that might be familiar to every woman asked to take off her headphones to listen to some tired platitudinous play. He buys her a cup of coffee and tries again: “When does your bus leave?” and she tells him. Then she says “Wouldn’t give us a lot of time, would it?” and all Eddie can do is laugh. It’s as cold a rebuff of a pick-up as anything in any noir, delivered with deadly surgical precision: a Piper Laurie special. When they meet again, she’s sloshed. He makes another move and perhaps knowing that most of his attraction to her has to do with her brokenness, she flashes that Piper Laurie smile, equal parts vulnerable and ferocious; sardonic and sad, and ties herself to his sinking ship.

Born Rosetta Jacobs in 1932, the daughter of a Detroit, Michigan furniture salesman, Laurie spent a few of her early teen years looking after sister, ailing with asthma and sequestered away in a sanatorium where they were cut off from entertainment and forced to rely on creating their own, fictional world as diversion. When she hit 17, she signed that contract with Universal and made her debut in Alexander Hall’s Louisa (1950) where she had her first affair with then 39 year old Ronald Reagan. I have to think he was badly outmatched. Frustrated with roles that squandered her merciless intelligence and blunted her rapier-sharpness, she sought refuge on stage and in television for four years until she set the world on fire for the first time in The Hustler. After collecting her first of three Oscar nominations for her turn there, she promptly stepped away from acting for the next fifteen years. She told an interviewer that with everything falling apart: the assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate — that acting seemed like a foolish thing for an adult to do. She adopted a child, learned how to work with stone and marble, and sharpened her instrument in the theater, most notably in 1965 in her broadway debut as troubled Laura in a revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. It turns out she was just waiting for the right moment to re-emerge as something savage on the silver screen.

The vehicle for her return to film was in 1976 as Margaret White, a film she thought initially was a comedy; she found a new freedom in performing roles that fit her pitch black sense of humor; a worldview marked by someone maybe too smart for what she was asked to do and so she did what she wanted with an irrepressible verve. By the end of Carrie when it came time for Margaret to be crucified by the entire contents of a silverware drawer, Laurie told director Brian DePalma that she wanted to play the multiple penetrations with expressions of ecstasy rather than agony. “Margaret did love God,” Laurie told Alex Simon in a 2016 interview, “She loved Jesus. She wanted them to embrace her daughter and herself as the ultimate joy in the Lord. She was a true believer.” Easy enough to say — and perhaps even easy to portray — but what Laurie brought to her performances was more than just a specific religious fervor, it was the terrible social consequences of that overwhelming belief. The cost of her passion is a terrible loneliness. She is cornered, wounded, and badly in need of kindness, but she’s dangerous to approach.

Watch her in her ten minute supporting role in Children of a Lesser God (1986) as the estranged mother of a troubled young woman (where she earned the third of her three career Academy Award nominations). Watch how she smokes a cigarette, looking at it unlit and chalk-white like Yorick’s skull before bringing it bitterly to her mouth. Watch how her eyes change when she realizes the young man who’s come to visit is maybe just interested in talking about her daughter because her daughter’s pretty. She is protective and caustic, both polarities at once and then one then the other — liquid and mercurial. She is high and low. In a film remembered for superlative performances, she communicates the entirety of two characters’ lonesome tribulations with just the play of a cigarette. Piper Laurie steals the show.

Piper Laurie had a long career that included dozens of guest spots on landmark television shows: John Frankenheimer-directed Playhouse 90 episodes all the way through to Matlock and Murder, She Wrote and a memorable recurring turn in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Wherever she showed up, she brought with her that inimitable raging-in-place, the threat in every expression of a castrating phrase or a piercing, emasculating gaze. To the extent that The Hustler is a kind of horror film, I find I mainly only think of Laurie as a horror film icon. When she shows up in something, I have the same thrill of delight as when Christopher Walken shows up in something. The temperature changes. Piper Laurie’s in this? Things just got real.

It was never burlesque for Laurie. Even as a gangster’s moll gone to seed in underseen haunted drive-in shocker Ruby (1977) (which I came to through another Stephen King book, Danse Macabre) doing a drunken lounge act for a blind patron, her performance is laced with the character’s palpable self-loathing and contempt. She laughs at herself mid-croon and the sandpaper rasp of it is almost physically painful. At her broadest, she still found small, intimate touchpoints. She is inspired in Walter Murch’s Return to Oz (1985) as an infernal Auntie Em delivering poor Dorothy (Fairuza Balk) to commitment and electroshock; in not much more than a cameo in Dean Koontz-adaptation Intensity (1997), she creates a fully-fleshed human being when she says how she “knows what it is to be out alone on a lonely highway… this is my first Thanksgiving in thirty-two years without my Howard;” she does it again as a dotty, spiritualist aunt in Steven de Souza’s demonic possession flick Possession (2000); as an evil, pod-infested member of The Faculty (1997), one of the ’90s great paranoid thrillers. Whenever there was a need for great depths in a limited time, it seemed, call on Laurie.

When I learned that Piper Laurie had died on October 14, 2023 at the age of 91, though, the first performance of hers that crossed my mind wasn’t from her best-known works, but rather from a little-seen 2006 serial killer film called The Dead Girl. Written and directed by Karen Moncrieff, it details the way the lives of several disparate strangers in a small community intersect when one of them, Arden (Toni Collette) discovers the brutally-murdered body of a young woman. Laurie plays Arden’s invalid mother. The first scene of the film has the two of them sleeping, nested together in bed; then the body; then Arden giving her mother a bath before enduring her mother’s abuse when the police arrive on scene. “Why are they asking you for? You don’t know anything?… and you called the police. You’re the reason those bloodsuckers are out there, swarming all over my yard, ringing my bell like they know me. Before I know it they’re gonna be pawin’ my cupboards, climbin’ up my stairs…” it’s clear she’s not talking about an official home invasion. Her fear of violation is a lot more intimate than that. She’s unrecognizable here, her hair thin and gray, her feet swollen in support hose. From bed later, she asks Arden what she’s done to her face, her hair, why she stinks of perfume. “You look like a two-dollar hooker” she says and then that laugh again, that Piper Laurie laugh that’s like teeth dragged across bone: more expression of pain than mirth, too much knowledge and too little profit from it. She always saw more than you could see. She always knew more than you thought there was to know. We are less for every irreplaceable force we lose. We are less now than we were before.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available in bookstores.