Her career was framed by «Carrie» and «The Hustler,» in which she gave two of the Hollywood’s defining performances.
“Carrie,” the 1976 Cinderella-goes-to-the-bloodbath horror film that gave Piper Laurie, who died Oct. 14 at 91, the role for which she’ll probably be best remembered, is the movie that changed my life. I was 17, home for the Thanksgiving weekend of my freshman year at college. “Carrie” had opened earlier that month, and I went to see it on Friday at our local mall. I knew nothing about it. (I’d never heard of its director, Brian De Palma.) I was just a naïve budding film geek who saw everything that played in town. But “Carrie,” for me, was the film-geek equivalent of watching the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan.” By the time the movie was over, I was a different person.
During the big shock sequence at the end, when Carrie’s hand pokes up through the earth in front of her grave, I literally stood up out of my seat in terror. That’s how real it all was to me. But it’s not just that “Carrie” struck a note of primal fear. The film’s prom-turned-nightmare fairy-tale high-school dreamscape felt alive to me like nothing I had ever seen.
And that was all about the interplay between Sissy Spacek, as the squishy pale telekinetic teen wallflower Carrie White, and Piper Laurie as her raging fundamentalist mother — a Jesus freak who wanted to rule over her daughter, who hated her for the fact that she was turning into a woman (a sexual being), who subjected her to a born-again Christian version of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. It sounds almost like “Mommie Dearest” recast as an over-the-top Evangelical nightmare. Yet the way that Spacek and Laurie played it, “Carrie” came closer to being “The Glass Menagerie” directed by Hitchcock on drugs. These two had an intimacy that could shake your soul.
For the thing about Margaret White, Laurie’s puritanical terrorist of a mother, is that she didn’t simply hate.
