Jill Clayburgh, 1944–2010

Writer and director Paul Mazursky conceived his 1978 film about a divorcée after a friend described herself on a mortgage application with the phrase “an unmarried woman.” But it was Jill Clayburgh’s portrayal of the film’s vulnerable but gritty heroine that brought the director’s inspiration to life on the screen, leading critics to cite An Unmarried Woman as a breakthrough in Hollywood’s depiction of women. “There was practically nothing for women to do on the screen in the 1950s and 1960s,” Clayburgh said while promoting the film. “Sure, Marilyn Monroe was great, but she had to play a one-sided character, a vulnerable sex object.”

Clayburgh was born into “a privileged New York family,” said the Associated Press. Her father was a successful businessman and her mother was a secretary to legendary Broadway producer David Merrick. “Willful and destructive,” Clayburgh was sent to a psychiatrist at age 9, undergoing analysis four times a week. Entranced by the theater, she studied acting at Sarah Lawrence College. After graduating in 1966, she acted alongside her boyfriend, Al Pacino, at the Charles Playhouse in Boston, where the couple lived on her trust fund. She made her film debut opposite Robert De Niro in 1969 in The Wedding Party, which was directed by her college classmate Brian DePalma.

In 1975, Clayburgh was nominated for an Emmy for her “breakthrough” role as a New York prostitute in the ABC television movie Hustling, said The Washington Post. An Unmarried Woman earned her the Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award nomination. (She lost to Jane Fonda for Coming Home.) Clayburgh was nominated for an Oscar again the next year for Starting Over, a romantic comedy in which she played the lover of a man (Burt Reynolds) who can’t get over his ex-wife. She lost again, this time to Sally Field in Norma Rae—a part that Clayburgh had turned down.

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Clayburgh’s films “personified a new breed of American female, defined by professional rather than marital status,” said The Philadelphia Inquirer. They included Semi-Tough (1977), It’s My Turn (1980), and First Monday in October (1981), in which she played the fictional first woman on the Supreme Court. Clayburgh retreated from acting in the mid-’80s to raise her two children with husband David Rabe, the playwright. (Her daughter is actress Lily Rabe.) But “like many actresses of a certain age,” she eventually found “juicier roles on television,” said the Los Angeles Times. She played a “New York socialite and matriarch” on the TV series Dirty Sexy Money, but the drama was canceled last year after two seasons.

Burt Reynolds described Clayburgh’s essence as “innocence masked by chutzpah.” For many fans, the results were riveting. One approached Clayburgh in 2002 and, weeping, said: “My God, you’ve defined my entire life for me.”