Priscilla Pointer, the accomplished stage and screen actress who was also the mother of Oscar-nominated actress Amy Irving and writer-director David Irving, died Monday at an assisted living facility in Ridgefield, Conn. She was 100.
Amy Irving confirmed the news in a heartfelt Instagram post and said her mother “most definitely will be missed.” Irving’s son Gabriel Barreto paid tribute to Pointer as well, sharing photos of her through the years and writing, “She was a wonderful mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and a true gift to the craft of acting.”
Pointer appeared in some of the most acclaimed films of the past century, including Brian De Palma’s Carrie and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. She also remains beloved for her role as Rebecca Barnes Wentworth, the firebrand she played on four seasons of Dallas.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Priscilla Pointer in ‘Carrie’
Pointer began her career on stage, and co-founded the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop with theater director Herbert Blau; his wife, the actress Beatrice Manley; and Jules Irving, whom Pointer married. The couple then moved to New York, where Irving became the first producing director of the Repertory Company of the Vivian Beaumont Theater of Lincoln Center, and Pointer starred in productions like A Streetcar Named Desire.
The couple had three children: Amy, David, and Katie. After Jules Irving’s death from a heart attack in 1979, Pointer married Robert Symonds, who had been Irving’s producing partner. Pointer and Symonds remained together until his death from prostate cancer in 2007.
Pointer’s first screen credits came via a two-episode stint on the TV series China Smith, but her first major screen role came in 1972, as Adrienne Harris Rainey on the daytime soap Where the Heart Is.
She made her theatrical film debut alongside daughter Amy in the 1976 adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie. Amy played Sissy Spacek’s sympathetic classmate Sue Snell, and Pointer played her mother, Eleanor. Mother and daughter would star together in several subsequent films, including Jerry Schatzberg’s Honeysuckle Rose, in which they again played mother and daughter, and the family affair Rumpelstiltskin, directed by son David.
Pointer also appeared in films including Looking for Mr. Goodbar, The Onion Field, and Twilight Zone: The Movie, and on TV series including Judging Amy, ER, and L.A. Law.
When Amy Irving was asked recently about the best piece of professional advice she’d ever been given, she recalled “doing a miniseries, where I had a week-long role, and I had to love this man… but I didn’t love this man… I went home that night, and I called my mother, Priscilla Pointer, who is an actress, and she told me what to do in that scenario. She said: ‘Amy, it’s very easy; you just have to imagine that he doesn’t have very long to live.’ I thought that was just brilliant.”
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