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Irene Worth's last errand, before she suffered the stroke that ended her life, was a trip to the post office near her apartment in the West SOs in New York City. Was it to mail something she had written? To send a book she had discovered-or rediscovered-to a friend? She kept in touch with all her friends and had more of them than anyone I have ever known-not only those who worked with her but also the audiences who took such pleasure from her remarkable career.
I thought I would see her on the evening of March 10. She was expected at the opening night of Edward Albee's new play, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? When she was not in the audience at curtain time, the curtain was held for her-perhaps the only time she was late for an entrance in the course of her disciplined, dedicated theatre life. A series of telephone calls revealed the reason why.
Albee was one of the first people I spoke to the next day. He said, "By the time I was 18 1 knew what acting was, but it wasn't until 1950, when I saw Irene in The Cocktail Party, that I knew what acting could be." In a piece he wrote for the New York Times, Edward paid her the most glorious compliment: "I suspect that one day before long I will find myself writing yet another character that only she can play."
Neil Simon told me about his first meeting with Irene in 1991 at the rehearsals of Lost in Yonkers. "She was so powerful, so kind, so smart, and she knew her business so well that I was intimidated by her. And though I did not know her until she was in her seventies, you could see how beautiful she was."
I asked Kevin Spacey about those Yonkers days. He said: "At the first readthrough she was tough, hilarious and bubbling. She could be intimidating, but I decided to treat her exactly as my character did. She was tough. I was tougher. I made her laugh, and laugh she did. She had moxie, that gal. She became our matriarch, just as she'd been for the American theatre for so many years."
Mercedes Ruehl remembers...