Age: 96
female
June Squibb (born November 6, 1929) began working in musical theatre at the St. Louis Muny and trained at the Cleveland Play House, and at the HB Studio. While at the Cleveland Play House, she performed in productions of Marseilles, The Play's the Thing, Goodbye, My Fancy, The Heiress, Detective Story, Antigone, Ladies in Retirement and Bloomer Girl. In 1958, she played Dulcie in The Boyfriend Off-Broadway. In 1959, she starred in an Off-Broadway revival of Lend an Ear with Elizabeth Allen. She made her Broadway debut in the original production of Gypsy starring Ethel Merman, taking over the role of stripper Electra in 1960. Squibb appeared in The Happy Time, which opened in 1968 and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Musical. In-between these periods, she did modelling work for romance novels and appeared in commercials. In 1995, she appeared in the play Sacrilege on Broadway, which starred Ellen Burstyn. Squibb played many roles in national tours, regional theatre, summer stock and off-Broadway. In 2012, she played Stella Gordon in Dividing the Estate at the Dallas Theater Center in which she received standout reviews. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Alexander Payne's film Nebraska (2013). In 2015, she was inducted into the Cleveland Play House Hall of Fame. Squibb will appear in the Disney+ film Godmothered.
Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character—a “difficult” woman. By no means is she conventionally “nice,” but she will never be forgotten. Ruth’s story is told in three parts, each focusing on a critical time in her life. When we first meet her—on Long Island, in the summer of 1958—Ruth is only four. The second window into Ruth’s life opens on the fall of 1990, when she is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career. She distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason. A Widow for One Year closes in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother. She’s about to fall in love for the first time. Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing, A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief.
