ACTRESS SALLY KIRKLAND PASSES AWAY AT 84
Sally Kirkland, the Oscar-nominated actress best known for her title role in the 1987 film Anna and for sharing the screen with Paul Newman and Robert Redford in The Sting, died Tuesday morning, November 11, 2025, at age 84 in a Palm Springs hospice, her representative Michael Greene confirmed.
Born in New York City to a Vogue and Life fashion editor who put her in modeling at age 5, Kirkland trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, studied Method acting with Lee Strasberg and under Philip Burton, and broke through in Andy Warhol’s 1964 13 Most Beautiful Women and a nude role in the off-Broadway Sweet Eros.
She honed her craft in Shakespeare—playing Helena in Joseph Papp’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Miranda in The Tempest—roles she later said were essential for any serious actor. Her decades-long screen career included a Blazing Saddles cameo, films with Barbra Streisand (The Way We Were), Kevin Costner (Revenge), Jim Carrey (Bruce Almighty), and Oliver Stone (JFK), plus series-regular stints on Valley of the Dolls and Charlie’s Angels and guest spots on Roseanne and Criminal Minds.
Her 1987 performance in Anna—as a fading Czech star mentoring a younger actress in America—earned a Golden Globe and an Oscar nod alongside Cher, Glenn Close, Holly Hunter, and Meryl Streep, with one critic calling it a “blazing comet” that finally revealed her talent to the public. Known for frequent on-screen nudity (Time dubbed her “the latter-day Isadora Duncan of nudothespianism”) and for a career low in the critically reviled 1969 Futz, Kirkland also taught Insight Transformational Seminars, belonged to the Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, and volunteered extensively for AIDS, cancer, and heart-disease patients, the homeless via the American Red Cross, hospices, and young prisoners.
