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Anna Eileen Heckart ( Herbert; March 29, 1919 – December 31, 2001) was an American stage and screen actress whose career spanned nearly 60 years. Heckart won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and two Emmy Awards, as well as was nominated for three Tony Awards. In 2000, she received the Tony Honor for Excellence in Theatre.
Heckart began her Broadway career as the assistant stage manager and an understudy for The Voice of the Turtle in 1943. Her many credits include Picnic, The Bad Seed, A View from the Bridge, A Memory of Two Mondays, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, A Family Affair, And Things That Go Bump in the Night, Barefoot in the Park, Butterflies Are Free, You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running, and The Cemetery Club.
Heckart won the 1953 Theatre World Award for Picnic. Her nominations include Tony Award nominations for Butterflies Are Free, Invitation to a March, and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs.
In 2000, at age 81, she appeared off-Broadway in Kenneth Lonergan's The Waverly Gallery. For this performance, she won several awards, including the Drama Desk Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, the Drama League Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award. That same year, she was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame and received an honorary Tony Award for lifetime achievement.
She was granted three honorary doctorates by Sacred Heart University, Niagara University, and Ohio State University.
On television, Heckart had starring roles in The 5 Mrs. Buchanans, Out of the Blue, Partners in Crime, and Backstairs at the White House (Emmy nomination as Eleanor Roosevelt). In 1994, she won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for her appearance as Rose Stein on Love & War. In 1988, she appeared as Ruth in the Tales from the Darkside episode "Do Not Open This Box". Her other guest roles included The Fugitive (where she appeared in three episodes as a nun, "Sister Veronica"), The Mary Tyler Moore Show (two Emmy nominations as journalist Flo Meredith, a role she carried over to a guest appearance on MTM's spinoff Lou Grant), Love Story, Rhoda, Alice, Murder One, Hawaii Five-O, Gunsmoke, Cybill, The Cosby Show (one Emmy nomination as Mrs. Hickson), and many others.
She appeared on two episodes of Gunsmoke. In 1965, Heckart appeared as Hattie Silks on the episode "The Lady." In 1969, Heckart appeared as Athena Partridge Royce on the episode "The Innocent".
Heckart played two unrelated characters on the daytime soap opera One Life to Live. During the 1980s, she played Ruth Perkins, the mother of Allison Perkins, who had kidnapped the newborn baby of heroine Victoria Lord under orders from phony evangelist and mastermind criminal Mitch Laurence. During the early 1990s, she played the role of Wilma Bern, mother of upstate Pennsylvania mob boss Carlo Hesser and his meek twin, Mortimer Bern. She appeared in the 1954 legal drama Justice, based on case files of New York's Legal Aid Society. She appeared in an episode of the medical drama The Eleventh Hour, titled "There Should Be an Outfit Called 'Families Anonymous!'" (1963), and an episode of Home Improvement, titled "Losing My Religion". She also played the role of spinster Amanda Cooper on season 5 episode 17 in the Little House on the Prairie episode "Dance With Me".
Heckart has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6140 Hollywood Blvd.
Heckart was a Democrat. She met President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House in 1967.
On December 31, 2001, Heckart died of lung cancer at her home in Norwalk, Connecticut, at the age of 82. She was cremated with her ashes scattered outside the Music Box Theatre in Manhattan, New York.
| 1956 | Miracle in the Rain | Grace Ullman |
| 1956 | Somebody Up There Likes Me | Ma Barbella |
| 1956 | Bus Stop | Vera |
| 1956 | Hortense Daigle | |
| 1958 | Hot Spell | Alma's Friend |
| 1960 | Heller in Pink Tights | Mrs. Lorna Hathaway |
| 1963 | My Six Loves | Ethel |
| 1967 | Up the Down Staircase | Henrietta Pastorfield |
| 1968 | No Way to Treat a Lady | Mrs. Brummel |
| 1969 | Sally Dunning | |
| 1972 | Butterflies Are Free | Mrs. Florence Baker |
| 1974 | Zandy's Bride | Ma Allan |
| 1975 | Katje | |
| 1976 | Burnt Offerings | Roz Allardyce |
| 1983 | Trauma Center | Amy Decker R.N. |
| 1986 | Seize the Day | Funeral Woman No. 1 |
| 1986 | Heartbreak Ridge | Little Mary Jackson |
| 1994 | Emma Buchanan | |
| 1994 | Ultimate Betrayal | Sarah McNeil |
| 1996 | Catherine MacDuggan |
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