Jessica Lange is an American actress who has worked in film, theater and television. Let’s see some interesting facts and trivia about her!
1.She was born on April 20, 1949, in Cloquet, Minesota.
2. Her father, Albert John Lange (1913–1989), was a teacher and traveling salesman, and her mother, Dorothy Florence (née Sahlman; 1913–1998), was a housewife.
3. She has two older sisters, Ann and Jane, and a younger brother, George.
4. Her paternal ancestry originates in Germany and the Netherlands, while her maternal ancestry originates in Finland.
5. Due to the nature of her father’s professions, her early home life was chaotic. Her family moved over a dozen times to various towns and cities in Minnesota before settling back down in her hometown, where she graduated from Cloquet High School.
6. In 1967, she received an art scholarship to study art and photography at the University of Minnesota where she met and began dating Spanish photographer, Paco Grande.
7. After the two married in 1971, Lange left college to pursue a more bohemian lifestyle, opting to travel throughout the United States and Mexico in a minivan with Grande.
8. The couple then moved to Paris, France, where they drifted apart.
9. While in Paris, Lange studied mime theatre under the supervision of Étienne Decroux, and joined the Opéra-Comique as a dancer.
10. There she was sharing an apartment with Jerry Hall and Grace Jones.
11. She was discovered by fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez and subsequently became a model for the Wilhelmina modelling agency.
12. In 1973, she returned to the States and began work in New York City as a waitress at the Lion’s Head Tavern in Greenwich Village
13. She made her professional film debut in his 1976 remake of the 1933 action-adventure classic King Kong, for which she won her first Golden Globe Award.
14. She renowned film critic Pauline Kael praised Lange and said “The movie is sparked by Lange’s fast yet dreamy comic style. Her one liners are so dumb that audience laughs and moans at the same time.”
15.. She starred in the 1981 movie “The Postman Always Rings Twice” by Bob Rafelson, alongside Jack Nicholson. The final choice for the role was between her and Meryl Streep and she bagged it successfully.
16. During the editing of “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” Graeme Clifford decided to cast Lange as the lead in his first movie as director – “Frances.
17. Praising Jessica Lange for her performance in the movie, Streep had mentioned her as “beyond wonderful” and stated that “I couldn’t imagine doing it as well or even coming close to what Jessica did, because she was so amazing in it.
18. In 1982, she became the first performer in forty years to receive two Oscar nominations within the same year.
19. She won her second Golden Globe Award and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as a soap opera star in Tootsie and was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of the troubled actress Frances Farmer, in Frances.
20. Jessica Lange received three more nominations, for Country (1984), Sweet Dreams (1985) and Music Box (1989), before garnering a sixth Oscar nomination and winning, along with her third Golden Globe Award, the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as a manic depressive housewife in Blue Sky (1994).
21. Jessica Lange was the second actress in Oscar history, after Meryl Streep, to win Best Actress after winning Best Supporting Actress; a record she held for nearly twenty years before being succeeded by Cate Blanchett in 2014.
22. She made her Broadway debut playing Blanche DuBois in the 1992 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, for which she won the Theater World Award and was nominated for the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Featured Actress; and made her West End debut in her reprise of that role in 1996.
23. Her stage roles include the 2000 West End revival of Long Day’s Journey into Night, for which she became the first American actress to receive an Olivier Award nomination for Best Actress.
24. From 1976 to 1982, she was partnered with renowned Russian ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, with whom she had her first child, Aleksandra (“Shura”) Baryshnikova (born 1981).
25. During that time, she was also sporadically linked with Bob Fosse. The two remained friends up until his death.
26. In 1982, she met and entered a relationship with playwright Sam Shepard.
27. They had two children, Hannah Jane (born 1985) and Samuel Walker (born 1987), and lived together in Virginia, New Mexico, Minnesota, and eventually New York City, before separating in 2009.
28. Though she does not follow any set religion, she periodically practices Buddhism.
29. Jessica Lange has also revealed that she suffers from severe bouts of depression.
30. In 2008, Lange published her own collection of black-and-white pictures entitled 50 Photographs (powerHouse Books) with a special introduction by Patti Smith.
31. In 2010, she published a second collection of photographs, In Mexico.
32. Jessica Lange is a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), specializing in the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in spreading awareness of the disease in Russia.
33. She has also been a public critic of former U.S. President George W. Bush, once calling his administration, “a self-serving regime of deceit, hypocrisy and belligerence.
34. Jessica Lange has been a fervent human rights supporter of the Buddhist monks in Nepal.
35. In the early 1990s, she fostered a Romanian child with disabilities.
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