Sally Kirkland, an actress known for her sassy, no-nonsense persona and whose prolific career included an appearance in an Andy Warhol film, a groundbreaking Off Broadway play in which she performed fully nude, and an Oscar nomination as best actress for the 1987 film “Anna,” died on Tuesday in Palm Springs, Calif. She was 84.
She died in a hospice center in Palm Springs, her godson Coty Galloway said; he did not provide an immediate cause but said she had dementia and had suffered multiple injuries from falls.
A product of the avant-garde New York City theater scene of the 1960s, Ms. Kirkland accumulated more than 250 television and film credits. She was seemingly ubiquitous but never quite a star.
“Kirkland is one of those performers whose talent has been an open secret to her fellow actors but something of a mystery to the general public,” the critic Sheila Benson wrote in her review of “Anna” for The Los Angeles Times. “There should be no confusion about her identity after this blazing comet of a performance.”
At 5-foot-10, she once said that producers believed she was too tall to be cast in traditional romantic leads. Still, she won a starring role in “Anna,” a drama with comic flourishes directed by Yurek Bogayevicz, who co-wrote the screenplay by the Polish-born Agnieszka Holland, who went on to become an award-winning director and screenwriter.
Ms. Kirkland played the title role — a fading Czech movie star once imprisoned for anti-government protests after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Now living in exile in New York, she is struggling to revive her career when she meets an innocent young fan and fellow Czech refugee (played by the former fashion model Paulina Porizkova) who, after receiving mentoring and a makeover from Anna, sets her sights on stardom herself.
Despite being known for her broad, sassy and very American personality, Ms. Kirkland did not consider the role of Central European screen siren much of a departure.
“I think I’m more European in personality,” she said in a 2000 interview with MoXie Magazine, a women’s publication. “My attitude is always one of sensuality, aggressive enthusiasm and a kind of outrageousness in my expression. I suppose if I wanted to be the girl next door, I could have been.”
She lost the Oscar to Cher in “Moonstruck” but received a torrent of strong reviews.
Even when the roles were small, her presence was unmistakable. She brought her trademark sexuality and swagger to “The Sting” (1973), playing the vampy stripper love interest of Robert Redford’s con artist character.
She delivered a brief but searing performance in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” (1991) as an exotic dancer compatriot of Jack Ruby, a club owner in Dallas who later shot and killed Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. And she wrung humor and pathos out of her turn as a fading rock star in “Revenge” (1990), a romantic thriller starring Kevin Costner and Anthony Quinn.
Her other appearances included the romantic drama “The Way We Were” (1973), starring Barbra Streisand and Mr. Redford, and the comedies “Private Benjamin” (1980) starring Goldie Hawn and “Bruce Almighty” (2003) starring Jim Carrey. She also worked for decades on television, with guest appearances in shows like “Kojak,” “Three’s Company,” “Charlie’s Angels” and “Felicity.”
Sally Kirkland Jr. was born on Oct. 31, 1941, in Manhattan to Frederic McMichael Kirkland, a product of Philadelphia’s Main Line and a scrap metals merchant, and Sally Sr., a fashion editor at Life magazine for decades.
“My name was Sally Kirkland Jr., so I had a huge insecurity problem about being the daughter of a famous woman whose byline was Sally Kirkland,” she said in a 2013 interview with the film site Money Into Light. But, she added, “I’m sure I would never have been an actress if it was not for her being so totally in the public eye and putting me at age 5 in front of the camera to be a model.”
As for acting, “I started when I was 10,” she said, “and I was very very shy, and it was a way for me to hide behind characters so the real Sally Kirkland wouldn’t have to emerge.”
In her teens, she fell under the tutelage of the Oscar-winning actress Shelley Winters, who helped guide her into the Actors Studio workshop. There, she studied under the Method acting guru Lee Strasberg.
She began appearing Off Broadway in the early 1960s and, as a habitué of Mr. Warhol’s Factory scene, earned her first credited screen role in the Pop artist’s 1964 experimental film “The 13 Most Beautiful Women.”
She also performed Shakespeare with Joe Papp’s Public Theater and gained a reputation for her willingness to disrobe onstage in more avant-garde fare, like the 1968 Off Broadway production of “Sweet Eros,” a one-act play by Terrence McNally. A Time magazine critic called her “the latter-day Isadora Duncan of nudothespianism,” but Ms. Kirkland called the nudity “symbolic” and critical to the point of the show, not meant to titillate.
Her reputation for skin-baring was such that in 1969 she wrote an essay explaining her motives in The New York Times: “I came to the theater, as others have, by way of painting and dance. As a painter, I had for my heroes Botticelli and Modigliani; as a dancer, Isadora Duncan, and so the carry-over on to the stage of the nude body seemed to me not only stylistically expressive, but a perfectly natural extension of my beliefs.”
Those beliefs included a fierce opposition to the Vietnam War. “The nude body onstage was the Truth,” she added. “Vietnam the Lie.”
Along with her sexualized persona came a reputation for dating famous men. Of the 35 films she’s starred in, she confessed in a 1990 interview with the television host Rick Dees, she was romantically linked to their leading men “at least eight times.” “I love men,” she added. “I just do.”
One paramour, she said, was Bob Dylan, whom she had met while waiting tables in Greenwich Village in the 1960s, and later connected with in Los Angeles in the 1970s. “I was obsessed,” she said in a 2023 interview with The Daily Mail. “Oh, God, yeah. He is the reason I am single and is definitely the love of my life.”
Her marriages to the singer and composer Michael Jarrett and to the music producer Mark Hebert ended in divorce. Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Ms. Kirkland received an overdue star turn last year playing herself in the independent film “Sallywood,” a gentle parody about a longtime fan of the actress who becomes her assistant and helps her in her quest to return to red-carpet glory.
In a video interview last year, Mr. Gruber recalled Ms. Kirkland’s response after she first read the script: “Oh, you wrote me as the world’s biggest narcissist, and I can’t wait to play myself this way!”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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