Barbara Loden

Barbara Loden was an American actress and director who moved to New York City after high school and earned a living as a model and dancer before training at the Actors Studio. In the mid-1950s she was a regular sidekick to Ernie Kovacs on his television show, and her first New York stage role came in 1957, in Compulsion. She appeared in films directed by Elia Kazan, among them Splendor in the Grass (1961). She won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress for After the Fall, which opened on Broadway in 1964. She was the writer, director and star of Wanda (1970), an independent film that took the International Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival in 1970. During the 1970s she directed Off-Broadway and regional theater productions and two short films, The Frontier Experience (1975) and The Boy Who Liked Deer (1978). Born in Asheville, North Carolina, she died in 1980.