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At an unpretentious restaurant in Manhattan's theater district, an unpretentious woman tucked a napkin in her dress and wolfed a hamburger lunch. Not that the dress was worth protecting; it was just another tent. After finishing, she wiped the napkin across her mouth. No need to freshen her lipstick; she wore no makeup. Then she strode out in her beat-up pumps—and as if on cue, heads turned, cars slowed, and a sailor rushed up at flank speed. "You're in the movies, aren't you?" he asked. "But I can't remember your name." Said she: "Who, me? You must be kidding."
The name is Sandy Dennis, and she couldn't care less whether you know it. As far as credits go, she is a major star at 30. Yet by dint of personal force and preference, she has thumbed her perky nose at glamour and the constraining star system. In 1963 and 1964, she won Tony awards for her first big Broadway roles, the sensitive social worker in A Thousand Clowns and the delectable mistress in Any Wednesday. For her next big success, the screen version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which she played the frightened young faculty wife, she won a supporting-actress Oscar, skipped the presentation ceremonies, and gave the Oscar to her business manager.
Instant Tears. In her newest film, Up the Down Staircase, Sandy gracefully portrays the grim trials and triumphs of a green young teacher in a New York City slum school. Staircase was the official U.S. entry at the Moscow Film Festival in July. Sandy was there, rubbernecking and restaurant sampling, but left before she became the first American ever to win the festival's best-actress medal. Chances are that she still neither knows nor cares that last week Staircase (No. 2 draw in the U.S.) produced Christmas in August for Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall by grossing $248,651 — the alltime opening-week record for a U.S. theater.
"Sandy is Sandy in whatever she does," says Playwright Muriel Resnik (Any Wednesday), but not surprisingly, herself-possession rubs some people the wrong way. Some actors dislike working with her, and one called her "a golden pain in the behind." They abhor her trademark mannerisms, the way she stutters and flutters her hands before uttering a line, as if about to goof it. Sandy is a constant hair pusher: in the first few minutes of Up the Down Stair case, she pushed three times. She is also an oral actress: a lip biter, tongue twitcher, mouth closer and chin wrinkler. Her vocal rhythm is a hesitation tango; her midsentence gasps leave audiences gasping, too.
On the other hand, she is widely lauded as a "totally original actress" and "complete professional." Most actors need ammonia capsules to weep even once; Sandy must hold the Olympic record for instantly crying on cue—ten times in one hour during the shooting of Virginia Woolf. Mark Rydell, director of her recently completed film, The Fox, calls her an "emotionally fluid actress" capable of doing anything.