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In Any Wednesday, the Dennis tricks saved a so-so show—the faucetlike crying, the stumbling over lines, the vocal tremolo between laughter and tears. Reviewers were almost separated from their critical faculties. John Chapman of the Daily News closed his mash notice by pleading for Mrs. Chapman's forbearance. Walter Kerr, then of the old New York Herald Tribune, led off simply: "Let me tell you about Sandy Dennis. There should be one in every home."
Chopped Liver. In Virginia Woolf, Sandy played a drunken child bride with stomach-turning realism and cannily turned the part into that of an anemic ant asserting itself against dragons. "Sandy," Co-Star Elizabeth Taylor says overgraciously, "made chopped chicken out of me—or chopped chicken liver, which is even worse." In Up the Down Staircase, she persuasively demonstrates the importance of being earnest amid the cynicism and bureaucracy of big-city schools. In her most affecting scene, she reaches unreachable kids by getting them to relate their time to the opening lines of Dickens' Tale of Two Cities ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"). "Sandy gave a special dimension to the picture," says Bel Kaufman, author of the grab-bag epistolary novel on which the film is more or less based. "She's a much more vulnerable and sensitive person than the character in the book."
Despite her "gingerbready" mannerisms, Sandy is fast becoming known as one of the most imaginative actresses around. "She'll never play a part in a conventional manner," says William Daniels, co-star of her new play, Daphne in Cottage D. "She drives the less imaginative directors up the walls." That she gets away with it doubtless reflects a growing U.S. hunger for actresses of talent rather than tinsel. But equally important is Sandy's own single-minded drive for theatrical achievement. Her background has a lot to do with it. She comes from Nebraska, and as a matter of odd fact, so do a remarkable number of other well-known names in show business—the Astaires, Marlon Brando, Johnny Carson, Montgomery Clift, James Coburn, Henry Fonda, Dorothy McGuire and Robert Taylor, to name a few. Just why, may have been explained a few years ago by ex-White House Aide Ted Sorensen, another Nebraska refugee. "The state," he complained, "is old, outmoded, a place to come from or a place to die."
Ferocious Reader. Sandra Dale Dennis was stamped for export almost from her birth on April 27, 1937, in Hastings, Neb. (pop. 15,412), where her father, Jack Dennis, was a bakery driver-salesman who also happened to have a tested IQ of 160. After the war, Jack joined the post office as a railway mail clerk based in Lincoln (pop. 98,884), where Sandy was mainly raised. Her mother toiled as a secretary, lest their daughter ever be unindulged. Sandy, after all, was a quick, creative child who read ferociously long before she got to school. Later on, she regularly gobbled six or seven books a week, favoring Willa Gather and Shakespeare.