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After a desultory two-year career at Downer College in Milwaukee and a stint as an elevator operator in Gary, Ind., in 1946 Dewhurst entered New York's American Academy of Dramatic Arts. A year later, she married Fellow Student Jim Vickery, and for the next dozen years lived with him in a series of cold-water flats, supporting herself with bit parts and odd jobs. At one point she had to turn down a major role when Director Joseph Papp, who had only heard about her, asked her to read for Juliet. "Oh, Mr. Papp," Dewhurst told him on the telephone, "you haven't seen me yet. I couldn't play Juliet when I was twelve." In 1963, however, she did a notable Cleopatra for Papp's Shakespeare Festival in Central Park.
In 1958 Dewhurst played a jailer's daughter in an off-Broadway revival of Edwin Mayer's 1930 Children of Darkness. Appearing opposite her was a young actor named George C. Scott.Their meeting, which Scott later described as a "bus accident," led to divorces from their spouses and their own marriage in 1959. They bought an 18th century farmhouse in South Salem, N.Y., combining acting with raising a family. In 1963, while Scott was filming The Bible in Italy, he encountered Ava Gardner, and the marriage to Dewhurst dissolved. Four years later, Scott and Dewhurst remarried. In 1971, however, Scott met Trish Van Devere on the set of The Last Run, and a year later he and Dewhurst divorced again. "George and I would have made a great brother and sister," Dewhurst comments.
Pets and Guests. Surrounded by four German shepherds, five cats and two birds, Colleen and her two sons by Scott live in South Salem, along with a housekeeper and assorted transient and semiresidential house guests. Some of the latter arrive at night while their hostess is asleep and greet her at breakfast, which she always prepares for the boys, even if she then returns to bed until 3 p.m. Will Dewhurst's new post-Moon status affect all this? "At 49, with nearly three decades in the theater," she says, "being called a star doesn't have the same thrust it would have had at 30." Tugging a baggy sweater down over vintage denims, she smiles ruefully: "I am what I am now. I will still have the same friends I have had for the past 20 years, and my house will always look as it does now—messy."