Diana Scarwid is the American actress who played Maureen Coyle in Psycho III and earned an Oscar nomination for Inside Moves.
Quick Specs
| Born | Diana Elizabeth Scarwid, August 27, 1955, Savannah, Georgia |
| Training | American Academy of Dramatic Arts and Pace University, graduating from both at once as an honors student |
| Feature debut | Frieda in Pretty Baby (1978) |
| Horror centerpiece | Maureen Coyle in Psycho III (1986) |
| Academy Award nomination | Best Supporting Actress, as Louise in Inside Moves (1980) |
| Razzie | won Worst Supporting Actress for Mommie Dearest (1981) |
| Emmy nomination | Bess Truman in HBO’s Truman (1995) |
| Other genre work | Strange Invaders (1983), The X-Files (1998), What Lies Beneath (2000), Lost (2007), Heroes (2009) |
| Last screen credit to date | Another Happy Day (2011) |
Who She Is
Diana Elizabeth Scarwid was born in Savannah, Georgia, on August 27, 1955, to Elizabeth and Anthony John Scarwid. Her family were longtime residents of nearby Tybee Island, and she grew up with three brothers. At 17 she left Georgia for New York to become an actress. She graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and Pace University at the same time, completing the dual program as an honors student, then worked with the National Shakespeare Conservatory in Woodstock, New York, and in regional theater.
In 1978 she married Eric Scheinbart, a physician. They had two children and divorced in 1995. By 2006 she was living back in Savannah. She gives very few interviews, and nearly everything she has said about her work in her own words comes from one long interview she gave that year.
The Work, and What She Did in It
She started in television in 1976, with guest spots on Gibbsville, Police Woman and Starsky and Hutch and TV movies including The Possessed (1977). Her feature debut was Frieda, one of the women of the Storyville brothel in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby (1978). In 1980 she played Sheila Langtree in the miniseries Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones and Jeanne in Honeysuckle Rose.
Then came Inside Moves (1980), Richard Donner’s drama about the regulars of a bar for disabled men. She plays Louise, the waitress hired after the owner’s heart attack, who becomes the love interest of John Savage’s Roary. It brought her a Best Supporting Actress nomination at the 53rd Academy Awards; Mary Steenburgen won for Melvin and Howard.
The next year she was the adult Christina Crawford in Mommie Dearest (1981), Frank Perry’s theatrical Paramount adaptation of Christina’s memoir, with Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford and Mara Hobel as the young Christina. To prepare, she met the real Christina Crawford and studied Hobel’s dailies to pick up the younger actress’s mannerisms. “She established Christina, so there are little nuances and things that she did,” she said. The film swept the Razzies, five in all including Worst Picture, and was later voted Worst Picture of the Decade. Scarwid won Worst Supporting Actress; she was only nominated for Worst New Star of the Decade, which Pia Zadora won.
It didn’t slow her down. 1983 brought three films. In Strange Invaders she is Margaret Newman, an alien who has been living disguised as the wife of Paul Le Mat’s character. In Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish she is Cassandra. In Mike Nichols’s Silkwood, written by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen, she is Angela, the funeral-parlor beautician who becomes the lover of Dolly Pelliker (Cher) and moves into the household Dolly shares with Meryl Streep’s Karen Silkwood and Kurt Russell’s Drew Stephens.
1986 was her horror year. Psycho III was Anthony Perkins’s debut as a director, with Perkins again as Norman Bates, from a script by Charles Edward Pogue. The film opens in darkness on her voice: “There is no God!” Maureen Coyle, a novice who has lost her faith, is on a convent bell tower meaning to jump. A nun who tries to save her falls to her death instead, and Maureen leaves the convent carrying the guilt. Hitchhiking, she escapes an assault by the drifter Duane Duke (Jeff Fahey) and ends up at the Bates Motel, where Norman is transfixed because she looks like Marion Crane, down to the initials M.C. When Norman, in his Mother persona, comes to her room, he finds she has already slit her wrists in the bath. He breaks off the attack and saves her. What follows is a tentative romance between two damaged people, the closest thing to a love story the Perkins sequels attempt, until Mother reasserts herself and Maureen’s story ends in tragedy. Scarwid plays her quiet and broken rather than Gothic, and the effect is to make Norman look like the less haunted person in the room.
The same year she was Lucy Bricker in The Ladies Club and Terry in Robert M. Young’s Extremities, from William Mastrosimone’s play. Farrah Fawcett’s Marjorie turns the tables on her would-be rapist Joe (James Russo) and imprisons him in the fireplace; Terry and Alfre Woodard’s Pat are the roommates who come home to the bound man and argue over what to do. Terry, herself a rape survivor from her teens, is the skeptic who insists Joe will never be convicted because no completed rape occurred. She also played Cassie, a casino dealer opposite Burt Reynolds, in Heat (listed as 1986 in some records and 1987 in others), and the rival reporter Libby “Lips” Lipscomb in Brenda Starr, shot in 1989 and released in some markets only years later.
The 1990s were prestige television. She was the widow Willa Harper in the 1991 TV remake of Night of the Hunter, Rose Kennedy in JFK: Reckless Youth (1993), and Bess Truman opposite Gary Sinise in HBO’s Truman (1995), which brought an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Special. On film she played Gail in The Cure, Sarah in The Neon Bible (both 1995), and Raylene, the protective aunt, in Anjelica Huston’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1996). She was Linda Bowman in the X-Files episode “Kitsunegari” (1998) and Joan Aldrin in From the Earth to the Moon (1998).
In Robert Zemeckis’s supernatural thriller What Lies Beneath (2000) she is Jody, the kooky best friend of Michelle Pfeiffer’s Claire, the warm, funny counterweight who nudges Claire toward the seance that cracks the story open. The part brought her a Blockbuster Entertainment Award nomination. She played Elke Alig, mother of the killer Michael Alig, in Party Monster (2003) and Eva Finch opposite Robert Redford in The Clearing (2004). In Bryan Fuller’s Wonderfalls (2004) she had a main role as Karen Tyler, the smothering, high-achieving mother of the heroine Jaye. Fox canceled it after only a few episodes aired; 14 were made, and the full run found its audience on DVD.
Guest roles followed: Jeanette Owens in Prison Break (2006), Isabel, the Others’ “sheriff,” in the Lost episode “Stranger in a Strange Land” (2007), Rayanne Leland in Cold Case (2008), the Mother Superior in Pushing Daisies (2008 to 2009), a neat rhyme with Maureen, Alice Shaw in Heroes and Jane Winmar in Criminal Minds (both 2009). Her most recent screen credit is Donna in Sam Levinson’s Another Happy Day (2011).
Cool Verified Facts
- She received an Oscar nomination and a Razzie win for back-to-back films, Inside Moves and Mommie Dearest, and followed them with work for Mike Nichols, Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Zemeckis.
- Maureen’s initials, M.C., deliberately echo Marion Crane, and she is styled to recall her.
- Paramount noticed the camp response to Mommie Dearest during its first release and retooled the campaign around “No wire hangers, ever!” and the tagline “The Biggest Mother of Them All.”
- On the 2006 Hollywood Royalty Edition DVD, John Waters recorded a commentary that treats the film as a serious biopic and criticizes the camp marketing.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
She has never disowned Mommie Dearest, unlike Dunaway, who refuses to discuss it. Scarwid reads Christina in earnest: “Little Christina was like a Joan of Arc; she stood up for injustice and you have to herald that.”
She said in 2006 that the film is “perpetual, it’s everywhere.” She described a woman walking toward her in tears in the dental-floss aisle of a Wal-Mart, saying only, “You were that girl from Mommie Dearest,” and the two of them hugging and crying. At her gay friends’ parties, she said, people urge her to do her lines, or the lines just come out: “I’m not one of your fans!”
Asked in the same interview whether, after Joan Crawford and Michael Alig’s mother, she had a thing for monsters, she laughed: “Well, we have to face them. It’s that challenge, by going to those places, that’s how we advance.” And: “To be a true perpetuator of peace you have to know the dark.” It’s the closest thing to an acting philosophy she has put on record.
Her bios agree on her signature, “a natural quality and keen instinct for underplaying roles.” Against Dunaway’s maximal Joan her Christina is the still center; against Perkins’s Norman her Maureen is quiet and broken. Louise, Angela, Maureen and Terry are all women in extremis, played down rather than up.
Why She Matters
Diana Scarwid is the human center of two of the most durable cult films of the 1980s. In Psycho III she isn’t a final girl or a victim of the week. Maureen Coyle is Norman Bates’s mirror, suicidal, guilt-crushed and faithless, and the film opens on her scream instead of his knife. In Mommie Dearest she is the abused daughter inside one of the most quoted camp films ever made, and her refusal to disown it has helped the film’s reputation grow from Razzie sweep to repertory staple.
Her awards whiplash is also a rebuttal. An Oscar nomination and a Razzie for consecutive films were followed not by collapse but by three more decades of work, more than 70 screen credits, almost none of them leads, that keep intersecting the canon. When Perkins needed someone who could make Norman Bates seem the less haunted person in the room, he cast her.