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Actors With Character: Woody Allen favorite Mary Boylan

June 17th, 2008 by Scott Marks

Mary Boylan in Alice, Sweet Alice

Remember the old woman who lived in a shoe? Here’s an old woman who looked like a lived-in shoe and made a career out of it!

Seeing Mary Boylan on screen for the first time gave me a gigantic laff at the movies. It was towards the end of Woody Allen’s Bananas. In order to to avoid courtroom photogs, Fielding Melish covers his face with a hat. He spots Miss Boylan in the crowd and taken aback by her homeliness, Melish kindly places his cap over her face. Allen later used her as the blue-haired Miss Reed in Annie Hall.

She was born on February 23, 1913 in Plattsburgh, New York. Due to a genetic quirk, Ms. Boylan looked many years older than her age, so she invariably was cast as senile spinsters. Her first big screen appearance was as the lady who looks like she’s always smelling something bad in Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man.

She appeared in two of the most influential films of their day, Midnight Cowboy and The Exorcist, in which she received billing as “First Mental Patient.” Sadly, she didn’t get a crack at the role she was born to play.  Ms. Boylan never starred as Eleanor Roosevelt opposite Ralph Bellamy’s F.D.R. in a touring company of Sunrise at Campobello.

Offscreen, she was described as lively and energetic. In addition to her film roles. Miss Boylan starred in New York’s Off-Off Broadway theatres such as the Caffe Cino and La Mama, with vehicles written especially for her by such writers as H.M. Koutoukas.

And shades of Skip Bittman, when Ms. Boylan auditioned for musical roles, she she brought a tape recorder to auditions instead of an accompanist.

The next time you hear someone mimic Norma Desmond’s “They don’t make faces like that anymore,” think of meeskite Mary Boylan and thank God!

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