Beatrice Whitney Straight (August 2 1914 - April 7 2001) was an Academy Award and Tony Award-winning American theatre, film, and television actress.

Born in Old Westbury, New York, she was the daughter of investment banker Willard Dickerman Straight and Dorothy Payne Whitney. She was four years old when her father died in France of influenza during the great epidemic while serving with the United States Army during World War I.

Following her mother's remarriage to British agronomist Leonard K. Elmhirst in 1925, the family moved to England. It was there that Straight was educated and began acting in amateur theater productions.

Returning to the United States, she made her Broadway debut in 1939 in the play The Possessed. Most of her theatre work was in the classics, including Twelfth Night (1941), Macbeth, and The Crucible (1953), for which she won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play.

Straight was active in the early days of television, appearing in anthology series such as Armstrong Circle Theatre, Hallmark Hall of Fame, Kraft Television Theatre, Studio One, The United States Steel Hour, Playhouse 90, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents and dramatic series like Dr. Kildare, Ben Casey, The Defenders, Mission: Impossible, and St. Elsewhere.

Straight worked infrequently in film, and is remembered best for her role as a devastated wife confronting husband William Holden's infidelity in Network (1976). She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance which, at five minutes and forty seconds, remains the shortest ever to win an Oscar.blank">Academy Awards Best Supporting Actor. Shortest and Other Oddities. Film Site.org.

Further film and television performances include the role of the mother of _Lynda Carter in the Wonder Woman series, and Marion Hillyard, the icy, controlling mother of Stephen Collins in The Promise. She also played the role of the paranormal investigator Dr. Martha Lesh in the film Poltergeist (1982), the most widely seen role of her film career.

Straight was married twice, first to Frenchman Louis Dolivet, a left-wing activist who became editor of United Nations World magazine and later a film producer. They divorced in 1949, and she immediately married film and Broadway actor/producer Peter Cookson, with whom she had two sons.

She suffered from Alzheimer's disease in her later years. Straight died from pneumonia in Los Angeles, California at age 86 and was cremated.

In her long career, Beatrice Straight actually did very little work in the movies, plying her trade mostly on stage. But, when she did grace the silver screen, she did it with great skill. Her first love was theatre, having debuted on Broadway in the 1935 "Bitter Oleander". Her work garnered her much acclaim, including laurels in her Tony-winning performance (an award for best supporting actress) as Elizabeth Proctor in the 1953 production of Arthur Miller (I)'s "The Crucible". In addition to theatre and movies, she also gave us notable work on television. In 1978, she won an Emmy nomination for her part as the matriarch Alice Dain Leggett in the miniseries "Dain Curse, The" (1978) (mini). No less stately, she played the part of Lynda Carter's Queen Mother in the 1970s "Wonder Woman" (1976) series. Her life was touched by that same kind of elegance and stateliness that she often portrayed on stage and screen. She was born Beatrice Whitney Straight in Old Westbury on Long Island. Her father, the banker and diplomat Willard Dickerman Straight, associated with the likes of J.P. Morgan. Her mother, Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight, was an heiress of the Whitneys, a dynastic (in the sense of T.V.'s own "Dynasty") moneyed family on the eastern seaboard. Beatrice went to the best schools, and caught the acting bug while a student in Devonshire, England, rendering a critically acclaimed performance in a school production of Ibsen's "A Doll's House." Her studies subsequently turned to acting, studying under the tutelage of Michael Chekhov, who was the nephew of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov and a member of the Moscow Art Theatre. Their relationship was somewhat symbiotic in that she persuaded him to start an acting school, later teaching there herself. It was through her work in the theatre that she met her husband, Peter Cookson (I), appearing opposite him as leading lady in "The Heiress" in 1948. She is perhaps best known for her achievement in the 1976 movie Network (1976); after only three days of work in that movie and just a few scenes that actually made it into the final cut, Beatrice Straight contributed such a stellar performance that she earned the Academy Award for the best performance by a supporting actress.