Carlin Glynn, who won a Tony Award for her performance as the madam Mona Stangley in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and had strong supporting turns in the films Sixteen Candles and The Trip to Bountiful, has died. She was 83.
Glynn died July 13 after battles with dementia and cancer, her daughter, actress Mary Stuart Masterson (Fried Green Tomatoes, Benny & Joon), announced in an Instagram post.
“My mother, Carlin Glynn Masterson, passed away. I was with her. I will always be grateful for those last moments, no matter how hard,” she wrote. “Death is like birth in the oddest way. From my first breath to her last. This thread is as fragile as it is strong.
“She was the most graceful clumsy person you would ever meet. Strong, smart, silly, intuitive, kind, generous, passionate and a deep listener. She was devoted to my father and to the enormous circle of students and collaborators who were considered her chosen family.”
Glynn, who went to high school in Houston, and her husband of 58 years, late actor-director-writer Peter Masterson, began workshopping The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas in the mid-1970s at The Actors Studio in New York. For the musical comedy revolving around the closing of the real-life Chicken Ranch brothel, Masterson wrote the book with Larry L. King and co-directed with Tommy Tune.
“I initially worked on the play only to help out,” Glynn recalled in a 1978 interview with The New York Times. “Peter was hesitant to force his wife on his collaborators. Finally, all four of the organizations who wanted to take the show to Broadway wanted me to stay in the part. So then I stopped worrying about nepotism.”
With Glynn making her Broadway debut, Best Little Whorehouse debuted on Broadway in June 1978 and ran for more than 1,500 performances. “For someone who had never sung before, the Texas‐raised Miss Glynn belts out throaty country Western songs like a pro and portrays Miss Mona as a complex, sensitive woman who has extra dimensions beyond the stereotype madam with the heart of gold,” the Times wrote.
Glynn wanted to take Mona to the big screen, but it was Dolly Parton who was hired to star opposite Burt Reynolds in the 1982 Universal Pictures adaptation.
In Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful (1985), which marked Masterson’s feature directorial debut, Glynn got to portray Jessie Mae, the shrewish daughter-in-law of Mrs. Watts (Geraldine Page in an Oscar-winning performance).
A year earlier, she and Paul Dooley played the forgetful parents of Molly Ringwald’s Sam Baker in John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles (1984).
Born in Cleveland on Feb. 19, 1940, Glynn was raised in Center Point, Texas, where her father was a gas station owner and then the town mayor. In Houston, she attended Lamar High School with Tune and met her future husband when they apprenticed at the Alley Theater. (Carol Hall, who did the music and lyrics for Best Little Whorehouse, was also at the Alley at the time.)
At 19, Glynn headed to New York, where she studied acting with Stella Adler and appeared in an off-Broadway production of Waltz of the Toreadors.
She and Masterson married in 1960, and while he built his career as an actor, appearing on Broadway in The Great White Hope and in such films as In the Heat of the Night (1967), The Exorcist (1973) and The Stepford Wives (1975), she put hers aside to raise their children, Alexandra, Mary Stuart and Peter.
“I didn’t work for a lot of years when I was raising my family. I really have come back to the theater in the last four years,” she said in 1978. “It was difficult to get hired when you have not worked in a long time. However, what I did do was work at The Actors Studio; it was terribly important to have a place to function and to be critiqued by the Lee Strasbergs, the Elia Kazans of the world.”
Glynn also appeared in commercials and made her movie debut in Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975) before her smashing success in Best Little Whorehouse.
In Francis Ford Coppola’s Gardens of Stone (1987), she, her husband and Mary Stuart were all in the cast.
Her big-screen résumé also included Resurrection (1980), Continental Divide (1981), The Escape Artist (1982), Blessing (1994) and Judy Berlin (1999), plus five other films helmed by her husband: Blood Red (1989), Convicts (1991), West of Here (2002), Lost Junction (2003) and Whiskey School (2005).
Glynn also portrayed the first lady opposite George C. Scott in 1987-88 in one of the Fox network’s first shows, the sitcom Mr. President.
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