Told, once again, she was wrong for the role, Miller said she "clapped her hands once and did a little jump and looked marvelous. Suddenly, I thought, she does seem like Linda Loman, with the persistent postiveness of that character, and her long, patient smile."
Other memorable roles that Dunnock endowed included Big Mama in Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Lavinia in Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest.
Gerald Bordman, theater scholar and co-author of The Oxford Companion to American Theatre, wrote that Dunnock was for "years one of the most respected supporting actresses in American theatre despite her mousy looks and plaintive voice."
Dunnock returned to Goucher when the Kraushaar Auditorium was dedicated in 1964.
"She took part in a version of Trojan Women and she was onstage with student actors. This was such a great thrill for them," Dorsey recalled.
In 1991, Goucher named a two-story teaching theater in the Meyerhoff Arts Center the Mildred Dunnock Theatre.
"In the last years of her life, she was very reclusive, and lived on Martha's Vineyard. I always wanted to go and see her and tell her how the kids enjoyed working in the theater named for her," Dorsey said.
In a 1971 visit to Goucher, Dunnock said in a lecture that "live performances can never be replaced by movies" and that sitting at home surrounded by screaming children is "not the same as sitting in a darkened theater, where you can have a certain true experience."
However, she was realistic about those seeking a career in theater.
"Theater is a hungry, trying life that no girl should attempt unless she has the passion to do it. You will starve. Your stomach will ache for food. You will break your heart," she told an assembly of Goucher students.
Dunnock, who was 90 when she died, had been married to Keith Urmy, a New York banker, for nearly 60 years. He died in 1995.
Her daughter, Linda McGuire, was an actress, as was her granddaughter, Patricia McGuire.
fred.rasmussen@baltsun.com
