Actress Lois Smith, who turned 90 earlier this month, received her third Tony nomination in October for her deeply moving performance in Matthew Lopez’s epic gay play The Inheritance. Born in Kansas, Smith moved to New York City in 1951, making her Broadway debut the following year in Time Out for Ginger and her auspicious screen debut alongside James Dean in Elia Kazan’s East of Eden followed in 1955. She’s worked consistently on stage and on film for seven decades, most recently receiving acclaim for her roles in Lady Bird and Marjorie Prime.
Her latest film, Uncle Frank, written and directed by Oscar-winner Alan Ball, sees her take on the memorable supporting role of Aunt Butch alongside Paul Bettany, Sophia Lillis, Peter Macdissi, Judy Greer, Steve Zahn, Margo Martindale and Stephen Root.
When The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann spoke with Lois Smith recently he asked what it was like to get that third Tony nomination for The Inheritance.
“Oh, it’s just a delight,” Lois Smith told The Queer Review, ‘and at this time when everything has just gone splat in so many ways, it was a special. I remember the day that I learned [about it],you know with everything put off so many months and everything being as it is, I thought, oh, a day of good news, because there were so many other kinds of news every day.”
Watch our full interview with Lois Smith and her Uncle Frank co-star Judy Greer below.
Amazon Studios will release UNCLE FRANK on Prime Video on Wednesday November 25th 2020. Watch the official Uncle Frank trailer below.
Official synopsis: In 1973, teenaged Beth Bledsoe (Sophia Lillis) leaves her rural Southern hometown to study at New York University where her beloved Uncle Frank (Paul Bettany) is a revered literature professor. She soon discovers that Frank is gay, and living with his longtime partner Walid “Wally” Nadeem (Peter Macdissi) — an arrangement that he has kept secret for years. After the sudden death of Frank’s father — Beth’s grandfather — Frank is forced to reluctantly return home for the funeral with Beth in tow, and to finally face a long-buried trauma that he has spent his entire adult life running away from.
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