Two-time Oscar nominee Melinda Dillon, best known for her roles in ‘Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1977) and ‘A Christmas Story’ (1983), has died at the age of 83.
The two-time Oscar nominee’s family confirmed in an obituary that she died on January 9, 2023. Along with Oscar nominations, Melinda Dillon won a Tony Award and a Theater World Award in 1963 for her Broadway debut in ‘What? Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?’
Born October 13, 1939, in Hope, Arkansas, Dillon spent her childhood in Alabama, Germany. She started her career as a comedian and actress and she got her first break in 1959 when she got the chance to star in the movie ‘The Cry of Jazz’.
Her filmography includes playing a single mother whose three-year-old son is abducted by aliens through her kitchen doggie door in Steven Speilberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). She is the wife of Sylvester Stallone in Norman Jewison’s FIST (1978), and a suicidal woman in The Prince of Tides (1991).
Melinda was married to the late actor Richard Libertini from 1963 until their divorce in 1978, and they had one son.
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