The world tried to break Susan Florence Anspach before she ever stepped foot on a stage. Born November 23, 1942, in Queens to a secretary with a singer’s throat and a father who’d already been disowned once, she learned early that family can be a dangerous place. Her great-aunt raised her for a while, then died. Back home, the walls tightened. Abuse, fear, the kind of loneliness that makes a kid stare out windows and imagine escape routes. At fifteen, she stopped imagining. She ran.
The church took her in. A Harlem family gave her a bed. She held herself together with faith and a stubborn refusal to let the world decide her worth. She finished high school. She earned a full scholarship to the Catholic University of America, studying music and drama like someone starved for a new life. And when she got onstage in Pullman Car Hiawatha, a summer-theater production in Maryland, it hit her: performance wasn’t a luxury—it was a lifeline.
She moved back to New York, and the city took a deep breath and let her in.
She landed in the Actors Studio right when the place was a hive of future legends—Pacino, Voight, Duvall, Hoffman. She wasn’t intimidated. She did Hair before it was a phenomenon, played Sheila in its gritty, electric early run at the Cheetah Theatre. She made audiences hold their breath in A View from the Bridge. She didn’t act so much as detonate.
Hollywood noticed.
1970. Five Easy Pieces.
Bob Rafelson’s bleak little masterpiece pulled her into orbit beside Jack Nicholson. Vincent Canby called her “one of America’s most charming and talented actresses.” She wasn’t a starlet—she was a spark plug, a live wire. In Play It Again, Sam she brought a quiet intelligence to Woody Allen’s neurotic swirl, and in Paul Mazursky’s Blume in Love she carved out a character who was equal parts wound and weapon.
She was supposed to be in Altman’s Nashville—Barbara Jean, the brittle heart of the film—but the money didn’t add up. Hollywood math: too many actors, not enough budget, goodbye role. It didn’t stop her. She kept working—nineteen films, eight TV movies, two series. She played women with edges, women with wounds, women who weren’t built to smile politely. By the 1980s she was doing everything from Swedish black comedy (Montenegro) to strange horror (Blue Monkey) to political dramas. If a role had a pulse, she could find it.
But her life off camera was just as dramatic as anything onscreen.
She had a daughter with actor Steve Curry. She had a son, Caleb, and said that Jack Nicholson was the father—one of those old Hollywood stories whispered behind hands and never fully resolved. She married actor Mark Goddard, who adopted both children, and later musician Sherwood Ball. Love for her seems to have been like every other part of her life—intense, messy, passionate, temporary.
But she wasn’t just an artist; she was an activist.
She marched with César Chávez.
She spoke out against apartheid.
She fought for human rights in Central America.
She knew what injustice felt like up close, and she refused to sit quiet.
It was the church and psychoanalysis that she said acted as her “parents”—two very different forms of salvation that kept her from unraveling. She was raised Catholic, but she grew into a woman who worshipped truth more than doctrine, art more than safety.
Her later years drifted toward quieter work—guest spots, smaller films, the occasional surprise. But the fire never fully left her. Even in her final roles, she carried that same raw force she’d had at twenty: the girl who ran away and remade herself.
Susan Anspach died April 2, 2018, of heart failure in Los Angeles at seventy-five. The papers called her “underrated.” That feels too small. She wasn’t underrated. She was under-categorized—too fierce for Hollywood’s girl-next-door mold, too intelligent for throwaway parts, too complicated to fit in anyone’s easy narrative.
Some actors decorate film history.
Susan Anspach cracked it open, climbed through, and left fingerprints on every wall.
