Posted on 10/22/2003 10:36:04 AM PDT by Captain Peter Blood
Janice Rule, an actress in film and onstage who became a psychoanalyst late in her career, died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 72.
Born in Norwood, Ohio, Ms. Rule studied ballet and began dancing in Chicago nightclubs in her teens. She soon attracted attention in Hollywood and made her film debut in 1951 in "Goodbye, My Fancy," with Joan Crawford and Robert Young.
She was pictured on the cover of Life magazine on Jan. 8, 1951, as a rising young actress. Her films in the 1950's included "Starlift," "Holiday for Sinners," "A Woman's Devotion" and "Bell, Book and Candle," in which she was the strait-laced fiancée who loses James Stewart.
In 1953 Ms. Rule was in the original cast of William Inge's "Picnic," which was Paul Newman's Broadway debut. She played Madge Owens, the naïve beauty.
Among her other Broadway shows were "The Flowering Peach," "The Happiest Girl in the World" and Michael V. Gazzo's "Night Circus," a 1958 production with Ben Gazzara, whom she later married. That marriage ended in divorce, as had her previous marriages to N. Richard Nash and Robert Thom.
Ms. Rule was also in the film "The Swimmer" in 1968, with Burt Lancaster, and Robert Altman's "3 Women" in 1977, with Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek.
During the 1960's she became interested in psychoanalysis. She began studying it in 1973 and received a Ph.D. 10 years later from the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute in Los Angeles. She practiced in New York and Los Angeles and continued to act occasionally.
She is survived by her daughters, Kate Thom Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gazzara, both of Brooklyn; her sisters, Kathleen Rule, of Oceano, Calif.; Ann Nader, of San Marcos, Calif.; and Emily Forbes, of Las Cruces, N.M.; and her brother Ralph, of Mallorca, Spain.
She was a FOX...it is a bitch getting old. Farewell Ms. Rule.
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