Who Is Tuesday Weld?
September 21, 2011
Occupation: Actress.
Sign: Virgo. Born August 27, 1943 in New York City.
Favorite color: Unknown.
Background:
She has 63 credits on her IMDb page, including Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Falling Down (1993).
“Tuesday Weld sparred with the material in her films and won every spat with acrid charm; she’s the best thing in everything she was in,” wrote Miriam Bale in The L Magazine, “She had hard, dark eyes, and golden hair and skin. The proportions of her milk-fed, wholesome body and sculpted face were pretty much perfect (all except those giant white All-American front teeth that gave her the gullible girl-next-door look well into her twenties).”
“Born Susan Weld, she was marketed by her mother as an unexciting day of the week from the time she was a toddler,” wrote Dan Callahan in Alt Screen today, “At 3 years old Tuesday was supporting her mother and her two siblings with child modeling work. “When I was 9, I had a breakdown, which disappointed Mama a great deal,” Weld related to The New York Times in 1971:
But I made a comeback when I was 10….Even when I didn’t have jobs, I’d get up in the morning and say, ‘Goodbye, Mama, I’m going to school,’ and then I’d head for the Village and get drunk. I started drinking heavily when I was about 10 years old. I made my first suicide attempt when I was 12. I had fallen in love with a homosexual and when it didn’t work out, I felt hurt. A bottle of aspirin, a bottle of sleeping pills, and a bottle of gin. I was sure that would do the trick, but Mama came in and found me. I was in a coma for a long time and I lost my hearing, my vision and several other things. When I recovered, I decided that I should try to get some help, but Mama didn’t think I needed analysis.
The Film Society series, Tuesday Weld: American Girl, begins tonight and continues through Sunday at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.
Image via Alt Screen.
