Gloria Carlin, the Montreal-born actress who appeared in the 1987 film The Hanoi Hilton and several other projects for her husband, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd, has died. She was 84.
Carlin died Aug. 5 at her home in Sherman Oaks, her family announced.
Carlin portrayed the wife of Tony Lo Bianco’s broken-down rodeo rider in Goldenrod (1976) and worked alongside Jean-Pierre Aumont and Stacy Keach in Two Solitudes (1978). Both Canadian films were written by her husband, and he directed the latter as well.
In The Hanoi Hilton, written and helmed by Chetwynd and starring Michael Moriarty, Carlin played a member of an American peace delegation who visits a Vietnam prison camp in a scene that invoked Jane Fonda’s real-life, controversial 1972 visit to Hanoi.
Born on Feb. 20, 1942, Carlin started acting at the Montreal Children’s Theatre and went on to attend Sir George Williams University, where she first met Chetwynd.
She left for New York to study acting with Peggy Feury at The Actors Studio and dance with Martha Graham but returned to her hometown, where she married Chetwynd in 1963. She then acted in plays, hosted a CBC kids show and worked at the Expo 67 world’s fair.
Carlin and Chetwynd moved to London, and she appeared in a 1971 West End production of Maybe That’s Your Problem, a musical about premature ejaculation that was the first play written by her husband.
(Ted Kotcheff directed that, and he and Chetwynd would reteam on the 1974 Richard Dreyfuss-starring Canadian classic The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, for which Chetwynd received his Oscar nom for best adapted screenplay.)
Gloria Carlin in 1987’s ‘The Hanoi Hilton.’
Cannon Films/courtesy Everett Collection
Carlin, Chetwynd and their two sons then lived in Connecticut and New York before settling in Los Angeles in 1976.
She later appeared in Roger Vadim’s The Hot Touch (1981), in the 2001 Emmy-winning TNT miniseries Joseph and in the 2001 Showtime movie Varian’s War: The Forgotten Hero, all written by Chetwynd.
In 1986, Carlin had a stint on the ABC soap General Hospital as the widowed store owner Charity Gatlin, mother of Roger Howarth’s Austin Gatlin-Holt. She also showed up on episodes of Cagney and Lacey, E/R, Knots Landing, Freddy’s Nightmares and The Facts of Life during her career.
In addition to her husband, survivors include her sons, Michael and Josh, a former THR writer; her daughters-in-law, Tracy and Jennifer; her grandchildren, Miller, Joseph, Mira and Becca; her brother, Harvey, and sister-in-law, Suzee; and nieces and nephews Cindy, Lisa, Clifford, Gabriel and Jeremy.
Carlin “was a light for anyone who had the privilege to know her,” her family said. “She was always willing to listen and provide sage advice. Those in her orbit knew, unreservedly, that Gloria, an unabashed optimist, was always in their corner.”
