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Joanne Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward, who has owned a home in Westport, turns 84 on Thursday. The actress and producer was born February 27, 1930, in Thomasville, Georgia, U.S.
Woodward won many beauty contests as a teenager. She appeared in theatrical productions at Greenville High and in Greenville's Little Theatre, playing Laura Wingfield in their staging of The Glass Menagerie.
Her first film was a post-Civil War Western, Count Three and Pray, in 1955. She continued to move between Hollywood and Broadway, eventually understudying in the New York production of Picnic. She had starred in The Three Faces of Eve (1957) , for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress and also appeared in many films like The Long, Hot Summer (1958), Paris Blues (1961), A New Kind of Love (1963), They Might Be Giants (1971), Harry & Son (1984),The Glass Menagerie (1987), Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990), Breathing Lessons (1994) and Empire Falls (miniseries) (2005).
She won two Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or TV Movie, for See How She Runs (1978) and in Do You Remember Love? (1985). She was also named Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974 for her performance in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.
In 1988, she established the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, which provides services to 20,000 seriously ill children and families free of charge.
She was a co-producer and starred in a 1993 broadcast of the play Blind Spot.
She was an executive producer of the 2003 television production of Our Town and is the artistic director of the Westport Country Playhouse.
In 2011 she narrated the Scholastic/Weston Woods film All the World.
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