Constance Towers
American actress
- Born May 20, 1933
- 3 movies
Constance Towers, born on 20 May 1933 in Whitefish, Montana, is an American actress and singer whose career has run from studio westerns to Broadway to daytime television. John Ford cast her opposite John Wayne and William Holden in The Horse Soldiers, and Samuel Fuller gave her two of the toughest women in 1960s American film. She then built a long stage career, playing Anna opposite Yul Brynner in The King and I, before a second act as the scheming Helena Cassadine on General Hospital.
Constance Towers appears in 3 films in The Rerun, from 1959 to 1963. Most of that work is in drama, mystery and thriller. Frequent collaborators in The Rerun: John Ford (2).
Known for
- The Horse Soldiers (1959).
- Shock Corridor (1963). A film credit from her screen career.
- The King and I (1977), Anna. She starred as Anna in the Broadway production in 1977 and 1978.
- Anya (1965). Her Broadway debut, opposite Lillian Gish.
Career
Trained in music at Juilliard, Towers was discovered there by a film agent and quickly taken up by John Ford, who cast her as the Southern belle Hannah Hunter in The Horse Soldiers (1959) and again in Sergeant Rutledge (1960). Samuel Fuller then used her very differently: as Cathy, the stripper girlfriend of an undercover reporter in Shock Corridor (1963), and as Kelly, a former prostitute starting over in a small town, in The Naked Kiss (1964).
In New York she played the title role in Anya (1965), Maria in The Sound of Music and Julie Jordan in Carousel, and spent 1976 to 1978 as Anna Leonowens opposite Brynner. Television followed: Clarissa McCandless on the CBS soap Capitol from 1982 to 1987, then Helena Cassadine on General Hospital from 1997. She was also nominated for a Primetime Emmy in 1974 for the television film Once in Her Life.
Where to start
- Shock Corridor (1963): Fuller’s lurid asylum thriller, and Towers at her most hard-edged.
- The Horse Soldiers (1959): a Civil War cavalry picture in which she holds her own against Wayne and Holden.
- The Naked Kiss (1964): her one true leading role for Fuller, and the natural follow-up.
Movies
Quick answers
- What movies and TV shows has Constance Towers been in?
- Constance Towers appears in Shock Corridor (1963), Sergeant Rutledge (1960) and The Horse Soldiers (1959) on The Remote.
- When was Constance Towers born?
- Constance Towers was born on 20 May 1933.
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