Sandra Church(I)
- Actress
San Francisco-born actress and singer Sandra Church had a moderately successful career playing ingénues on stage between 1954 and 1961. Sandra's father, Charles Joseph Church, had died when she was just two years old and she had spent the next three years with her aunt and uncle in San Jose. As a child, she harboured aspirations of one day becoming a ballerina or a pianist. However, at five years of age, her mother, a registered nurse, took her to Hollywood with the intention of turning her into a child star. Sandra went on to be educated at private schools, including the Catholic Immaculate Heart High School in Los Angeles. During year 11, she was taken out of classes to audition for the part of Madge (as a replacement for Janice Rule) in William Inge's seminal play Picnic on Broadway.
Sandra's professional acting career thus began in 1953, touring several American cities with the cast of Picnic, before a return to New York. In between performing gigs in 1955, she worked for NBC lighting technicians as a stand-in for actresses, earning a (then) very respectable $25 an hour. Having honed her acting skills under Lee Strasberg, she appeared in an off-Broadway production of Uncle Vanya. Back on the Great White Way, Sandra had another ingénue role as Betsy Dean (played in the film adaptation by Carol Lynley) in Holiday for Lovers and then gave her breakthrough, Tony Award-nominated performance as burlesque artist Gypsy Rose Lee in 1959. She auditioned five times for Gypsy in front of Stephen Sondheim, Jule Styne and Arthur Laurents, ultimately winning out over Suzanne Pleshette. Laurents explained in his autobiography "Suzanne was the better actress, but Sandra was the better singer. We went with Sandra." To learn the 'stripper's walk', Sandra hired a stripper named Torchy for ten dollars an hour. In 1960, she appeared again on Broadway as the female lead opposite Dean Jones in the sex comedy Under the Yum Yum Tree (Carol Lynley was cast for this film version as well).
By contrast, Sandra's screen career was somewhat desultory, mostly comprising occasional guest spots in television anthologies. Her one notable appearance was as Marlon Brando's on-screen wife in the political drama Le Vilain Américain (1963), a cinematic release set in a fictional Southeast Asian country. The film was neither a commercial nor a critical success. Following her marriage to Broadway producer Norman Twain in November 1964, Sandra Church faded from the scene and was little heard of thereafter.
Sandra's professional acting career thus began in 1953, touring several American cities with the cast of Picnic, before a return to New York. In between performing gigs in 1955, she worked for NBC lighting technicians as a stand-in for actresses, earning a (then) very respectable $25 an hour. Having honed her acting skills under Lee Strasberg, she appeared in an off-Broadway production of Uncle Vanya. Back on the Great White Way, Sandra had another ingénue role as Betsy Dean (played in the film adaptation by Carol Lynley) in Holiday for Lovers and then gave her breakthrough, Tony Award-nominated performance as burlesque artist Gypsy Rose Lee in 1959. She auditioned five times for Gypsy in front of Stephen Sondheim, Jule Styne and Arthur Laurents, ultimately winning out over Suzanne Pleshette. Laurents explained in his autobiography "Suzanne was the better actress, but Sandra was the better singer. We went with Sandra." To learn the 'stripper's walk', Sandra hired a stripper named Torchy for ten dollars an hour. In 1960, she appeared again on Broadway as the female lead opposite Dean Jones in the sex comedy Under the Yum Yum Tree (Carol Lynley was cast for this film version as well).
By contrast, Sandra's screen career was somewhat desultory, mostly comprising occasional guest spots in television anthologies. Her one notable appearance was as Marlon Brando's on-screen wife in the political drama Le Vilain Américain (1963), a cinematic release set in a fictional Southeast Asian country. The film was neither a commercial nor a critical success. Following her marriage to Broadway producer Norman Twain in November 1964, Sandra Church faded from the scene and was little heard of thereafter.
