Verna Bloom, who appeared in the 1978 comedy classic "Animal House" and later portrayed Mary in "The Last Temptation of Christ," has died. She was 80.
Bloom's long career in film, television, and on stage spanned a wide range of roles in drama and comedy. Her career began with her screen debut in Wexler's documentary-style 1969 film, "Medium Cool." In it, she portrayed a single mother from West Virginia who gets caught up in the street violence of Chicago's 1968 Democratic Convention.
Writer-director-cinematographer Wexler inserted Bloom into the violence, and the image of her in a yellow dress searching for her lost son among the protesters, tear gas, tanks, and armed soldiers became an indelible artifact of those divisive times.
She was nominated as both best actress and best supporting actress by the National Society of Film Critics for the role, according to USA Today.
Two hours later when she arrived at the Sherman House hotel, she got "all these calls and Haskell [Wexler] said, 'Where have you been? Marianna, have you abandoned Verna?...'We've got to bail her out!' and I said, 'She did nothing! All we did was take a stroll!' So it was a big scandal," she said.
Studs Terkel, who was consulting and advising Wexler during the making "Medium Cool," wrote "a wonderful story about two girls walking in the park and getting arrested for just being girls. It was a cause célèbre and was in the headlines in the Chicago Sun-Times for about two weeks."
Bloom was most famous for her scene-stealing role in the 1978 comedy "Animal House," playing the wife of Faber College's Dean Wormer. She also appeared in three films by Martin Scorsese—documentary "Street Scenes 1970," "The Last Temptation of Christ" (1988) where she played Mary, and in the 1985 comedy, "After Hours." She was the Clint Eastwood's love interst in "High Plains Drifter" (1973) and again joined him in "Honkytonk Man" (1982).
On the television side, Bloom was the mother of Linda Blair's character in the 1975 NBC TV movie "Sarah T.—Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic." She also appeared in "The Hired Hand" (1971), directed by and starring Peter Fonda, and Howard W. Koch's "Badge 373" (1973), starring Robert Duvall.
Her final appearance was in a 2003 episode of "The West Wing."
From there, she went on to Broadway, where she debuted in the 1967 "The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of Marquis De Sade," also known as Marat/Sade. She starred as Charlotte Corday, according to Variety.
She is survived by her husband Jay Cocks, a former film critic and two-time Oscar-nominated screenwriter for his work on Scorsese's "The Age of Innocence" (1993), and "Gangs of New York" (2002). The two married in 1972. She is also survived by her son, Sam, a prosecutor in the Special Victims Bureau of the New York County District Attorney's Office, according to THR.