Nuns, Nurses, and Busybodies: The Queerness of the Character Actress

This is what I became known for in acting class: old-lady drag.

Character actresses will tell you that if you’ve played a nun, it’s likely you have also played a housekeeper, a busybody, a nurse, an eccentric, a gym teacher, a schoolmarm, a psychopath, a barren woman, a cranky grandma, a kooky aunt, a witch, someone in a bonnet, or some combination of these coded lesbian tropes. As a basketball-shorts-wearing, Cheri Oteri–loving beanpole with a flair for the dramatic and an underdeveloped sense of shame, I had played most of these by the time I entered acting school at eighteen.

I discovered the character actress Mary Wickes at age eleven, when I popped a rented copy of Sister Act into my family’s VCR for the first time. Tall, dry, and weak-chinned like me, Mary played Sister Mary Lazarus, a no-nonsense taskmaster in full nun regalia. She went toe-to-toe with Whoopi Goldberg and triumphantly talk-sang her way through the big “Hail Holy Queen” production number. Kathy Najimy was the breakout star from that film, but it was Wickes’s stern yet lovably strange and sarcastic persona that stole my heart.

Mary Wickes covered every character-actress base imaginable in a film career that spanned from FDR to Bill Clinton: She got famous for playing Nurse Preen in The Man Who Came to Dinner (on Broadway and on film, quite the feat) and would later kill as Aunt March in her last big film role, Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women (cranky grandmother, bonnet). Mary was the live-action model for the Disney animators who created Cruella de Vil (psychopath), and she was my favorite pick-a-little Iowan, Mrs. Squires, in The Music Man (busybody). She understudied Margaret Hamilton in a 1934 Broadway play, The Farmer Takes a Wife, and then played Hamilton’s famous Miss Gulch/Wicked Witch of the West role in a 1970s stage production of The Wizard of Oz. The combination of Wickes’s lanky frame, expressive face, and impeccable timing informed my own retorts for years to come. Consider this exchange, from Sister Act:

Sister Mary Lazarus: A progressive convent? Sounds awful. I liked my convent in Vancouver. Out in the woods. It wasn’t all modern like some of these newfangled convents. We didn’t have electricity. Bare feet, cold water. They were nuns.

Sister Mary Patrick: Sounds wonderful!

Sister Mary Lazarus: It was hell on earth; I loved it. This place is a Hilton.

In retrospect, it’s obvious why Sister Mary Lazarus spoke to me. These days I stand five foot eleven on a short day, but in fifth grade I was five-headed and five foot six with prescription lenses that covered two-thirds of my face. ­­­­I was taller than not just my classmates but also my teacher, and I had not yet grown accustomed to what more than one person has told me is “a face made for a bonnet.” I always hated that phrase but probably wouldn’t have blinked had they said habit instead.

Tall, dry, and weak-chinned like me, Mary played Sister Mary Lazarus, a no-nonsense taskmaster in full nun regalia.

For years, nuns and convent life had been a constant source of fascination. My mother, the second youngest of twelve children, was sent to The Mount Providence School, a convent in St. Louis, at thirteen. Along with her fraternal twin sister, she was sent to get a better education than their mother thought that their two hundred–person mid-Missouri river town could offer. While her twin left after high school, my mother stayed to continue her education with the Sisters of Divine Providence, living through the late sixties as what she later described to us as a NIT (“nun in training”), until she left the convent at twenty-one to pursue a secular life.

When I was a kid, she and my father talked about The Mount in mythic terms every time we drove to the St. Louis airport and caught sight of it on the hill. I even visited it once. The convent itself was closed, converted into a dorm for the University of Missouri–St. Louis, but as we swung on the swing sets my mom told us stories about the horrible stuffed-green-pepper dinners, the nice nun who would occasionally sneak her a beer, roller-skating in full habit and period belts, and the hell of not being allowed to take ibuprofen for your cramps. I begged to know if the “year of silence” she was required to take was 100 percent silent, and I laughed when she described one particular 1969 group outing. She was in a postulant habit and white veil. Her vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience were due in a year. She saw long-haired men in bell-bottoms, people her age carrying protest signs. “Freak,” she would say about herself as she retold the story. She wasn’t laughing. Soon after, she left the convent forever and met my father, who had himself left the seminary. My siblings and I were raised atheists, of course, but the specter of the convent loomed large as we would often visit one of my mom’s other siblings: a Franciscan Sister of Mary.

Aunt Pat lived in St. Louis proper with two other nuns in a beautiful old house opposite the enormous Amoco sign, which we now definitively know to be the world’s biggest (see: Yelp).

I rarely saw Aunt Pat—Sister Patricia to the order—in a habit except for the times we would visit her at the convent and she was on official nun business. Or in her headshot on the wall at St. Mary’s hospital where she ran the lab. The hospital was connected to the convent by underground tunnels. I assume this was thoughtfully designed so the older nuns didn’t have to face the frigid cold while en route to and from work, but I sometimes imagined they were running top-secret messages. That fantasy was probably conjured for me by Portia Nelson (the workhorse character actress who utters the perfect “a clown” in “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria” in The Sound of Music). She and her fellow nun save the day when they steal the distributor wires from the Nazis’ car, allowing the von Trapps to escape. They close the scene with a silent “we have sinned” take to each other as they reveal the wires to the Reverend Mother. Iconic.

Pat loved Bobby McFerrin and the occasional Bud Light. She valued hard work and garage-sale bargains. Pat was tall like my mom, like that whole side of the family: near-six-foot women, who, as they aged, developed practical, farm-shaped shoulders. She always smelled freshly powdered and kept her hair curled. She had polio as a kid and for most of her childhood, as the family story went, her brother Joe had to carry her to and from school every day. She had seen a bunch of kids walking to school and she prayed to God that if he ever allowed her to walk again that she would devote her life to him. I guess he did, so she did too.

What is a nun’s life? Childless. Lives with other women. Married to God.

But, to me, her life felt like one big-city sleepover. Pat walked to work and had a giant TV, unlimited mac and cheese, a free pool membership, female friends to live with, and tickets to see Funny Girl at The Muny. Pat took us to Italian restaurants on The Hill where they served skinny breadsticks and spinach that had been flash fried into these elegant little chips. She just happened to dress more conservatively than other people.

My mother only spoke about the convent when I or my siblings asked about it. But if you got her going, she might describe the “personal friendships” (or PFs, as she and her twin sister called them) that sometimes developed between two women, and how they were prohibited. Girls would be separated or sent to different orders if they got caught. Could two nuns even fit into one of those tiny cots together?

In 2002, I arrived in New York City, ready to tackle acting school and group female living with my double-disc DVD of The Sound of Music in tow. I introduced myself to everyone as the child of a nun and a priest. My roommate was hanging a poster from her high school’s production of The Wild Party, where she played the spirited and sexy Kate, a role made famous by Idina Menzel. I told them I was fresh off playing Ann Putnam, the barren, bonneted woman who cries “witch” in my high school’s production of The Crucible, a role portrayed on film by forty-three-year-old Frances Conroy.

Three years into the degree, I was sitting in my acting class. On this particular Thursday afternoon, as we unpacked our tote bags full of the Chekhovian props we had schlepped from our midtown dorms (teacups, dusty books, sewing kits that doubled as snuff boxes), two of my classmates prepared their scene work for the day: four pages from Three Sisters. They needed a ringer, someone to come in and deliver one line as this third character—Anfisa, an eighty-year-old nursemaid whose character breakdown reads: “Servant, loyal, kind, old, childless.” The line was: “I’m old, I’m old, I’m old.” I knew what was coming. Sure enough, there was no hesitation as twelve twenty-somethings immediately volunteered me for the job. My feelings existed somewhere between pride—that my talent had been universally acknowledged—and depression—that each of them saw me as a sexless woman close to death. Still, I put on my rehearsal skirt, bowed my back, and erected the fourth wall, and as I struggled to cast my head up, I looked longingly in the distance and demolished the room. This is what I became known for at school: old-lady drag.

While my professors assigned the other girls in my class scenes of burgeoning or tortured love, I was assigned a scene from The Cherry Orchard as middle-aged Arkadina, bandaging the head of my son Treplev after his suicide attempt. I got the kooky clairvoyant, Madame Arcati, in Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit. One gay professor, who fancied himself a subversive visionary, condescendingly whispered to me that “everyone in this school sees you as The Nurse, but I want to give you the gift of Juliet.” Maybe it should have bothered me that my professors saw me as Angela Lansbury. But, increasingly, it made me feel singular. Powerful. Even if I wasn’t out of the closet for another nine years; maybe especially because I wasn’t. They said I was funny. They knew what to do with me. “You have a niche,” they told me. I understood what that meant.

Besides, I had been playing parts like weary old Anfisa since I was a child. In my fifth-grade production of Mary Poppins, I was cast as the Bird Lady. I had hoped to land the role of Mary, since, had you asked me at that age, I would’ve replied that Julie Andrews was my favorite actress (Aunt Pat had taped The Sound of Music off the TV and lent me the tape). I practiced my accent with “Spit-spot” and “Close your mouth please, Michael; we are not a codfish,” but I got the Jane Darwell role instead. At ten I was cast as the unhoused octogenarian surrounded by pigeons, muttering “faid the buhds,” in egregiously awful cockney. I drew crow’s-feet in the corners of my eyelids with my mother’s dull brown Maybelline pencil. I wore her floor-length floral prairie skirt and used cakey gray eye shadow I found at the bottom of a Kaboodle to lightly paint soot on my face. I was disappointed to have been cast as the old-lady eccentric with one scene and a song I could talk-sing. But in the end, I racked up more compliments from the parents than our Mary. “So committed.” “What an accent.” “Memorable.” I could live with that.

They said I was funny. They knew what to do with me. “You have a niche,” they told me. I understood what that meant.

I gave up acting years ago. I didn’t have the stomach to see my weak chin on-screen. Nowadays I write and, from time to time, I perform. My last few years have been dedicated to interviewing character actresses for an archival podcast project. I wish our timelines would have overlapped such that I could have met Mary Wickes on Zoom to ask her why she thinks Hollywood always cast her as a nun, nurse, housekeeper, or witch. I’d ask her if she knew the term “PFs” and what it was like stealing scenes from Whoopi. I’d ask her if she had any dream roles she never got to play, if she felt a kinship with nuns, and if she loved the Amoco sign like I did.

Mary Wickes was born and bred in St. Louis. She never married. She lived with her mother and donated her papers to her alma mater, Washington University. Those who love old Hollywood gossip as much as I do theorize that Mary might have been a lesbian. Lucie Arnaz, who was a close family friend, is quoted in Mary Wickes: I Know I’ve Seen That Face Before as saying that Mary, sexually, simply “was neither here nor there. Maybe because of her religion and the era she was born in, it was just taboo and she wasn’t happy with either one of the options . . . Maybe she had a great relationship in her life that I don’t know about. I hope so. But it was very private if she did.”

These days, when my parents pick me up or drop me off at Lambert Airport, they usually factor in a visit to Pat’s assisted-living center. The convent that I grew up visiting was razed in 2016, like The Mount before it. Pat is long retired from the lab. She just celebrated her fiftieth jubilee a few years back, and now she navigates a Rascal scooter through the hallways of her facility, where each nun has her own living quarters. She doesn’t carry cash, it’s kept by the order, so when my parents take her out for a pizza and a pitcher of beer, she grabs a twenty-dollar bill from the head administrative nun. Because no one likes seventy-five-year-olds driving at night, my parents, who are now quite friendly with the staff, sometimes sleep over and drive home in the morning. When their car broke down this past spring, the head nun loaned my father the convent passenger van for a week until their car was ready for pickup. Nothing quite so queer and antiestablishment as “resource sharing.”

And this is the sitcom version of the convent I hold in my mind: quirky, communal, hijinks possible at any moment. Of course, it’s not as simple as that. I vetted this essay with my sister, to make sure she felt I had accurately represented our shared family history. She was surprised at this last paragraph, since the convent tales she remembers from our childhood are exclusively of the cruelty, isolation, and despair my mother experienced. I suppose I kept the singing and the roller-skating and the PFs, not the fear and loneliness of a year of silence, not the “you can’t go home until your parents die.” Not being forced to drink sour milk or accidentally breaking a plate and being forced to pray for forgiveness in front of the entire congregation. Not the sternness and the shame, the darkness and confusion of a cloistered life. These unspeakables are buried in the rubble that was once The Mount, now the dusty foundation of a parking lot catty-corner to a FedEx in St. Louis, just west of the Mississippi. I kept Sister Mary Lazarus. What is a nun’s life? Childless. Lives with other women. Married to God. That last part was hell on earth, but the rest of it? A Hilton.