Penelope Milford, who received an Oscar nomination for her supporting turn as Jane Fonda’s bohemian roommate in Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and portrayed a silent-film star in Ken Russell’s Valentino, has died. She was 77.
Milford died Tuesday in an assisted living facility in Saugerties, New York, her sister, Candace Saint, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Milford, who appeared twice on Broadway early in her career, also played the fiancée of Don Murray’s character in Franco Zeffirelli’s Endless Love (1981) and was the hippie Westerburg High School guidance counselor Pauline Fleming in Michael Lehmann’s Heathers (1988).
In Coming Home (1978), Milford portrayed Vi Munson, whose brother (Robert Carradine) has just returned home after just two weeks in Vietnam with severe emotional problems. Her friendship with Fonda’s Sally Hyde leads her roommate to volunteer at a Veterans Administration hospital.
Milford landed one of Coming Home’s four acting Oscar nominations, with Fonda and Jon Voight winning the best actress and best actor prizes and Bruce Dern getting nominated for his supporting turn. (Milford would lose out to Maggie Smith of California Suite.)
In 1977, she played silent-film star Lorna Sinclair in Valentino and shared a nude sex scene with Rudolph Nureyev in the biopic.
Born in St. Louis on March 23, 1948, Penelope Dale Milford graduated from New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois.
She made her big-screen debut as an extra in Maidstone (1970), written and directed by Norman Mailer, then appeared with Richard Gere in an off-Broadway production of the musical Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone.
In 1972, Milford joined the Broadway cast of Lenny, starring Sandy Baron as comedian Lenny Bruce, and three years later landed a Drama Desk nomination for her performance in the long-running Civil War musical Shenandoah. In his review of the latter, Clive Barnes in The New York Times called her “fetching” and noted that she “sang with spirit.”
Her résumé also included the films Man of a Swing (1974), The Last Word (1979), Take This Job and Shove It (1981), Cold Justice (1991), Normal Life (1996) and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1996) and four acclaimed telefilms: 1980’s Seizure: The Story of Kathy Morris, starring Leonard Nimoy, and The Oldest Living Graduate, starring Henry Fonda; 1982’s Rosie: The Rosemary Clooney Story, starring Sondra Locke; and 1984’s The Burning Bed, starring Farrah Fawcett.
Milford also taught acting, performed on local stages and was active in the Woodstock Christian Science church. She moved to Saugerties about 15 years ago to remodel a historic home, her sister said.
Her brother Kim Milford — Rocky in the original American stage production of The Rocky Horror Show and a singer in a band with guitarist Jeff Beck — died of heart failure at age 37 in 1980.
She was briefly married in the ’80s to poet Michael Lally. Survivors also include her brother, Douglas.
