Photo courtesy of IndieCollect.
It is with a heavy heart that I report on the passing of Carol Dickerson Sutton, the acclaimed stage and screen actress who appeared in so many unforgettable films, including Horace Jenkins recently restored 1982 classic, Cane River. She died of Covid-19 on December 10th at Touro Infirmary in New Orleans just a few days after her 76th birthday. In Cane River (which we screened at Ebertfest last year), she plays Ms. Mathis, the mother of a young woman, Maria (Tommye Myrick), who falls for a man, Peter (Richard Romain) from a different class background.
Advertisement I first met Carol on the set of Cane River 40 years ago, Myrick recently told Sandra Schulberg of IndieCollect, the film preservation organization behind the film s restoration. She played my mother. On the last day of the shoot, our director, Horace Jenkins, realized belatedly that he needed a major confrontation between us. But we had already wrapped and cameraman
Lovecraft Country Actress Carol Sutton Passes Away At 76
Sutton appeared in more than one hundred film and television productions without leaving her hometown of New Orleans.
The
Eve’s Bayou, and
Sutton initially began performing in the theater. She appeared in the plays
The Last Madam, Native Tongues, and
A Raisin in the Sun before pivoting to television in 1974. She loved New Orleans so much that she refused to relocate for her career. She explained her choice to her friend and colleague Tommye Myrick in a 2019 interview.
“When everyone else left, I never had a desire to leave New Orleans. I never wanted to go to L.A. or New York,” she reportedly said.“In those places, there were hundreds of people trying to do the same things I wanted to do. If I wanted to get on stage or get in a movie, I was able to do that right here.”
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She moved to television in 1974 with “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” with Cicely Tyson and had roles in “In the Heat of the Night” and the TV movie “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” with Avery Brooks.
Her recent TV credits included “Scream Queens,” the 2016 remake of the series “Roots,” “Treme,” “True Detective” and “Lovecraft Country.”
Credit: Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP
Carol Sutton arrives at the World Premiere of Poms on Wednesday, May 1, 2019, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP)
Her film work includes roles like playing a policewoman in “The Pelican Brief” with Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington and a nurse opposite Sally Field, Dolly Parton and Shirley MacLaine in “Steel Magnolias.” She was a judge in “The Big Easy” with Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin.