i didn t know that. he was 63? yeah. reporter: wow. did any of your friends think it was weird? i don t know. i mean reporter: they didn t say anything? didn t matter to me. reporter: the marriage lasted more than a decade and then she met and married director sidney lumet and then my father, writer wyatt cooper. over the course of her life, my mom was photographed by all the great photographers and she worked as a painter, a writer, an actress and actress. if you were around in the early 1980s it was hard to miss the jeans she helped create, but that was her public face, the one she learned to hide behind as a child. her private self, her real self that was more fascinating and more lovely than anything she showed the public. i always thought of her as a visitor from another world. a traveler stranded here who had
and so my dad brought something to the table that she had not experienced before. i mean he had a plan for what a family life was going to be like, and what they were going to be like as parents, and i think that it is a big part tof thep appeal for my mom. it is interest, because they could not have been from more different worlds. my dad came from the relatively poor family in mississippi. had two parents for most of his childhood and brothers and sisters and had family reunions and relatives were all around. and you are listening to wyatt cooper reminiscing about life within the large rural southern family. these were joyous occasions for me and to see all of the colorful people gathered in holiday mood with the jokes and the laughter and the familiarity with each other was exciting a thing that i knew, and they belonged to me and we had chams on each other. it is scary in a way, because i am a loner, be by i had to learn to belong to a family. wyatt brought that kind of
out in my life, and it took me years and years and years to work it out. but when i married wyatt, i knew it was for life. my dad wanted you to re-establish contact with your mom? yes. he was a great help in that. she then had something called hysterical blindness which you are not blind, but you psychologically something happens so that you can t see. i felt why was i afraid of this sad person, you know? who was so gentle. she was like a butterfly, you
where my family was buried, because it is me in new york, and you could go to visit him at the grave. and i said, you are not going to die. i mean, i was just it was just an inconceivable, you know, i mean, i said, you are not going to die. and he said, i m not, as if i knew something that he didn t know. i said, no, you are not going to die. and, and then it was only five days after january 5th, the new year that he died. we are gathered here today as the family and friends of wyatt cooper to pay our respects in this way to the life in which he lived. to the all of us who count ourselves among his closest friends and loved ones, who will
darling. what is that? i am count iing on your vote and how did you meet my father? well, sidney and i went for d dinner at moreen mcgrath s and wyatt cooper was there, and he was an actor. wyatt, good luck tonight. he had become a screen wrwri when i met him. and he said that afterwards, he was imare pressed with me. and i was impressed with him, you nknow. otherwise, you wouldn t be here. and so, you were still married to sidney at the time? yes. my mom and sidney separated and divorced when i was about 12. that was difficult for me. of course. but on the other hand, i could see how happy my mom was. i had an awful lot to work