Mercedes McCambridge

Oscar-winning actress

By ASSOCIATED PRESS

McCambridge

Actress Mercedes McCambridge, who won an Oscar for the 1949 film "All the King's Men'' and later provided the raspy voice of the demon-possessed girl in "The Exorcist," died of natural causes March 2 in La Jolla, Calif. She was 87.

She received the Academy Award as supporting actress for her screen debut in "All the King's Men," in which she played Sadie Burke, the secretary and mistress of populist Southern governor Willie Stark.

During her film career, McCambridge acquired a reputation as a strong-willed, outspoken woman on and off the screen. When she was hired to play the enemy of Joan Crawford in a 1954 Western, "Johnny Guitar," the pair feuded on the set.

Because of her great vocal skills, McCambridge was hired to portray The Demon in William Friedkin's 1973 hit "The Exorcist."

Despite the celebrity that followed her Academy Award for "All the King's Men," McCambridge's film career did not flourish. Because she did not fit the glamour girl image that was prevalent in postwar films, her movie work was sporadic.

Among the later films: "Giant," her second Academy nomination as supporting actress, "A Farewell to Arms," "Touch of Evil," "Suddenly Last Summer," "Cimarron," "99 Women," "Thieves" and "The Concorde -- Airport '79'' (1979).

In the early 1990s, Neil Simon called with an offer to play the grandmother in "Lost in Yonkers" on Broadway and on the road. McCambridge's return to the New York theater proved triumphant, and she performed the play 560 times.

In her later years, McCambridge also appeared in "Magnum, P.I." and other television series.

McCambridge battled through much of her life, surviving a long siege of alcoholism, two failed marriages and series of tragedies involving her only child, John Lawrence Fifield. The son, who later took the last name of his mother's second husband, Markle, killed his wife and children and himself in 1987. She struggled with alcoholism for many years, eventually achieving sobriety.

Born in 1916, in Joliet, Ill., McCambridge, at some point in life, began giving her birth date as 1918.

After graduation from Mundelein College in Chicago, she acted in Chicago radio, which then produced several network soap operas and nighttime shows.

McCambridge returned to New York for the title role in a radio adaptation of the play "Abie's Irish Rose." She later found steady work in the radio dramas of Orson Welles, who called her "the world's greatest living radio actress."