Melinda Dillon, actress in 'Close Encounters' and 'Christmas Story,' dies at 83 - The Washington Post

Melinda Dillon, an actress who won acclaim for playing women in crisis or at a crossroads in roles such as the mousy Honey in Broadway’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, a mother seeking her alien-abducted son in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and the doting matriarch in the holiday classic “A Christmas Story,” died Jan. 9.

She often played women locked in personal struggles in films including the psychological drama “The Prince of Tides”(1991) and “Absence of Malice”(1981) as a Catholic woman who kills herself after her abortion is revealed by a journalist (Sally Field).

Looking back, Ms. Dillon said she had reached “the American Dream” as a young performer raised in Arkansas and studying in New York with celebrated acting coach Lee Strasberg.

She became, however, a sought-after performer who was defined by two roles as mothers in very different settings: manic in “Close Encounters” in a quest that leads to Wyoming’s monolithic Devil’s Tower, and stoic in “A Christmas Story” about a boy’s dream of getting a BB gun as a present.

The scene became part of sci-fi movie fandom — never showing the aliens at the house but announcing their presence with pulsing lights and a mayhem of flying kitchenware and rattling appliances.

In films, she dabbled in lighter roles in “Slap Shot,” a 1977 hockey comedy starring Paul Newman, and alongside John Lithgow in “Harry and the Hendersons”(1987) as a family with a Sasquatch in tow.