“When Ms. Carroll makes her first entrance,” Frank Rich wrote in The Times, “a tense silence descended upon the audience at the Shakespeare Theater here in Folger as hundreds of eyes watched them.” In a thousand television reruns, they find instead Falstaff, who may have slipped out of a duly painted portrait, with tufts of silver hair and a beard. It’s a bald old knight strewn with dust, with a huge belly, pink cheeks, and squinting frog-like eyes peering out of the mist of liquor.
Mr Rich continued.
Patricia Ann Carroll was born in Shreveport, Louisiana on May 5, 1927 and raised in Los Angeles. Her father, Maurice, worked in the Los Angeles water and power department. Her mother, Kathryn (Mar) Carroll, worked in real estate and office management.
Carol attended Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles on an English scholarship but dropped out before graduating. “I realized that what I was learning wasn’t going to advance what I wanted to do,” she said in 2011.
In 1947, Carroll left Los Angeles for Plymouth, Massachusetts, where she worked at the Priscilla Beach Theater. She made her professional stage debut that year in her Gloria Swanson-starring “Gander’s Goose”. Soon after, she ended up in New York, where, among other odd jobs, she shined her shoes.