PALM SPRINGS - Hollywood has lost one of its brightest lights. Actress, iconoclast, teacher and Oscar-nominated star of Anna, Sally Kirkland has passed away on November 11, 2025, at the age of eighty-four. Her passing brings to an end a six-decade career that blazed with bold choices, raw emotion, and a kind of rare, exposed humanity.
By Allan R. Ellenberger for The Hollywoodland Revue
Photo Credit: People
Born in New York City, Sally began her career as a model before transitioning to the stage. It was there she found her true calling. A fixture in the city’s avant-garde art scene in the 1960s, Sally worked with Andy Warhol and starred in experimental theatre long before Hollywood ever took notice. But when the big time did come calling, it found not a doe-eyed starlet but a weapon — wicked, shining, and entirely without fear.
She moved through both prestige drama and cult favorites with equal aplomb. Whether headlining The Sting and JFK or hitting the sweet spot of private eye-femme comedies with Private Benjamin, or Ed TV and Bruce Almighty, Sally Kirkland refused to be pigeonholed. It was, however, her heart-wrenching turn in the 1987 independent drama Anna that made her legend. Sally earned both a nomination for Best Actress and a Golden Globe win for her portrayal of a Czech actress washed up by the Hollywood machine and trying to reinvent herself in New York. Her performance, by turns searing and transcendent, is one of the great studies in artistic endurance.
Offscreen, Sally was just as magnetic. A longtime acting teacher, Sally meted out wisdom with the same rigor as she did her craft. From the hallowed halls of NYU to the legendary Silver Spoon Café in West Hollywood, she mentored generations of performers. Always humble, always frank, Sally Kirkland’s first lesson was simple: Truth is more important than technique. “Don’t act,” she once said to a young actress in her class. “Feel — the camera will know the difference.”
I met Sally roughly twenty-five years ago, when a friend of mine, Jimmy Bangley, and I would regularly go to the Silver Spoon. By then, the old Café had become a bohemian actor’s hangout for the converted, a haven for actors and would-be actors, writers and dreamers. Sally was a fixture, claiming one of those corner booths with that wisp of a cigarette and a smile that lit up the room. We’d talk about her early years in New York, the people she knew and the roles that got away and the ones that didn’t. The stories were endless. The laughter that followed was limitless. Silver Spoon is long gone now, but when I drive by that stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard, I still picture her there. Radiant, mischievous, and filled with that kind of energy only Hollywood’s originals can harness.
In her later years, she was plagued by a series of health issues. But if those challenges tried to dim her light, they never managed to dim her wit or her spirit. Whether it was attending a small screening, taking class or sitting and talking with old friends, Sally Kirkland was still Sally. Candid, contradictory, and altogether kind.
The world will miss Sally Kirkland. But her brightness will endure in every performance, every classroom, and every person who ever crossed her path. More than an actress, Sally Kirkland was a reminder of what it meant to live and to create art with heart, with vulnerability and with absolutely no apology.
Rest in peace, dear Sally. Hollywood will never forget you.
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