June Squibb: Film Actor by Her Sixties, Leading Woman by Her Nineties

Then, in the nineteen-sixties, she met the director and acting teacher Charles Kakatsakis, who became her second husband and the father of her son, Harry. “He convinced me that I could be a really fine actress,” she said. Though she was already in her late thirties, Squibb began taking classes with him. It wasn’t easy. “All the kids were younger than me, and they knew me as Charlie’s wife,” she said. “I would scream and cry, but he’d say, ‘You’re doing it!,’ and, boy, he got me to do it!” She finally began working in film when she was around sixty—a run that has included an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, in 2014, at the age of eighty-four, for her role as a salty matriarch in another Payne movie, “Nebraska.” (Kakatsakis passed away in 1999.)