Estelle Parsons sits in her sunny living room in her Upper West Side apartment, taking an afternoon break from preparations for her annual trip to New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee, where she has spent summers since she was a girl. The sole reason for this NYC visit is her interest in promoting projects she is passionate about at the Actors Studio. If that also means talking about her life and her 70-plus year career as an actress, so be it.

“But we’re going to talk about my projects at the Studio too, I want to get the word out there—this is something people should see,” she says in that familiar, insistent, no-nonsense New England Yankee voice, which strikes certain words like gongs, that dismisses foolish talk, that cuts to core truths.

Parsons, who turned 95 a few days ago, has the energy level and work ethic of a person decades younger. Trim and active, she hikes, works out, and stays busy with acting gigs. She also has a lineup of projects into next year at the Actors Studio, an artistic home where she has been engaged for more than half a century—and been a leader there since the 1980s. To celebrate its 75th anniversary this season, the Studio plans special events in April 2023 to honor Parsons, currently the company’s co-associate artistic director in New York.

“Lee recognized early on Estelle’s ability to lead,” says Beau Gravitte, the Studio’s artistic director in New York, referring to the institution’s founding artistic director, Lee Strasberg. “It’s hard to find words to define her impact on the Studio. She is one of the foundations. She’s shown up, in person, year after year. I don’t know frankly where the Actors Studios would be without her. She’s influenced generations of actors coming out of here.”

Asked to described her work with the actors, Gravitte says that a person’s previous credits aren’t important to her; all that matters is “if you’re talented and that you work hard. But performing in front of her can be a real test of fire. She knows what she’s doing. She is exacting, and she wants you to bring it when you come onstage.”

This exacting eye extends to the organization as a whole. “She’s fearless and a fierce leader,” says executive director Deborah Dixon. “She never hesitates about picking up the phone and calling somebody. She is incredibly proactive in all things about the Studio. She is a social activist and a leader for us in diversity that goes way back way, decades and decades before #BlackLivesMatter.”

To the general public she is most known as an actor for film roles in Bonnie and Clyde (for which she won an Oscar) or Rachel, Rachel (an Oscar nomination), or perhaps for TV roles, most recently on Grace and Frankie and Roseanne (now The Conners).

But it’s the stage where she has always felt most vital and where she’s made her mark as one of theatre’s great tragic comedians. A 2004 inductee into the Theater Hall of Fame, Parsons began her stage career in Broadway musicals in the early ‘50s and continued in every decade since, most notably in plays by Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Dario Fo, Tony Kushner, Horton Foote, Paul Zindel, Alan Ayckbourn, and, most memorably, in Roberto Athayde’s Miss Margarida’s Way.

In later years she starred in August: Osage County on Broadway and on tour, kicked up her heels in the Gershwin musical Nice Work If You Can Get It, joined the ensemble in David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People, and received her fifth Tony nomination for The Velocity of Autumn. More recently she appeared in the Michael Friedman musical Unknown Soldier at Playwrights Horizons, in a run that was interrupted by the pandemic four days after it opened, but not before Ben Brantley could call Parsons “incomparable.”

As a director, she created the New York Shakespeare Festival Players for Joseph Papp in the 1980s, and in an effort to develop a multicultural audience they performed Shakespeare on Broadway for NYC students. She also staged many shows, including Oscar Wilde’s Salome: The Reading with Al Pacino on Broadway and on tour.

Parsons’s recent stage projects include public presentations at the Actors Studio that grew out of sessions there. These plays and pieces, which deal with social justice, climate change, poverty, and illiteracy, and which conclude with audience talkbacks with experts in the field, are what primarily interests Parsons now. Several will be featured in the spring as part of the 75th anniversary season. She’s particularly excited to talk about one non-scripted, untitled work, built originally from an outline, that has been developed over the last few years by professional actors of color from the Studio playing men who were recently incarcerated.

“It’s not a play,” Parsons explains. “It’s more like the theatrical equivalent of jazz, where you just let these professional actors do their thing and improvise. They’ve been working on this project for a long time and they know these characters so well, so they can riff on them and make something that is theatrically dynamic and human and will leave you with something to think about.” She’s eager for the piece….|CONTINUED|