“When Carroll made the first entrance,” Frank Rich wrote in The Times. With a thousand TV reruns. Instead, they found Falstaff, who might have been able to escape from the officially painted portrait: a bald old knight with silver hair and tufts of beard, a huge belly, With pink cheeks and squinting eyes, frog-like eyes look into the noisy fog. The sight is so creepy that you grab your seat. “
“People notice,” continued Rich. “What is offered is Shakespeare’s personality, not a camp parody.”
Patricia Ann Carroll was born on May 5, 1927 in Shreveport, Louisiana, and grew up in Los Angeles. Her father, Maurice, worked for the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Her mother, Kathryn (Meger) Carroll, was engaged in real estate and office management.
Carroll attended Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles on an English scholarship, but left before graduating. “I realized that what I was learning wasn’t moving forward with what I wanted to do. I always thought experience was the best preparation,” she said.
In 1947, Ms. Carroll left Los Angeles for Plymouth, Massachusetts, where she worked at the Priscilla Beach Theater, where she ate, drank, and breathed. She made her professional stage debut that year with her “Goose for Gander” starring Gloria Swanson. Shortly thereafter, she arrived in New York. There, among her other strange jobs, she polished her shoes.
