Kim Stanley, whose infrequent but luminous stage portraits brought her to the edge of greatness, died Monday at a hospital in Santa Fe, N.M. She was 76.
She died after a prolonged illness, said Rachel Ryder Zahnher, her daughter.
In plays like William Inge’s Picnic, Horton Foote’s The Traveling Lady and, especially, Inge’s Bus Stop, Miss Stanley captivated Broadway audiences and dazzled critics.
In the 1955 Bus Stop, she played Cherie, a worn nightclub singer who finds herself sitting out a snowstorm in a Kansas diner with her fellow passengers, one of whom is a swaggering cowboy.
Their sparring not only won laughs, but also touched the heart. Brooks Atkinson, in The New York Times, summed up her work as “superb” and called it a “glowing performance that is full of amusing detail — cheap, ignorant, bewildered, but also radiant with personality.”
Miss Stanley had already won accolades two years earlier as the teenager Millie Owens in Picnic.
Then in Foote’s 1954 drama, The Traveling Lady, Miss Stanley so dominated the stage that she was given star billing two days after its premiere.
More good reviews for her stage work followed, but nothing came close to her success in Bus Stop except her performance in the 1958 film The Goddess.
Though she won praise in the film, Miss Stanley said she didn’t much like acting for the cameras. The fragmented nature of movie making frustrated her. It was, she said, like “shooting pool in the dark.”
Kim Stanley, whose original name was Patricia Reid, was born in 1925, in Tularose, N.M. She graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in psychology.
Then she was approached by a director of the Pasadena Playhouse, who had seen her perform in a college production and offered her a scholarship.
She stayed there only a year. Then, after a season of walk-ons with a company in Louisville, Ky., she boarded a bus for New York.
After a few months of making the rounds, she turned to modeling and waiting tables. She also briefly married Bruce Hall, another aspiring actor.
