Early life

Gary was born as Lorraine Gottfried in Forest Hills, Queens, New York on August 16, 1937, to Betty and George Gottfried, an entertainment business manager.

At an early age, she moved with her family to Los Angeles, California, where she was raised. At age 16, she won a best actress award in a competition at the prestigious Pasadena Playhouse. She was offered a scholarship to enroll at the Pasadena Playhouse, but declined and attended Columbia University as a political science major instead.

Career

A life member of the Actors Studio, Gary began her acting career in the late 1960s doing guest appearances on several popular TV shows. These include Night Gallery, Dragnet 1968, in an episode entitled "The Big Shipment", McCloud, The Marcus-Nelson Murders (the pilot for Kojak), and The F.B.I.. She began her first major acting role when she was a guest star on seven episodes of the TV series Ironside, among them "Tom Dayton Is Loose Among Us", in which she played the substitute librarian Miss Kirk, who pushes the unstable Tom Dayton too hard, and "In Search of an Artist", as a woman with a drinking problem who may have been involved in a murder.

Personal life

On 19 August 1956, Gary married entertainment industry executive Sidney Sheinberg, with whom she has two sons. She retired for eight years after the movie 1941 but then came out of her voluntary retirement to reprise Ellen Brody in Jaws: The Revenge. Her sons, Bill Sheinberg and Jonathan Sheinberg, are both film producers. Sheinberg is a member of the Human Rights Watch Women's Rights Advisory Committee, for whom she produced and directed a series of fourteen educational videotapes, and an Advisory Board Member of Ms. Magazine and Girls Learn International. In 1995, together with her husband, Gary received the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Humanitarian Award.

Selected filmography

[ Source: Wikipedia ]