Caitlin O’Heaney, who starred as the stalked bride to be in the cult slasher film He Knows You’re Alone and as a lounge singer and spy in the Donald P. Bellisario-created adventure series Tales of the Gold Monkey, has died. She was 73.
O’Heaney died May 18 in Westchester County in New York, her friend Peter Davis told The Hollywood Reporter. They recently worked together on the short film Faith and Forgiveness. No cause of death was revealed.
Trained at Julliard under John Houseman and Michael Kahn, O’Heaney also worked with Katharine Hepburn on Broadway, played a 1930s Hollywood actress for Woody Allen in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) and starred as Snow White on the first season of the 1987-88 ABC sitcom The Charmings.
The green-eyed, auburn-haired O’Heaney portrayed Amy Jensen, a woman menaced by a bride-obsessed killer, in He Knows You’re Alone (1980), an independent film picked up by MGM. Director Armand Mastroianni said he looked at more than 4,000 photos and interviewed more than 100 actresses before selecting her for the part.
And on the 1982-83 series Tales of the Gold Monkey, set in in 1938 in the South Pacific, she portrayed the American spy Sarah Stickney White, the love interest of fighter pilot Jake Cutter (Stephen Collins).
Caitlin O’Heaney with Jeff MacKay (left) and Stephen Collins in 1982 on the set of ‘Tales of the Gold Monkey.’
ABC/Courtesy Everett Collection
The youngest of three daughters, Kathleen Helen Heaney was born on Aug. 16, 1952, in Milwaukee and raised in the suburb of Whitefish Bay. Her mother, Ruth, was a physical ed teacher, and her great-great-great grandfather was Jacob Best, owner of a brewery that would produce Pabst Blue Ribbon.
She joined the North Shore Children’s Theatre at age 11, played clarinet in the band at Whitefish Bay High School and after graduation in 1970 won a scholarship to Julliard at age 17. Her classmates in the school’s third-ever drama class included Christopher Reeve, Robin Williams, Christine Baranski and William Hurt.
When she was 21, she modeled for Salvador Dalí in the grand ballroom and a penthouse room at the St. Regis in New York, she noted in an interview in the late 1970s. The project never went forward, she was told, because Dalí’s wife was jealous of her.
She reunited with Reeve in 1976 when she made it to Broadway to serve as the understudy to Wanda Bimson’s ingénue character in A Matter of Gravity, starring Hepburn as an eccentric Englishwoman who hires a servant who can fly. (O’Heaney wound up doing a great impersonation of Hepburn.)
After starring in plays for the ACT Contemporary Theatre in Seattle and turns at the Public Theater and Playwrights Horizon in New York, she was cast as a tap dancer in the 1978 ABC comedy Apple Pie. Despite being created by Norman Lear and starring Rue McClanahan and Dabney Coleman, the Depression-era show aired just two episodes before being canceled.
She decided to remain in Los Angeles and in 1979 starred in her first slasher film, Savage Weekend, after which she adopted the stage name Caitlin O’Heaney for He Knows You’re Alone. (Tom Hanks made his big-screen debut in the Staten Island-shot movie, playing a jogger in line for a ride at a country fair.)
Caitlin O’Heaney with Don Scardino in 1980’s ‘He Knows You’re Alone.’
MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection
“I met Caitlin during the film’s casting sessions and was immediately taken by the fact that she reminded me both in looks and in spirit of Vivien Leigh,” Mastroianni wrote. “I reminded her several times of that during the making of the film, much to her amusement.”
She said she spent hours auditioning alongside Richard Dreyfuss for Steven Spielberg at the Sherry-Netherland hotel in New York for a role in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but “there was just no way I’d look 28 with four kids. So the part went to Teri Garr,” she explained.
And at the advice of her agent, she turned down a dialogue-free role as a nude Christ-like figure that would have opened Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980), a move she said she regretted.
In 1980, she starred as the actress Olive Lashbrooke in a revival of John van Druten’s The Voice of the Turtle.
“Miss O’Heaney is a wonder,” critic Jennifer Dunning wrote in The New York Times. “With a well-practiced movie star drawl, big eyes that snap like exclamation points and impeccable timing, she roars through the play like a tornado, playing just at the edge of fatal broadness, yet never losing the edge of sadness that lies under Olive’s bitchy humor.”
On The Charmings, Snow White and husband Prince Charming (Christopher Rich) awaken from a thousand-year spell and try to adapt to life in present-day Burbank, with the princess working in a department store. O’Heaney was replaced by Carol Huston for the second season, which lasted 15 episodes before being canceled.
She also appeared on episodes of AfterMASH, Spenser for Hire, Silver Spoons, St. Elsewhere, Murder, She Wrote, Beauty and the Beast, L.A. Law and Matlock and in films including Wolfen (1981) and the Spielberg-produced Three O’Clock High (1987).
The always interesting O’Heaney served as an assistant cook in 1990 aboard a Greenpeace vessel in the North Sea and from her home in Los Angeles in the late ’90s created a perfume called Caitlin, billed as a “medieval” scent with overtones of apple, gardenia and sandalwood. She also taught acting and loved animals.
Survivors include her sisters, Maureen and Coleen; nephews Robert, Patrick, Kevin, Ryan, Michael and Eric; grandnephews Bradley, Nicholas and Dayton; and grandnieces Myla, Kayla, Vanessa and Naomi. A celebration of life is being planned.
In 2017, O’Heaney told BuzzFeed News that she was punched by Val Kilmer during an audition for the part of Jim Morrison’s girlfriend Pamela Courson in Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991). The role eventually went to Meg Ryan.
“When I got to the room and Val Kilmer picked me up and shaked me, throwing me down to the floor, Stone just stood there the whole time laughing,” she recalled. She said the director walked her to the door and told her, “That got kind of wild.”
O’Heaney said she signed a nondisclosure agreement and received $24,500 in a settlement but chose to speak out in the wake of allegations of sexual and physical harassment made against Harvey Weinstein.
“Women have come together, saying, ‘We’re not going to be fucked by you,’” O’Heaney. “I finally have the confidence to speak about this. It’s too long that I’ve sat on this story.”
