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Malina appeared occasionally in films, beginning in 1975, when she played Al Pacino’s mother in Dog Day Afternoon. Using her for the role was Pacino’s idea, said its director, Sidney Lumet. Lumet recalls that tracking her down was difficult, as she had moved from New York to Vermont. “I had no idea of what to expect,” said Lumet. “I didn’t even know whether she’d want to do a ‘commercial’ film. Well, let me tell you, she is an actress. Totally professional. She also had no money and we had to pay her fare from Vermont, but she walked in and was perfect.”

She also appeared in Pacino’s Looking for Richard. Malina’s other roles in cinema include; Rose in Awakenings (1990) and Grandma Addams in The Addams Family (1991). She had major roles in Household Saints (1993) and the low-budget film, Nothing Really Happens (2003). She appeared in an episode of long-running TV series The Sopranos in 2006 as a nun, the secret mother of Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri. Malina is the subject of a 2012 documentary by Azad Jafarian titled Love and Politics. The film premiered at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival. Malina also has a significant supporting role in the well-received film Enemies, A Love Story (1989), in which she acted alongside Lena Olin, Ron Silver and Anjelica Huston.

Malina met her long-time collaborator and husband, Julian Beck, in 1943, when she was 17 and he was a student at Yale University. Beck, originally a painter, came to share her interest in political theatre. In 1947 the couple founded The Living Theatre, which they directed together until Beck’s death in 1985.

Malina’s and Beck’s marriage was non-monogamous. The bisexual Beck had a long-term male partner, as did Malina. In 1988, following the death of Julian Beck in New York City, she married her long term partner Hanon Resnikov. They co-directed the Living Theatre’s activity in the Middle East, Europe and the United States of America, until Resnikov’s unexpected death in 2008.

Judith Malina died in Englewood, New Jersey, on April 10, 2015. She was survived by her two children by her marriage to Beck.

On this day in 1940, Carson McCullers’ novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter first appeared. She was 23 and the only thing she had published before was a short story. The novel, about a group of outcasts all drawn to the same deaf man, was a magnificent success. She wrote later: “For a whole year I worked on The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter without understanding it at all. Each character was talking to a central character, but why, I didn’t know. I’d almost decided that the book was no novel, that I should chop it up into short stories. But I could feel the mutilation in my body when I had that idea, and I was in despair. Suddenly it occurred me that Harry Minowitz, the character all the other characters were talking to, was a different man, a deaf mute, and immediately the name was changed to John Singer.

The whole focus of the novel was fixed and I was for the first time committed with my whole soul to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.”

The title comes from the poem “The Lonely Hunter” by the Scottish poet William Sharp, who used the pseudonym “Fiona MacLeod”.