When Carmelita Pope’s acting career began taking off, she had to fend off gibes about the folly of pursuing a life in the theater. “It’s such a terrible living,” an old friend from Chicago she called Bud would grouse.“Whaddya wanna do with acting?”

But she pursued her passion anyway. And after director Elia Kazan saw her in a film in which she portrayed the Chicago saint Mother Cabrini, she told The Palm Beach Post in 1997 that he promised her, “I’ll have something for you.”