Today is a holy day! The truly glorious and versatile John Waters character actress Mink Stole (née Nancy Paine Stoll on 25 August 1947) turns 78! You probably know her best as villainous Connie Marble in Pink Flamingos (1972) or Dawn Davenport’s maladjusted daughter Taffy in Female Trouble (1974), but I’d argue Stole’s crowning achievement is her performance as neurotic Peggy Gravel in Desperate Living (1977) (pictured). Who can forget the unstable Peggy ranting and raving in its opening minutes? (“Have I gone to Hell? Is that it? Have I gone straight to Hell?” and screaming at a child “Go home and tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother – I hate YOU!”). “Stole isn’t just a great actress: she’s the Barbara Stanwyck of Baltimore filth. If there is a chameleon of sensuality, danger, and camp amid Waters’s actors, it’s Mink,” Kayleigh Donaldson astutely claims in her article “In Praise of Mink Stole, Trash Cinema’s Greatest Character Actress” on the MUBI website. “If Divine was the almighty Joan Crawford of filth, a diva of melodrama and woman’s glamorous grit, Stole was akin to a Thelma Ritter or Eve Arden: no less daring but an undeniable scene-stealer with an intense range of femininity on display that both played with and subverted expectations.” Some fun facts: Pleasant Gehman interviewed Stole on her podcast The Devil’s Music a few years ago. While she’s synonymous with Baltimore, Stole has resided in Los Angeles for years. And it may come as no surprise that being a beloved cult cinema icon isn’t exactly lucrative: for decades Stole maintained a day job as a legal secretary.
