RIP Phyllis Frelich

Tony Award-winning actress Phyllis Frelich passed away on Thursday, April 10 at the age of 70. Frelich is familiar to fans of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation for her guest-starring role in the episode “The Two Mrs Grissoms” during the show’s eleventh season. She played Betty Grissom, the mother of former CSI supervisor Gil Grissom (William Petersen).

Frelich was the oldest of nine deaf children born to deaf parents, and she won the 1980 Best Actress Tony Award for her leading role in the Broadway production of Children of a Lesser God. She went on to appear in 18 different TV series and movies between 1981 and 2011, including an Emmy-nominated role in the 1985 TV movie Love is Never Silent and a 31-episode stint as a nun on Santa Barbara in 1988. More recently, she struggled for the past several years with progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), a rare brain disorder for which there are no effective treatments.

Frelich worked with Academy Award winner Marlee Matlin in “The Two Mrs Grissoms”, and Matlin posted this tweet on Thursday:

Here’s a quote from Matlin’s 2011 CSI Files interview about working with Frelich:

CSI Files: You also got the chance to work with Phyllis Frelich, who originally played your character from Children of a Lesser God. Was this the first time the two of you had met?

Matlin: I have a great deal of admiration and respect for Phyllis. She created the role for which she won the Tony for Best Actress and I won an Academy Award for Best Actress. She is one talented woman and when we first worked together on my first telefilm Bridge to Silence, we just hit it off immediately. We’ve worked together a few times since, most recently on a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie called Sweet Nothing in My Ear on CBS. It was great to see her and many other deaf actors come together on this episode of CSI, thanks to Anthony [Zuiker] and the rest of the CSI executive producing crew.

Additional sources: IMDb and Wikipedia

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