Mary Elizabeth Hartman (December 23, 1943 – June 10, 1987)
Hartman was an actress, best known for her performance in the 1965 film A Patch of Blue, playing a blind girl named Selina D'Arcy, opposite Sidney Poitier, a role for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress and the Golden Globe Award. The next year, she appeared in Francis Ford Coppola's You're a Big Boy Now (1966) as Barbara Darling, for which she was nominated for a second Golden Globe Award. On stage, she was best known for her interpretations of Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie and Emily Webb in Our Town. By the late 1970s, Hartman's career had begun to slow, and she quit acting in 1982 after finishing the voice role of Mrs. Brisby in Don Bluth's animated film The Secret of NIMH (1982). Throughout much of her life, Hartman suffered from depression. In 1984, she divorced her husband, screenwriter Gill Dennis, after a five-year separation. In the last few years of her life, she gave up acting altogether and worked at a museum in Pittsburgh while receiving treatment for her condition at an outpatient clinic. On June 10, 1987, Hartman committed suicide by jumping from the window of her fifth floor apartment. She is buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Youngstown, Ohio.