Universal cast her in “Louisa” (1950), a romantic comedy in which she played Ronald Reagan’s teenage daughter. (They dated after filming was over.) Over the next four years, she appeared in a dozen films, including “The Prince Who Was a Thief” (1951), “Son of Ali Baba” (1952), “The Mississippi Gambler” (1953) and “Francis Goes to the Races” (1951), in which one co-star was a talking mule.
After moving to New York in the mid-1950s, Ms. Laurie acted in Off Broadway stage productions and television dramas. But she did not make her Broadway debut until 1965, when she starred as the fragile teenage heroine, Laura, in a revival of Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” with Maureen Stapleton and Pat Hingle. She returned to Broadway only once, in 2002, as part of the ensemble cast of “Morning’s at Seven.”
Her later film career included “Tim” (1979), in which she played an older woman who has a relationship with a younger man who is mentally disabled (Mel Gibson, then 23, in one of his first films); Sean Penn’s drama “The Crossing Guard” (1995), starring Jack Nicholson; and “The Grass Harp” (1995), based on a Truman Capote novel.
She also appeared in two horror movies, “The Faculty” (1998) and “Bad Blood” (2012); in both, she played a cult matriarch. In 2018, she appeared in two movies: “Snapshots,” a drama in which she played a grandmother with a secret past, and “White Boy Rick,” a crime drama starring Matthew McConaughey.
Ms. Laurie had a long romantic relationship with the director John Frankenheimer, who directed her in the original live television version of “Days of Wine and Roses” in New York, but they never married. While promoting “The Hustler,” Ms. Laurie was interviewed by Joe Morgenstern, then an entertainment reporter for The New York Herald Tribune and later a film critic for Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal. They began dating and married in 1962.