Melinda Dillon Dies: ‘Close Encounters’, ‘A Christmas Story’ & ‘Absence Of Malice’ Actress Was 83
deadline.comMelinda Dillon, a two-time Oscar nominee for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Absence of Malice who also played Ralphie’s mom in A Christmas Story, has died.
She was 83. Her family said she died January 9 in Los Angeles but did not give other details. Dillon probably is best known for playing a mother whose young son is abducted by the aliens in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
She and Roy (Richard Dreyfuss) inexplicably are drawn to Devils Tower in Wyoming as they struggle to make sense of what has happened to them.
She earned a Supporting Actress Oscar nom for the role. She also played the mother of the young lead Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) in the 1983 holiday classic A Christmas Story, memorably warning the boy who wants a BB rifle that, “You’ll shoot your eye out!” Dillon would earn a second Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination for 1981’s Absence of Malice, playing a close friend of Paul Newman’s Michael Gallagher.
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