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CURRENT EDITION: Issue 2 2009
FEATURE
Delta Zeta Sorority Honors Marcia Wallace
Delta Nu, Parsons College (Iowa),
as Woman of the Year for 2009
Marcia Wallace Delta Nu ’61 Emmy-award winning actress and comedienne, uses her fame as a platform to help women. With each life experience, she has found a way to communicate what she has learned to inspire others and champion women.
As a 22-year breast cancer survivor, Marcia speaks around the country to promote early detection and low cost mammography. In 2007, she won the Gilda Radner Courage Award from Roswell Park Cancer Institute for helping educate Americans about the importance of early cancer detection. She has worked closely with the Susan G. Komen Foundation and the American Cancer Society.
Marcia’s autobiography, “Don’t Look Back, We’re Not Going That Way,” chronicles her life, fame, family, tragedy, and why she can “still manage to count my lucky chickens.” Told with humor and poignancy, Marcia’s story is inspirational to women everywhere. She has dealt with mental illness, which she discusses candidly. At the height of her success as the quick-witted receptionist on the Emmy-nominated “The Bob Newhart Show,” she found herself checking into a mental hospital after suffering a nervous breakdown.
The experience taught Marcia an important lesson. “When I knew the show was a success, I found out that you can’t look outside yourself for real happiness,” she says.
She was born to an unloving mother and an abusive father. Yet Marcia, gifted with talent, tenacity, resilience and a big heart, had an inability to feel sorry for herself. She also experienced forgiveness and reconciliation with her parents before their deaths.
She knows the challenges of single motherhood, after losing her beloved husband of six years, Dennis Hawley, to cancer. Today her son, Mikey, is starting his senior year in the theater program at UCLA.
Among many awards, Marcia received the Honorary Doctorate of
Public Service Award from Luzerne Community College in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania in 2008 and the Spirit of Life Woman of the Year Award from the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, California.
As a collegian, Marcia was president of the Delta Nu Chapter at Parsons College and says of that experience, “I loved college and my sorority experience, and I value and treasure the friends that I made there. My life is better for it—no question about it.” Today she continues to attend the Delta Nu Chapter reunions held in Fairfield, Iowa.
Marcia’s acting and producing credits include “The Bob Newhart Show,” which received the TV Land Icon Award in 2007. In the 1980s, she made guest appearances on TV shows such as “Taxi,” “Magnum P.I.,” “Alf,” “Murder, She Wrote” and later, as Murphy Brown’s efficient secretary in the television series of that same name, a role for which she received an Emmy nomination.
Marcia became the voice of Edna Krabappel on the animated series “The Simpsons,” for which she won an Emmy for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance in 1992. She also appeared as Maggie the housekeeper on “That’s My Bush,” an irreverent sitcom, and had recurring roles on “Seventh Heaven,” “Full House” and “Charles in Charge.”
To add to her many stage credits, this past summer she played the Mother Superior in “Nunsense 2” and Faye in “The Sugar Bean Sisters” before originating the role of Leona in the new play “Rest, In Pieces.” She also made her soap opera debut for several weeks as bumbling kidnapper Annie Wilkes on “The Young and the Restless.” Last month she was elected to the national board of the Screen Actors Guild.