Born Susan Stockard and raised on Manhattan’s posh Upper East Side, the future Stockard Channing inherited substantial wealth at an early age when her father died in 1950. After attending NYC’s prestigious Chapin School and earning a high school diploma from the Madeira School in Virginia, the intelligent actress went on to graduate summa cum laude at Radcliffe and, despite having no formal theater training, act for the first time in a Harvard University production of “The Threepenny Opera”. The rebellious native New Yorker, who encountered such potent thespians in the Boston theater community as Tommy Lee Jones, John Lithgow and James Woods, married young (acquiring her last name) and joined the experimental Theatre Company of Boston in the mid-60s, debuting professionally in “The Investigation” (1966). She surfaced later off-Broadway with the group’s “Adaptation/Next” and soon after made her Broadway debut in “Two Gentleman of Verona” (1971), her first collaboration with playwright John Guare.
