Stockard Channing, the actress best known for playing Rizzo in the 1978 film Grease, now lives alone in London and says she is "happy being a recluse." Channing has been married and divorced four times during a career spanning decades.
A wealthy New York upbringing
Channing was born in Manhattan to father Lester, who ran a successful shipping business, and mother Mary. She joked that she was supposed to become "a well-educated, Harvard Business School-type; you know, Mrs. Venture Capitalist," but chose acting instead.
She said her family believed "your name should appear in the papers only twice in your life, when you're born and when you die." In a 1979 interview, she described her childhood as full of "rules and restrictions," recalling a strict upbringing that dictated "how you dressed, how you sat, how you ate your food."
Channing said she was sent to boarding school at 12 and left her family's affluent world behind by 17. "There's been a good 10, 15 years which were spent on my own and out there without the umbilical cord of money," she said. Raised largely by governesses while her parents traveled for work, she said the experience shaped her decision never to have children, saying "there's no point having a kid unless you can find out what life is like through their eyes and experience it with them."
Four marriages and a life alone
Channing married her first husband, wood sculptor Walter Channing Jr, in 1963 when she was 19. The two met while she was at Radcliffe and he was at Harvard. They divorced four years later when she decided to pursue acting. Walter died in 2015 at 74.
"There's no way I could have stayed married as the person I was when I was 19 and 20," she said, adding that the marriage "wasn't a horrible disastrous thing" but that she always felt pulled toward doing something else. "The need to act blew my life apart. It was like I ran off and joined the circus," she told US Weekly in 2001.
She married playwright and professor Paul Schmidt in 1970; they divorced after six years. Schmidt later died aged 65 from complications of HIV-AIDS. That same year, 1976, Channing married Hollywood writer and producer David Debin, her third husband. The pair formed a production company together and worked on The Stockard Channing Show. They divorced in 1980, and Debin died in 2025.
Channing then married businessman David Rawle in 1980, the longest of her marriages at eight years before they split in 1988. Speaking to The New York Times that year, she said: "These weren't things that were entered into casually. It's not like I woke up in a motel in Oklahoma with a ring on my finger and said, 'Who the hell are you?' I would learn from each one and not make the same mistakes again."
Channing did not marry again after her divorce from Rawle. "I don't think I'll get married another time," she told The Guardian in 2006. Her last relationship was with cinematographer Daniel Gillham; the pair began dating in 1990 and stayed together until his death in 2014.
"I've lived alone since I lost Daniel and I'm happy being a recluse. I was married four times before Daniel and they all represent epochs of me," she told The Times last weekend. "I grew up in the Sixties, reacting to that repressed notion of marriage and sexuality from the Fifties, kinda like Rizzo." On not having children, she added: "Children were thought about and, yeah, I think about them now because it'd be great to have someone taking care of me. But hey, children can be just as selfish as everybody else out there."
Grease brought fame but little career boost
Channing started out as a theatre actress before moving to television. She was 33 when she played 17-year-old Betty Rizzo in Grease. "I gave it my all, and I'm proud of the performance and proud of the character. But at the time, it was not taken at all seriously," she told The Times of London last year. "The money that it was making was resented. I was resented. It's a kid's movie, it was really p****d on."
Although Grease became one of the highest-grossing musicals ever made, Channing said it did little for her career. "Grease did nothing for my career whatsoever," she told US Weekly in 2001. "I mean, the people at the TV networks responded to Grease. But the people in motion pictures did not." She told You Magazine that after Grease she "couldn't even get an audition."
After Grease, Channing starred in her own CBS sitcom, The Stockard Channing Show, then appeared in Without a Trace in 1983, The Men's Club, A Time of Destiny and Echoes in the Darkness through the 1980s. She returned to Broadway in They're Playing Our Song, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation, in which she starred alongside Will Smith.
Six Degrees of Separation and an Oscar nod
Smith later said he "fell in love" with Channing while making the film. He told Esquire: "My character was in love with Stockard Channing's character. And I actually fell in love with Stockard Channing. So the movie was over and I went home, and I was dying to see Stockard. I was like, 'Oh no! What have I done?'" Channing said of Smith: "He was sweet. This was his first movie, so he was nervous and I had his back. We hung out off set, he trusted me."
Channing starred in the 1993 film adaptation of Six Degrees of Separation, which earned her an Oscar for Best Actress and a Golden Globe nomination. Her other credits include Up Close & Personal, Practical Magic, Smoke, USA's An Unexpected Family, The West Wing, the CBS sitcom Out of Practice, the docudrama The Matthew Shepard Story, The Business of Strangers and The Good Wife.
Move to London and a new role as director
Channing relocated from Maine to London in 2019, several years after Gillham's death in 2014. She said his loss "was more devastating than I realised; it had a lag effect. The pattern of my life shifted, so I shifted my life from Maine." She added that Donald Trump's election was another factor: "It vaguely coincided with Trump getting elected and the way politics has changed in the US." Reflecting on her years playing a White House press secretary on The West Wing, she said: "People look at The West Wing and go, 'Wow, wasn't it great when politicians had an ounce of integrity?'"
Channing is now making her directorial debut with a production of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape at the Edinburgh Festival, starring David Westhead as Krapp, a 69-year-old man reflecting on his life through old tape recordings.
