Stockard Channing Recalls 'Shock' of Learning of Costar Courtney B. Vance's Father's Suicide (Exclusive)
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While starring together in Broadway’s ‘Six Degrees of Separation,’ Courtney B. Vance called Stockard Channing first with his tragic news
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Stockard Channing, Courtney B. Vance in 2023Stockard Channing is remembering how she learned about the most difficult moment in Courtney B. Vance’s life.
In 1990 between Broadway performances of Six Degrees of Separation, Vance, 63, learned from his mother that his father had died by suicide. As the People v. O.J. Simpson star reveals in his book The Invisible Ache, the first call he made was to Channing — his friend and costar in the play.
“I just remember the shock,” Channing, 79, tells PEOPLE of that phone call. “I'll never forget it.”
“You know in life when something happens, you remember where you are, where you're standing, what room you're in, all that? That happens to all of this, I think.”
She adds, “I do remember that extremely clearly. It was such a terrible shock.”
As Vance told PEOPLE, the Grease star was the first person he thought to call because the actors had made a pact, along with Six Degrees costar John Cunningham, to never miss a performance of their Broadway show.
Her response upon hearing the tragic news, recalls Vance: “'Courtney. Go home.'”
In The Invisible Ache, a guidebook to healing aimed at Black men co-written with Dr. Robin L. Smith, Vance calls Channing both a “wonderful actress” and friend: “Given the intensity of our experiences doing that show, she was more than a costar. She’d become my comrade in arms.”
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What was performing the first show without Vance like? “It was very hard on every f---ing level,” recalls Channing with characteristic candor.
Plus, she remembers, that day’s performance was scheduled to be recorded by Lincoln Center for the New York Public Library’s Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, meaning Vance's “wonderful work was not going to be preserved. And so his understudy went on and that's what's preserved. Which I now sense is a bit trivial compared to the suicide of your father, but still, it has to have been a large thing as well because he was so wonderful in the part.”
Upon returning from sorting out his late father’s affairs and rejoining Six Degrees, Vance leaned on his New York theater community and the show’s regularity, he told PEOPLE. “I came back from taking care of my mom, getting her affairs in order… and the whole company embraced me.”
He added that Laura Linney, who was understudying another part in Six Degrees at the time, “changed my life” by recommending the massage therapist who then introduced him to the longtime therapist who helped Vance process his grief.
Related: Stockard Channing Remembers Late 'Grease' Costar Olivia Newton-John: 'I Will Miss Her Enormously'
Channing remembers how she, Linney and the rest of the production’s cast and crew rallied around the mourning Vance. “It was a very close company, very easy-going, loose. We were really an ensemble.”
Vance, she continues, “must've been through so much on every level” that it may have been a relief “to come back to a neutral place where you just did your work, people hugged you and you went—the cliché—‘Let's put on the show.'”
Channing, who now lives in London, says that she, Vance and his wife Angela Bassett have remained close throughout the years. “He did ring me,” she says, when their fellow Emmy winner Mary Alice died in July 2022. “He just sent me a lovely message saying he was thinking about me, which is really sweet.”
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, text "STRENGTH" to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or go to 988lifeline.org.
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