Anne-Marie Suchman

Anne-Marie Suchman (nee Haslam), a stage actress and founding member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, died peacefully in Santa Barbara on Wednesday after a long battle with dementia. She was ninety-two.

Born in Brooklyn during the Great Depression into a multi-generational Irish Catholic household, Anne-Marie benefitted from the tutelage of her beloved grandfather (the chief telegrapher for the New York Times) who taught her to read at an early age. She spent much of her childhood reading in the window seats of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum Library. Not offered the privilege of higher education, she achieved the equivalent book by book, reading her way out of a narrow world into an expansive and adventurous one.

When a brief first marriage in Manhattan in her twenties proved disastrous, she boarded a Greyhound bus with Kerouac’s On the Road. The bus was bound for Reno, NV where she secured a divorce, worked by night as a change girl at Harrah’s Club, skied, and met a group of young writers from San Francisco.

She moved to San Francisco at the height of the Beatnik era. Her writer friends became lifelong comrades with fine careers: John Deck, Leonard Gardner, Gina Berriault, and Clancy Carlisle. Anne-Marie auditioned for local theatre productions, eventually landing a spot in a group, led by Ronnie Davis, that became the influential outdoor theatre ensemble, The San Francisco Mime Troupe. Under the stage name Mia Carlisle, she was often cast as the beauty in the troupe’s Commedia dell’arte performances.

In the Sixties, a splinter group of these writers took a Yugoslav freighter to Europe to establish a writer’s colony in Nerja, Spain, along with U.K. writers such as Aidan Higgins, Michael Foss and the Canadian journalist Harry Calnek. By the mid-sixties, Anne-Marie lived peripatetically with her second husband whose work brought them to live in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Trinidad.

Before the Vietnam War ended, Anne-Marie returned to California heartbroken after a failed second marriage. Within a year she met the love of her life, Dr. J. Richard “Dick” Suchman, a psychologist and Professor of Education who championed inquiry development at his Ortega Park Teachers Laboratory, an institute he founded in the redwoods above Stanford University. The night they met, they fell in love playing theatre games and never looked back. They had one child together and moved to the Monterey Bay, eventually settling in Santa Cruz, CA. She valiantly maintained normalcy for her child when her beloved husband was diagnosed with a fatal long-term illness in his early fifties. After raising her daughter, Anne-Marie worked as a secretary and a nanny — ever sustaining a rigorous reading habit from novels to Wilfred Thesiger to The Paris Review.

Anne-Marie was a humanist, a reader, a marvelous home chef and hostess, and an extraordinary mother. She delighted in music from Schubert to Muddy Waters to Nina Simone. She will be remembered for her perfect vinaigrette recipe, her facility with words, and her gritty Brooklyn-girl moxy.

Anne-Marie is preceded in death by her husband Dr. J. Richard Suchman, her best friend of fifty years Harriet Deck, and a brother, Edward J. Haslam. She is survived by a daughter, Olivia Suchman Joffrey, and three granddaughters, Camilla, Cosima and Clementine Joffrey all of Santa Barbara, CA.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Friends of the Montecito Library, P.O. Box 5788, Montecito, CA 93150.