Talent agent Susie McCarty calls Micaela Nelligan the ultimate professional. Fran Pruyn, who directed Nelligan — and also traveled and partied with her — calls her wild and funny, a woman of big emotions. Her former theater professor, Richard Scharine, remembers how well she sang and how outspoken she was when she found a theater history assignment too dull for her tastes.
Nelligan died at home on Monday at the age of 47. A funeral mass will be held Monday at 10 a.m. at Our Lady of Lourdes Church, 670 S. 1100 East; and at 6:30 p.m. there will be a celebration of her life at the Grand Theatre, 1575 S. State, Salt Lake City.
Local audiences may not remember Nelligan's early role as Rosalind in "As You Like It," in 1981. She was better known for her later, more brash and brassy roles — in "Saturday's Voyeur," "The Kathy & Mo Show" and, most memorably, as Miss Honeypot in "A ... My Name is Alice."
And certainly, Scharine says, she had a perfect sense of comic timing. Yet he says, if he could have chosen one role for her, it would have been Shakespeare's Rosalind. "That was a part of a kind she didn't get often."
In recent years, Nelligan worked mostly in film. McCarty lists a dozen titles — including Nelligan's regular part on "Everwood," playing Martha Thompson.
McCarty says she can't recall sending her out for a role she didn't get.
E-mail: susan@desnews.com