There is a scene in The Curse of Widow’s Bay, the breakout comedy of the year, in which Rosemary, a woman who has been tormenting the protagonist for eight episodes (and the comic relief of the narration) reveals for several minutes a family tree as extensive as it is relevant to the series. The scene caused during filming the actor Matthew Rhys himself to ask the show’s creator, Katie Dippold, whether she hated Dale Dickey, the actress who plays Rosemary and who for that sequence had to learn nine pages of script.
Dickey tackled the challenge with mastery, because experience is a credential, and although she may not be a widely known performer, she is a seasoned supporting actress battle-hardened in a thousand battles. Or, more precisely, according to her IMDb profile, in 150. Not bad for a woman who, as she has told The New York Times, did not fit the “standards of beauty” and had trouble not only securing work or auditions, but also finding an agent to help shepherd her career.
On Monday night, at 64, Dickey will attend the Emmy Awards ceremony as a first-time nominee for her role in the aforementioned Apple TV production. After three decades in the audiovisual career, success may have taken a while to arrive, but this woman born in Tennessee never gave up on pursuing her dream of acting.
No Money to Work
Dickey’s filmography begins in the mid-1990s, with small roles in modest TV series and films that didn’t go down in the history of cinema. “My IMDb page was full of things that never saw the light of day, where the catering consisted perhaps of a peanut butter sandwich, and you stayed at a cockroach-infested Holiday Inn. But well, I’m a camping girl. I need a change of clothes and a bathroom. I don’t need anything luxurious,” she said in an interview with Variety.
Dale Dickey in an image from the 2019 miniseries Creedme.
Those were difficult years, living in New York, where she moved after graduating from the University of Tennessee. A lover of acting since childhood, because she grew up in Knoxville, which, as she herself has described, “had a vibrant artistic community,” in the city of the skyscrapers she couldn’t get an agent. She wasn’t pretty enough nor quirky enough. But she kept going. And she moved to Los Angeles, where she believes she “couldn’t have continued if she hadn’t received the support of casting directors.”
At the beginning of her career, Dickey worked on Sean Penn’s film The Pledge and in episodic roles in series such as The X-Files. Jobs so sporadic that she couldn’t even afford her SAG union insurance, something actors cannot do without to be part of a production. And then she landed a small role in the hit series Frasier. But she could not step onto the set until she paid her dues. Fortunately, Dickey found a friend who lent her the money, and she was able to work on the well-known comedy. With what she earned, she paid back the loan.
Tears Inside the Dinosaur Costume, Without Losing Hope
Gilmore Girls, Open Case, ER, CSI, the Angelina Jolie film The Exchange, Breaking Bad or My Name Is Earl, in which she played a supporting character, Bones, Criminal Minds or Weeds, are some of the titles she worked on already in this century. And although she later appeared in titles such as the feature films Super 8 or Hell or High Water and series like True Blood and Justified, the precariousness of episodic roles (most of them) forced her to become a more versatile woman than she would have liked.
Dale Dickey in the series Ellas dan el golpe, which premiered in 2022.
Delivery truck driver of sandwiches and balloons, waitress, parking attendant or children’s party entertainer dressed in the purple Barney the Dinosaur suit, Dickey had no qualms about working to pay the bills. And meanwhile, she never stopped auditioning nor gave up hope of landing a great role. Although inside the cartoon mascot there were moments when despair would make her cry while thinking that she only wanted to act, as she has shared.
Her fellow cast member, Matthew Rhys, twice nominated for the Emmy Awards for his work in The Beast in Me and The Curse of Widow’s Bay, has said of her that “she never makes mistakes. She will always throw you good pitches; the hard part is not laughing.” She, for her part, has acknowledged that “it is a lot of fun to tease Matthew.” And Katie Dippold, the creator of the Apple TV series, has revealed that she knew she had her eccentric and peculiar Rosemary as soon as she saw the Knoxville actress’s audition tape.
Although she has confessed that, in order to attend the television awards party to be held on September 14 in Los Angeles, she relies on stylists, Dickey asserts that she learned to “accept my peculiar appearance a long time ago. I am attractive in my own way, but I do not meet the standards of great beauty. I am proud to have accepted it and to have put vanity aside. I land wonderful roles.” And, despite the bad moments, she does not hesitate to share that “one of the best compliments was when a girl told me: ‘Thank you for making me believe that I don’t have to be a Barbie doll to be an actress’.”
