Piper Laurie (born Rosetta Jacobs; January 22, 1932) is an American actress. She is known for her roles in the films The Hustler (1961), Carrie (1976), and Children of a Lesser God (1986), all of which brought her Academy Award nominations. She is also known for her performances as Kirsten Arnesen in the original TV production of Days of Wine and Roses, and as Catherine Martell in the television series Twin Peaks, for which she won a Golden Globe Award in 1991 and is one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.
Piper Laurie was born Rosetta Jacobs in Detroit, Michigan, the younger of two children (both girls) of Alfred Jacobs, a furniture dealer, and his wife, Charlotte Sadie (née Alperin) Jacobs. Her paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Poland and her maternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Russia.
She was delivered, according to her 2011 autobiography Learning to Live Out Loud, in a one-bedroom walk-up on Tyler Street in Detroit, where the family lived. Alfred Jacobs moved the family to Los Angeles, California, in 1938, where she attended Hebrew school.[citation needed] To combat her shyness, her parents provided her with weekly elocution lessons; this eventually led to minor roles at nearby Universal Studios.

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