Melissa Yandell Smith, who helped steer San Francisco’s esteemed American Conservatory Theatre for 25 years and made a notable late-career film debut opposite her longtime friend Frances McDormand in the Oscar-nominated 2020 film Nomadland, died of cancer September 7 at her home in San Francisco.
She was 64.Her death was announced earlier this month by A.C.T.Smith, whose lifelong friendship with McDormand began when they were classmates at the Yale School of Drama in the late 1970s, played Nomadland’s Dolly, the sister of McDormand’s character Fern.
In the film, she movingly delivers a line of dialogue to McDormand, saying, “You could see me when I was hiding from everybody else.
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