Maureen Stapleton, who died yesterday at 80, was among the finest stage actresses of her generation, and a personality as outsize as any she played onstage, or as anything she compared her posterior to.

From her 1951 Tony-winning turn in “The Rose Tattoo” through her 1981 valedictory alongside Elizabeth Taylor in “The Little Foxes,” Stapleton defined the highest points of the American stage; she created memorable characters in plays by Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams.

Stapleton won an Oscar for her supporting role in “Reds” as Emma Goldman, a writer and anarchist whose presence the actress seemed almost eerily to channel.

Stapleton was as elemental offstage as on. She swore and belched and ate off her interviewer’s plates; glamour was never a part of Stapleton’s act. “Not unpretty,” one reviewer sniffed. Even at the beginning of her career, she played women twice her age. “People looked at me onstage and said, ‘Jesus, that broad better be able to act,'” she wrote in her autobiography. “I was born 40.”

A founding member of the Actors Studio, Stapleton considered “The Method” form of acting to be overblown and over-praised, and preferred to stress more practical advice, like getting enough sleep and talking loudly. “The main thing is to keep the audience awake,” she wrote.

As for how she chose her roles, she once told the Washington Post, “First of all, that I get paid. Second, that I don’t throw up on the script, that it shouldn’t bomb, and the people that watch it won’t throw up, and it’s reasonable. Third, how much time will it take out of my life.”

Stapleton grew up in Troy, N.Y. Her father, a violent drinker, eventually abandoned his family, and Stapleton left home as soon as she graduated high school, in 1943. She dreamed of starring in Hollywood films alongside screen idols like Jean Harlow and Robert Taylor, but had heard that Broadway was a better way to get into acting than moving to Hollywood. She took the $100 she earned at a job in an upstate weapons factory and moved to New York. Portly even then, she resembled, she wrote, “a bulging barn.”

After trying various jobs, including as a tour guide at the Chrysler Exhibit of War Weapons, Stapleton took a late night clerical position in a hotel, leaving her free to study acting at the Herbert Berghof Acting School during the day. Later Stapleton studied at the Actors Studio, alongside other young actors with names like Brando and Newman and Monroe. She began getting work, and in between stage roles posed for artists like Raphael Soyer and Reginald Marsh.

Stapleton made her Broadway debut with a small part in the 1946 production of “Playboy of the Western World.” More roles followed, but her breakthrough came in 1951 as Serafina in Tennessee Williams’s “The Rose Tattoo,” a role originally meant for Anna Magnani. The spiffier Magnani got the film role. In 1957, Stapleton again starred in a Williams play on Broadway, “Orpheus Descending.” Again Magnani got the movie role of Lady Torrence in the film version, “The Fugitive Kind” (1959), though Stapleton got a small part, too.

“Somehow, I never make the movie,” she sighed to the New York World-Telegram and Sun in 1959. She eventually had parts in dozens of movies, and was nominated for Oscars for supporting roles in “Lonelyhearts” (1958), “Airport” (1970), and “Interiors” (1978).

Stapleton had a long collaboration with Williams, and appeared to huzzahs as Amanda Wingfield in “The Glass Menagerie” in 1965, as well as in a 1976 television production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” opposite Laurence Olivier, which she considered a career highlight. Stapleton wrote that Olivier was “The Lord God.”

During the 1950s, Stapleton also appeared on Broadway in “Richard III,” the original production of “The Crucible,” “The Seagull,” and in 1960 played Carrie in Lillian Hellman’s “Toys in the Attic.” Hellman frequently invited Stapleton to dinner along with other luminaries of literature and politics, and the distinctly unbookish Stapleton would ask if she was the “token moron.”

Therefore it came as a pleasant surprise when she wrote a particularly amusing autobiography, “A Hell of a Life” (1995). Or rather, she dictated it and let a ghostwriter do the organizing, then told her children to take out whatever they didn’t like. “Maybe if I got drunk, I could read it,” she told the Boston Globe. Disorganized, and for decades often drunk when not onstage, she hardly cut an exemplary figure. “Stop talking German, Mom,” her son would yell when she slurred her speech. Two marriages broke down quickly, although she maintained amicable relationships with her exes. “The object of my greatest passion,” she said, was George Abbott, with whom she had a decade-long relationship, starting when she was 41 and the Broadway director was 81. He dumped her for a younger woman.

As she grew older, Stapleton’s notorious phobias made it inconvenient to work. She was afraid of opening nights, and of airplanes and elevators and bridges (“I don’t do up.”). As she grew older, she cocooned herself in the warmth of family and old friends. Stapleton retired to Lenox, Mass., not far from where she grew up. The demons of her past – though she once told an interviewer that she never forgave her father – seemed largely to have abated.

“We actors are like dock rats – we have to survive,” she once said. “We’re the deformed children of the world. The actor has to hang out his ego on the line for everyone to see and weigh. He better hang it on a good line.”

Asked by the Globe in 1995 what she would like her tombstone to read, she replied, “A very distant date.”

Maureen Stapleton

Born June 21, 1925, in Troy, N.Y.; died March 13 of chronic pulmonary disease in Lenox, Mass.; survived by her son, Daniel Allentuck, a daughter, Katharine Bambery, two grandchildren, and a brother.