Tony Nominee Diane Cilento Dies at 78

According to published reports, Tony and Academy Award nominated actress Diane Cilento recently passed away in Australia. She was 78 years old.

In 1956, Cilento was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Supporting or Featured Actress for Helen of Troy in Jean Giraudoux's Tiger at the Gates. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Tom Jones in 1963 and appeared in The Third Secret the following year, but she allowed her film career to decline following her marriage to actor Sean Connery, to whom she was married from 1962 to 1973.

She starred with Charlton Heston in the 1965 film The Agony and the Ecstasy, and with Paul Newman in the 1967 western film Hombre. In 1985, Cilento married Anthony Shaffer, a playwright, who wrote the script of The Wicker Man; she met him when she appeared in the film in 1973, and he joined her when she returned to Queensland in 1975. During the 1970s, she studied Sufism under the British spiritual teacher John G. Bennett.