Refreshing and Rare: An Actress with Integrity

The other day I was thinking back to a terrific play I saw in high school at the Folger Shakespeare Theater in Washington. I used to always go watch the performances downtown performed by the Shakespeare Theatre Company. The play was The Merry Wives of Windsor with Sir John Falstaff played by the magnificent Pat Carroll. The performance was considered historic and got raves in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other reviews. I also saw her in Mother Courage, which also was performed at the Shakespeare Theatre.

Being a big Wikipedia fan, I decided to check out Pat Carroll and see what she was up to lately. She has done a lot of television and theatre performances. She is perhaps best well known (especially to kids growing up in the 80's and 90's) as Ursula the Octopus in Disney's The Little Mermaid, Ursula being one of Disney's great tradition of vampish villainesses, including Cruella DeVille and Madame Medusa that everyone remembers.

So I look up her up in Wikipedia. What a surprise and a nice one at that! It turns out that Pat Carroll is a devout Catholic that picks and chooses her roles based on traditional Catholic morality:

"As a devout Roman Catholic, her religious views inform her choice of what roles to accept, and in which productions to appear. According to a Current Biography article, she is a supporter of the Republican Party."

It is always refreshing to find the occasional actor or actress that has achieved some degree of fame and also happens to have moral integrity. It is even more stunning in this age of superficial stars who worship multiculturalism, whose highest moral compass is their own superficial whims, and who become liberals to appear intelligent, showing how naive and uneducated they actually are.