A BELOVED Oscar-nominated actress known for her iconic performance in A Christmas Story has passed away.
Melinda Dillon, who earned Academy Award noms for her roles in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Absence of Malice, passed away on January 9. She was 83.
Her death was confirmed in an obituary posted by the Dillon family.
The obit did not provide any service details about the Los Angeles resident but did ask to show support by a digital candle lighting.
Tributes poured in for the actress who "warned a generation about the dangers of shooting their eye out," one mourning fan wrote on Twitter.
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"RIP to the legendary actress," they said.
Another wrote: "Rest in peace, Melinda Dillon, a wonderful actress known for Close Encounters, A Christmas Story, Harry and the Hendersons, Slap Shot, Magnolia, and many more."
"Oh man, this sucks, she was such a good actress," a third person tweeted.
"Rest In Peace, Melinda Dillon."
Before hitting the silver screen, Dillon was first an accomplished stage actor, and earned a Tony nomination at the beginning of her career in 1963 for her performance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
She acted in several plays for the next few years until she broke into cinema with the influential short film The Cry of Jazz in 1969.
Years later, she began to score roles in the biopic Bound for Glory in 1976 and Slap Shot in 1977.
Also in 1977, she assumed one of her most influential roles in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
She played a distraught mother whose child was abducted by aliens and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
In 1981, Dillon was cast in Sydney Pollack's Absence of Malice, where she played a devout Catholic woman who takes her own life after a reporter discloses her abortion in an article.
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While she was celebrated by critics for these performances, her most memorable role would hit the screen in 1983.
In A Christmas Story, Dillon plays the mother of Ralphie, who pushes back on the precocious boy's insatiable desire for an air rifle.
"Dillon has a sweetly comedic presence that threatens to dissolve into creative anarchy," Sam Kashner wrote of the film in 2016.
"She's a vigilant mom but is still a child at heart, apparent when she encourages her youngest, Randy, a fussy eater, to pretend he's a pig at a trough.
"Randy really gets into it, snorting and plunging his face into his meatloaf and mashed potatoes, while he and his mom dissolve into fits of laughter.”
Though she received no critical praise for the role, she continues to be a welcome presence on living room televisions across the world each holiday season.
Dillon was born in 1939 in Hope, Arkansas.
After her mother divorced and remarried an Army veteran when she was young, Dillon spent several years in Nuremberg, Germany.
She later graduated from high school in Chicago where she broke into performing through improvisational theatre at The Second City.
Despite her illustrious career, Dillon told the New York Times in 1976 that her break-out role in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? nearly broke her.
After nine months of performing and studying under Lee Strasberg, she had to spend time at a psychiatric hospital to recover.
"I had had the American dream - to go to New York and study with Lee Strasberg," the up-and-coming actress said at the time.
"I guess I just wasn't prepared for it all to happen so quickly in New York.
"I'm not sophisticated; I hadn't had any kind of cultural education, at all, so when it came to meeting people, and presenting any kind of ideas I might have to offer, I would be terrified.”
