by Rob Hurwitt for the San Francisco Chronicle
Sandra Archer, a mesmerizing actress whose brief career left a large impression on Bay Area theatre artists, died Oct.12 at Bayview Villa hospice in San Carlos. A lead performer with the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the 1960s, she made an indelible impression on audiences and fellow actors with her beauty, forceful stage presence and impeccable comic and dramatic timing, before she quit the stage in 1970.
Ms. Archer had been diagnosed with cancer in 2007, which went into remission after treatment. "It came back with a vengeance" last winter, said her close friend Sally Forsberg-Weber. Her "last siege" with the illness lasted nine months. She was 72.
"Sandy Archer was simply the most luminous, gifted, brilliant actress I have ever worked with," said actor Peter Coyote by e-mail from Madrid. "I loved her madly, and unrequitedly, and to this day my heart quickens to think of her. Her loss hits me like a punch in the gut. I mourn too that she was never adequately captured on film, so that others might have the opportunity I did to be mesmerized by her shimmering like quicksilver."
"Her voice was superb," said Mime Troupe founder R.G. Davis, with whom she lived in the '60s. "Her talent was enormous. She unhesitatingly knew what she was doing onstage and she could handle any level of work. Whatever she did, she really did it. People said she was a genius. I can't deny it."
Sandra Lee Archer was born Feb. 23, 1938 in San Francisco and graduated from San Rafael High School at the age of 16, said her cousin and closest surviving family member Linda Jenkins. She graduated from San Francisco State College, where she studied theater, and was briefly married, Jenkins said.
Ms. Archer performed with the Mime Troupe from 1964 to 1970. She excelled in commedia dell'arte, outdoors in the parks, and in more serious works by Sartre, García Lorca and Brecht.
"She took command of the stage," said Joe Bellan, a leading Bay Area comic actor. "She was more than a hard act to follow. Sandy was an impossible act to follow."
In a memorable 1967 turn in "L'Amant Militaire," adapted from Goldoni by Joan Holden, Ms. Archer executed a stunning, instantaneous switch from farce to tragedy. In a scene lampooning the romance of war, she had large outdoor audiences roaring with laughter until, with a sudden change of expression and voice placement, she stopped the laughter cold to express the grief of a war widow.
Ms. Archer left the Mime Troupe during the conflicts that accompanied its transition to a collective leadership. She participated in setting up a short-lived Cultural Training Center, then, with Bellan, co-founded Tale Spinners, a multi-generational company that took shows to senior centers and drew performers from them.
"Tale Spinners was close to her heart," said Bellan, who visited her shortly before her death. She coordinated the company's work but never performed with it, he said. After a few years, she left the Bay Area for Westwood in Lassen County to care for her aging parents.
"She just dropped out," Bellan said. "I think she burned out. She was just doing too much."
Ms. Archer lived in Westwood until her death. She worked for the non-profit Plumas Rural Services in Quincy, retiring in 2001. She also taught children's theater there and, in the '80s, traveled to Humboldt County to teach classes and direct students at Dell'Arte, one of the nation's leading schools for physical comedy. Dell'Arte founders Joan Schirle, Michael Fields and Donald Forrest each cite her as a primary mentor, a role model for both acting and directing and personal hero.
Holden, the Mime Troupe's primary playwright for three decades, said Ms. Archer "gave me the greatest playwriting lesson I ever got," simply by demanding, "Don't give me feelings. Give me verbs."
Holden said Ms. Archer will be remembered for "her beauty, her warmth onstage, her range and the risks she could take with her timing. Whatever is the comic equivalent of perfect pitch, she had it."
