About Post
Before gracing screens everywhere, Dillon was a talented actress on Broadway, exploding onto the scene with her Tony-nominated performance as Honey in the original 1963 production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She'd get some brief roles on hit television series like Bonanza and The Jeffersons before breaking through on the big screen with Bound for Glory, the 1976 biopic about singer Woody Guthrie which also starred David Carradine and Ronny Cox. She'd earn a few more film roles including the Paul Newman starrer Slap Shot before catching the eye of Stephen Spielberg.
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Dillon earned the first of her two Oscar nominations for her role in Close Encounters as Jillian, the mother of a son abducted by aliens who becomes obsessed and, like Richard Dreyfuss's character Roy, is inexplicably drawn to Devils Tower in search of answers. Bound for Glory director Hal Ashby gave her an in with Spielberg, recommending her for the role which she would immediately make iconic. Her second nomination would come a few years later when she re-teamed with Newman for Absence of Malice which also saw her star opposite Sally Field.