Prior to her career as an actress, Mary Alice was a teacher in Chicago. In 1967, she moved to New York, taking parts in theater, film, and television. In 1974, she starred in the PBS movie The Sty of the Blind Pig. In the 1976 film Sparkle, which was inspired by Diana Ross and the Supremes, she played Effie Williams, "the single mom raising daughters played by Irene Cara, Lonette McKee and Dwan Smith," as Mike Barnes puts it in The Hollywood Reporter. Mary Alice appeared in episodes of various TV series throughout the years, and in 1977, she acted opposite Morgan Freeman in Cockfight at the American Place Theater in New York. According to theNew York Post obituary by Erin Keller, Mary Alice "played Bostic, a dorm director, in the Cosby Show spinoff for two seasons in the 1980s. In those years, she also portrayed Ellie Grant Hubbard in All My Children. Her performance as Rose in the 1987 production of August Wilson’s Fences earned her a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play. In 1992, she won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for I’ll Fly Away."

Three years after winning the aforementioned Tony Award, Mary Alice portrayed the key role of Annie Lamb, the mother of the boy injured in the hit-and-run accident that lay at the center of The Bonfire Of The Vanities. That same year, according to The Hollywood Reporter obituary by Mike Barnes, "Alice played Nurse Margaret opposite Robin Williams and Robert De Niro in Awakenings, directed by Penny Marshall", and also "the family matriarch dealing with a disruptive guest (Danny Glover) in Charles Burnett’s To Sleep With Anger."

In 1987 the editors of CIAK, the Italian film monthly, proposed that I write a weekly newsletter about everything that was happening in Hollywood movies, plus film reviews and interviews with actors and directors, as their Los Angeles Correspondent. I held this position until 1994.

The first article published, interviews about “The Untouchables” with director Brian De Palma and star Kevin Costner, run as an 8-page cover story. (c) CIAK September 1987

The new episode of TCM's The Plot Thickens: The Devil's Candy delves into that opening steadicam shot of The Bonfire Of The Vanities. The episode is titled "Wire Without a Net," after a chapter in Julie Salamon's book, and features new interviews with Larry McConkey, Aimee Morris (DeBaun), and Chris Soldo, as well as voices from Salamon's original tapes: Melanie Griffith, Morgan Freeman, Bruce Willis, Tom Wolfe.

Production designer Richard Sylbert and the McCoy apartment on Stage 25 of the Warner Bros. lot. Copyright © 1991 Warner Bros., Inc.

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Episode 2: Reaching for the Stars – and Paying the Price
Tom Hanks signs on to play amoral stockbroker Sherman McCoy, and he’s so beloved that nobody recognizes how wrong he is for the part. There's immediate pushback against Bruce Willis as the other male lead, since his role was written as British. But the hardest decision comes when the director insists that a Jewish judge be played by a Black actor, to soften the film’s racial tensions.