Jerry Chipman, actor and longtime St. Jude spokesman, has died

For most of his life, Jerry Chipman represented Memphis with pride and distinction on the stage, on the movie screen, and as the public voice of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

In "21 Grams," a 2003 movie made in Memphis by future two-time Oscar-winner Alejandro González Iñárritu, Mr. Chipman was cast as the father of a grieving woman played by Naomi Watts. "Life goes on," he counsels her, in one of the film's many intense scenes.

Mr. Chipman, 79, died Sunday at his Midtown home, nine days after undergoing open-heart surgery. The valve-replacement operation had seemed to go well, but Mr. Chipman's health declined over the weekend.

A statement from Theatre Memphis described Mr. Chipman as "beloved" and "cherished and treasured" for his decades of contributions, beginning with his acting role in a 1963 production "The Drunkard," opposite a pair of local theater stalwarts, Bennett Wood (Mr. Chipman's acting mentor) and Florence Leffler (who had been Mr. Chipman's high school English teacher).

"His passion for Memphis theater in general and Theatre Memphis in particular truly are unparalleled," said Debbie Litch, Theatre Memphis executive producer.

Offstage, Mr. Chipman was familiar to Memphians for his four decades as media spokesperson for St. Jude. Originally a "department of one," he eventually headed an entire marketing and communications office. When he retired in 2012, his official title was "vice president for corporate and executive relations."

Mr. Chipman saw a connection between his dual missions.

"In communications, you're not promoting yourself, you're behind the scenes telling someone else's story, and that transfers over to directing a play," he told The Commercial Appeal in 2012. "It's being true to a work and communicating it to an audience."

St. Jude was "my career, my life," said Mr. Chipman, hired nine years after the hospital's 1962 founding. "It's a wonderful place to work in every respect."

Mr. Chipman said he was humbled by sharing stories of the hospital's successes and its groundbreaking treatments of childhood cancer with the world. But he also adroitly managed the hospital's media relations in less inspiring situations, as in February 1982, when the father of a child who had died of leukemia at St. Jude stormed the hospital and held four hostages at gunpoint before being killed by police.

"That was a dark day for us," Mr. Chipman later told The Commercial Appeal. "I was working with the lead hostage negotiator to go out on a regular basis to the media and keep them updated, and we worked carefully with the police department as to the information that was revealed."

He also handled much of the press in the wake of the Feb. 6, 1991, death of St. Jude founder Danny Thomas, the actor and comedian whose television celebrity had helped elevate the hospital's profile even before it established its international reputation as a research and treatment center.

"Jerry Chipman will never be gone," said actress Marlo Thomas, St. Jude National Outreach Director and daughter of Danny Thomas. "His spirit lives in every brick of every building, in the heart of every child and in the memory of all of us who were blessed to know him. We will miss his bottomless passion for our mission, but our one consolation is knowing that he is having a joyous reunion with his dear friend, my father."

In addition to St. Jude and Theatre Memphis, Mr. Chipman had two "great loves," according to family friend Lisa Buckner: His husband, Emiliano Livellara, a personal trainer, and his 18-year-old orange tabby cat, Bobby. 

Mr. Chipman was born in Halls, Tennessee. His family relocated to Memphis when he was a teenager. 

At the University of Memphis (then known as Memphis State University), he earned a bachelor's degree in liberal arts, with a double major in English and theater history and a minor in journalism.

As soon as he was old enough to pursue his interest in the stage, Mr. Chipman immersed himself in local theater, becoming an encyclopedic resource for anyone interested in its history and a mainstay at the Memphis Little Theatre, which eventually evolved into Theatre Memphis.

He last acted at the East Memphis theater in 2018, in the play "Heisenberg." His final play as a director there was in 2019, when he helmed a revival of the popular 1930s comedy by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, "The Man Who Came to Dinner."

Mr. Chipman also appeared in some of the more prestigious movies shot in Memphis, including "Forty Shades of Blue" by Memphis writer-director Ira Sachs, which won the Grand Jury Prize for Drama at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, and director Sydney Pollack's 1993 "The Firm," adapted from the John Grisham novel.

In the latter film, which chronicled the depredations of a corrupt Memphis law firm, Mr. Chipman was an FBI agent assigned to shadow David Strathairn, cast as the brother of a lawyer played by Tom Cruise.

Mr. Chipman had a larger screen role as the father of sisters played by Watts and Clea DuVall in "21 Grams," which marked the English-language feature debut of Mexican director Iñárritu, who later won back-to-back Best Director Oscars for "Birdman" and "The Revenant." 

Mr. Chipman appeared in several emotional scenes with Watts, and was memorable enough that people sometimes asked why he didn't leave Memphis for the stage or film scene in New York or Los Angeles.

In response, he asked: Why should I? The Memphis theater community "has satisfied that creative part of me," Mr. Chipman explained to the newspaper. "I don't take any of this for granted."

"He loved Memphis," Litch said. "He wanted to invest his passion and his interest and his talents into this community that he loved."

Funeral arrangements are incomplete at this time.