She won a small part in the television film Chase 1985 and appeared alongside Shirley MacLaine in the feature film Waiting

She won a small part in the television film Chase (1985) and appeared alongside Shirley MacLaine in the feature film Waiting for the Light (1990), before her role in Northern Exposure, which was filmed in rural Washington.She later guest-starred in the television series Suddenly Susan (as a judge, 1996) and ER (2000).Anthony Hayward. EILEEN SIMPSON was from the generation of American women who were expected to be writers’ wives rather than writers themselves. Married for 11 years to the poet John Berryman, Simpson none the less managed to stand this stereotype on its head – personally, by leaving Berryman, who was a simply hopeless husband, and professionally by becoming a practising psychotherapist and writer of several excellent books which ranged over topics from dyslexia to romance in old age to her own life with the famous poet. Eileen Patricia Mulligan, writer: born New York 1918; married 1942 John Berryman (died 1972; marriage dissolved 1956), 1960 Robert Simpson (deceased), 1989 Francis X Baine (deceased); died New York 21 October 2002. Clever, and very attractive, she struggled throughout her school years with what was then an undiagnosed acute case of dyslexia – she only learned of her disability after marrying Berryman, when he pointed out that her notes to him were often gibberish. She managed to attend Hunter College, and was working in New York City when she met Berryman at a New Year’s party.Diffident, susceptible, the young Mulligan was attracted to the poet at once, though she was uneasy about his obvious continuing affection for a girl in England to whom he was still nominally engaged. Their courtship was also complicated by Berryman’s living north in Boston, where he was teaching as a junior instructor in English at Harvard.

In time, the English rival released a Berryman now in love with Mulligan, Mulligan decided to leave her job in New York, and the two were married the following year, in 1942.From the beginning their marriage was unevenly balanced, for the man she had married proved demanding, self-engrossed, and deeply self-destructive, with suicide already a distressingly common topic of his conversation. Though a promising poet, Berryman was still essentially unknown, and he yearned for the literary celebrity that had already engulfed his close friend and fellow poet Delmore Schwarz, precocious author of the acclaimed In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938) and frequent contributor to the then ascendant journal Partisan Review.The essential instability of Berryman’s personality was complemented by an equally uncertain professional life, which was unsettling to a young bride. In an era when there were no posts at American universities for “creative writers” (or postgraduate degrees in their subject either), Berryman’s comparative lack of scholarly credentials made his tenure at institutions continuously short-lived – in John Haffenden’s 1982 biography of the poet, we find him teaching at no fewer than 12 colleges and universities during his career. And, although Berryman tried to play by the then constricting academic rules, his heart was never in criticism as much as in his own work, despite some powerful essays on Shakespeare.

The writing of poetry was Berryman’s first love; talking, teaching, and writing about it came second; a wife, as Eileen Berryman fairly rapidly discovered, was doomed to a distant third.Berryman was not alone in this poetic compulsion, and the strength of Eileen Simpson’s later memoir Poets in their Youth (1982) lies particularly in capturing the zeal with which the leading poets of Berryman’s generation pursued their craft to the neglect of all else, including domestic relationships. Interestingly the final break between her and Berryman seems not to have been instigated by his relentless philandering, excessive drinking, or unwillingness to father a child (a fact he tried later to deny), but rather from his complete immersion in his long poem and masterpiece Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956).For, typically, the mistress Berryman was most attached to was the historical figure of Anne Bradstreet, America’s first woman poet. As he declared to a slightly bemused Eileen, “the poet wants to seduce her”. As Simpson wrote, “Mistress Bradstreet was vividly present in the apartment at all hours of the day and night (John’s working schedule).” Berryman was ecstatic when he finished the poem; visiting St Tropez, he startled the local bakers, hard at work in the early hours of the morning, by standing next to their ovens and reciting it to them. This kind of obsessiveness, along with the sheer melodrama of it all, finally persuaded his wife that it was time to go.Having taken a Master’s degree in Psychology in 1950, Eileen Berryman had built up a considerable private practice by the time she and Berryman were finally divorced in 1956 (they had separated three years earlier).