Coal Miner's Daughter



Coal Miner's Daughter is a 1980 biographical film which tells the story of country music legendary singer Loretta Lynn. It stars Sissy Spacek as Loretta, a role that earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress. Tommy Lee Jones as Loretta husband Mooney Lynn, Beverly D'Angelo and Levon Helm also star. The film was directed by Michael Apted.

Helm (drummer for the rock group The Band) made his screen debut as Loretta's father, Ted Webb. Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff, and Minnie Pearl all make cameo appearances as themselves.

The film was adapted from Loretta Lynn's 1976 autobiography written with George Vecsey. At the time of the film's release, Loretta was 48 years old.

Background
Loretta Lynn is one of eight children born to Ted Webb ( Levon Helm), a coal miner raising a family with his wife despite grinding poverty in  Butcher Hollow, Kentucky (pronounced by locals as "Butcher Holler"). She marries  Oliver Vanetta (Doolittle) "Mooney" Lynn ( Tommy Lee Jones) when she is 15 years old and he was 22 year old. A mother of four by the time she is 19 (and a grandmother by age 29), Loretta begins singing the occasional songs at local honky-tonks on weekends as well as making the occasional radio appearance.

At the age of 25, Norm Burley—the owner of Zero Records, a small Canadian record label—hears her sing during one of her early Northern Washington radio appearances. Burley gives the couple the money needed to travel to Los Angeles to cut a demo tape from which her first single, "Honky Tonk Girl", would be made. After returning home from the sessions, Mooney suggests that they go on a promotional tour to push the record. He takes his own publicity photo, and spends many late nights writing letters to show promoters and to radio disc jockeys all over the South. After Loretta receives an emergency phone call from her mother telling her that her father had died, she and Mooney hit the road with records, photos, and their children. The two embark on an extensive promotional tour of radio stations across the South.

En route, and unbeknownst to the pair, Loretta's first single, "Honky Tonk Girl", hits the charts based on radio and jukebox plays, and earns her a spot on the Grand Ole Opry. After seventeen straight weekly performances on the Opry, she is invited to sing at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop Midnite Jamboree after her performance that night. Country superstar Patsy Cline, one of Loretta's idols, who had recently been hospitalized from a near-fatal car wreck, prompting Loretta to dedicate Patsy's newest hit "I Fall to Pieces" to the singer herself as a musical get-well card. Cline listens to the broadcast that night from her hospital room and sends her husband Charlie Dick down to Tubbs' record shop to fetch Loretta so the two can meet. A long and close friendship with Patsy Cline follows, and endeds only by the tragic death of her idol in a plane crash on March 5, 1963.

Extensive touring, keeping up her image, overwork and a great deal of stress from trying to keep her family and marriage together causes a nervous breakdown. However, after a year off at her ranch in Hurricane Mills, TN, Loretta goes back out on the road in fine form and becomes The First Lady of Country Music.

Some months later, Mooney drives Loretta at breakneck speed out to what she discovers is a proposed site for a new house. They argue about where to put the bedrooms, and finally, Mooney somewhat jokingly says if they can't settle the issue about where to put the bedrooms, he's going to go live in a treehouse up at the top of a hill. The film ends with Loretta performing Coal Miner's Daughter that is now well known as her signature song to a sold out crowd, and a medley of Loretta Lynn hits performed live plays over the credits. ==Cast [edit] ==
 * Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn
 * Tommy Lee Jones as Oliver Vanetta (Doolittle) "Mooney" Lynn
 * Beverly D'Angelo as Patsy Cline
 * Levon Helm as Ted Webb
 * Phyllis Boyens as 'Clary' Webb
 * Bob Hannah as Charlie Dick
 * William Sanderson as Lee Dollarhide
 * Ernest Tubb as himself
 * Roy Acuff as himself
 * Minnie Pearl as herself