OXFORD, Miss. – The first Mississippian to wear the Miss America crown, the late actress Mary Ann Mobley, and her husband, the late actor Gary Collins, will have their legacies expanded at the University of Mississippi with the naming of a studio theatre in the Gertrude C. Ford Center for the Performing Arts and the university’s first-ever theatre and film scholarships.

Their daughter, Clancy Collins White, of Los Angeles, has directed more than $1.6 million from Mobley’s estate to her alma mater, where she was the inaugural recipient of the prestigious Carrier Scholarship, an Associated State Body officer, majorette in the band, Miss Ole Miss and Miss University.

A public ceremony is set for 6 p.m. Saturday (Oct. 27) in the Ford Center lobby, paying tribute to the lives of the couple, as well as honoring White for her role in the gift. Before the dedication, a reception begins at 5:30 p.m., with the couple’s photos and scrapbooks on display. Theatre arts students also will perform several musical selections following the dedication.

White, a senior vice president with Warner Bros. Television, said her parents would be “incredibly honored” with the scholarship endowment’s and studio theatre’s names linking them to the place they loved in perpetuity, musing that her mom, who “never stopped talking, might even be speechless.”

“At a time when our world is in such disarray and all we’ve held dear seems to be in jeopardy, there is such an incredible power in storytelling – the power to inform, educate and most importantly transform,” she said. “My parents were huge believers in the power of the arts to impact people’s lives and make them feel. And they felt as though performing is the greatest expression of love.

“My mother credited Ole Miss with changing her life. She talked so lovingly and glowingly about Ole Miss as I was growing up that I was convinced I’d be going there too, pledging Chi Omega and telling my own stories to my children. Obviously, I stayed out West but I have always loved Ole Miss.”

Chancellor Jeffrey Vitter expressed his appreciation for the significant gift.

“We are deeply grateful to Clancy Collins White for directing this marvelous gift to the University of Mississippi, enhancing our vibrant cultural arts offerings,” Vitter said. “To have Mary Ann Mobley’s and Gary Collins’ names on the studio theatre and scholarships makes us very proud; they were both such loyal, passionate ambassadors.

“The scholarships will be life-changing to our theatre and film majors.”

The gift reflects the family’s love for Ole Miss, Mississippi and the importance of the arts in everyone’s lives, said Julia Aubrey, Ford Center director.

Recognized humanitarians, Mobley and Collins also supported “Mississippi Rising,” the Hurricane Katrina benefit hosted at Tad Smith Coliseum in 2005, as well as countless other events and initiatives designed to build resources for Ole Miss and the state.

“Mary Ann Mobley never forgot her home state as she pursued a career in Hollywood, and Gary Collins adopted Mississippi as his home state,” Aubrey said. “Throughout their lives they gave back to Mary Ann’s alma mater and supported efforts to celebrate the arts and bring attention to the needs of the people of this state.

“They generously shared their talents and influence to help throughout their lives.”

The 130-seat Mary Ann Mobley Collins and Gary E. Collins Studio Theatre will be dedicated inside the Ford Center, which will benefit from half the gift. The Mary Ann Mobley Collins Theatre Arts Scholars – the first endowed scholarships in the department’s history – will assist students who want to pursue careers in the performing arts.

The scholarship resources will have a significant impact on students, said Michael Barnett, chair of the Department of Theatre and Film.

“This assistance will enable students who are chosen as recipients to focus on their education so they can entertain and enrich audiences around the world,” he said. “They will be able to fully dedicate themselves to their craft.

“The department, the faculty, the staff and students – everyone who touches theatre and film at Ole Miss – is deeply grateful for the support Clancy Collins White has shown to this university and especially to our students, who are the next generation of those who will be able to shape our culture through the arts.”

Mississippians gathered around their TV sets on Sept. 6, 1958, to watch with pride as their native daughter won Miss America 1959. Mobley, a native of Biloxi who later lived in Brandon, went on to achieve success in film, television, Broadway, personal appearances and as a documentary filmmaker.

The Golden Globe winner appeared in countless TV series, including “Diff’rent Strokes,” “Fantasy Island,” “The Love Boat,” “Falcon Crest” and “Hearts Afire.”

Chancellor Emeritus Robert Khayat was a lifelong friend of Mobley’s, beginning with their freshmen and sophomore years at Ole Miss.

“Mary Ann became Mississippi’s most popular citizen, before Archie and Eli Manning,” Khayat said. “After she brought such positive attention to her home state, no child was raised in Mississippi without knowing who Mary Ann Mobley was.

“She had a great career, and she made a movie with Elvis. If that doesn’t give you standing, I don’t know what would.”

Mobley was the first woman to be voted into the Ole Miss Alumni Hall of Fame. The group inducted with her included her friend William Faulkner, the Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning author.

“Wherever Ole Miss hosted an event – Oxford, Washington, D.C., or California – Mary Ann and Gary were there lending their support,” Khayat said. “Gary was one of the most likeable individuals you would ever meet. Mississippi people claimed him as much as he claimed us.”

White agrees with that description of her father, a native of Venice, California, who made his motion picture debut in “Cleopatra,” starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. He acted in a number of movies, Broadway productions and TV series.

He also was host of “The Home Show” and “Hour Magazine,” for which he won an Emmy. Additionally, he hosted the Miss America Pageant from 1989 to 1994.

“My parents were married in Mississippi in 1967 and from then on, my father’s love for Mississippi only grew and grew,” White said. “By the time I was a child, I think he loved it as much, if not more, than mom!

“He felt so welcomed and embraced by everyone in Mississippi and Ole Miss, something he’d never had before in his life.”

In fact, that was part of the inspiration behind the gift.

“My parents wanted to repay all that Ole Miss had given to them and provide an opportunity for others to achieve their dreams,” White said. “My mother would be overjoyed. You have to understand, she was a girl from a small town of 2,500 people who never thought she would achieve what she was able to accomplish.”

Mobley and Collins were active volunteers with the March of Dimes for more than three decades and traveled around the globe with relief organizations to end world hunger. They were involved with the Crohns & Colitis Foundation and other groups. Collins was dedicated to raising awareness about breast cancer in support of his wife, who was diagnosed with cancer twice.

Sam Haskell III – a philanthropist, author, producer and the former Worldwide Head of Television at the William Morris Agency – and his wife, actress and singer Mary Donnelly Haskell, were close friends of Mobley and Collins. Both couples lived in Los Angeles and were enthusiastic ambassadors for Ole Miss and Mississippi.

Mobley and Collins appeared in every show Sam Haskell produced to secure funding for student scholarships, academic programs and disaster relief.

“As I think of the careers of many, and I was involved in so many, I think about Mary Ann Mobley and Gary Collins and the amount of national and international exposure they had,” Haskell said. “I’ve always believed the best way to make a difference is to use whatever position God has blessed you with to do that.

“Mary Ann and Gary did a lot of good for a lot of people, whether in Hollywood, Mississippi, New York or beyond.”

OXFORD, Miss. – Support from fellow students and faculty proved invaluable for Susie Penman, the first graduate in the Master of Fine Arts in Documentary Expression program at the University of Mississippi.

Penman, who also earned two other degrees from the university– a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 2007 and a master’s in Southern studies in 2012 – received her latest degree in August. She said she made good use of the resources at UM and its Center for the Study of Southern Culture, where the new MFA program is housed.

“For someone who is thinking about it, it’s a very supportive program,” Penman said. “There are people here to help you not just pursue what you are already interested in, but certainly in my case because I had never done film before, there were people who were patient and who taught me what I needed to know.

“That’s what I got out of it most, just learning this whole new skill set, which is working with film.”

Her film, “The Knowing of People,” is about juvenile crime and punishment in New Orleans. She took a personal experience she had while living in the city and brought it to life onscreen.

“I was carjacked a couple of years ago, and the people who did it were three teenagers who were tried as adults,” Penman said. “When I found that out, before I even knew about the MFA program, I just got interested in it because I was not part of the process at all; I just got a letter saying they’d been sentenced.

“I didn’t know anything about how the justice system worked and I wanted to explore that, and then I applied for the program and it just seemed like a natural fit because it was the thing I found myself thinking about and talking about more than anything else. I was upset about it and I wanted to do something.”

Penman started reaching out to people in New Orleans, asking questions about how the criminal and juvenile courts worked, and getting a better understanding the role of the district attorney and other players in the process.

“Things I’d been oblivious to because I’d been lucky enough not to have been involved with crime before – whether as a victim or living in a community affected by crime – so it’s a combination of personal experience and field work,” Penman said.

“I asked people who either work in the criminal justice system or have been affected by violence in the community somehow and pieced together a story about the bigger picture of juvenile crime in New Orleans told through by what happened to me.”

When she arrived last fall to begin the MFA program, Penman thought she would work on an audio-based project, such as a podcast or an oral history, or photography.

“I didn’t think I’d be doing film, and then I saw that Andy Harper was teaching a class and became interested and just thought I would do it to learn it,” Penman said. Although she was at first reluctant to commit to filmmaking for her thesis, she ended up loving the work and took full advantage of the support.

“If someone is thinking about getting their MFA, there are just wonderful people here who are helpful,” Penman said. “There is a good mix of people – you know, historians – but also a good balance of scholarship and technical tools that you need to learn.

“We were all there to bounce ideas off of each other, and I never felt alone, I always felt like there were people within reach I could ask questions of. I liked the feedback I would get from people.”

Andy Harper, director of the Southern Documentary Project, said he couldn’t be happier that Penman is the first MFA graduate.

“Susie represents everything we are looking for in adding students to our new program: someone who has a background in documentary work, but more importantly has a desire to learn more about the intersections of cultural studies and documentary arts,” Harper said.

Susie’s MFA thesis film on juvenile incarceration is at once personal and provocative – a great example of advocacy-based documentary work that is so important today. Now that we have one MFA graduate in the books, I can’t wait to see who is next and what stories they will tell.”

One thing that surprised Penman was how much she enjoyed the editing process.

“Filming is hard, and there are so many things that can go wrong,” she said. “I try to remind myself that most people work in teams and they have a camera person and someone doing the interview and a sound person, and this was just me, the whole time.”

Being thrown into the field made her realize there is much more work involved in filming than people understand, Penman said.

“You have to get everything just right, and in most cases, I didn’t,” she said. “I usually got one crucial thing wrong that I had to make up for, but that was part of the learning process.”

Besides her thesis, one of the films Penman worked on for Ava Lowrey’s Advanced Documentary class last spring was “Sister Hearts,” about Maryam Uloho, a woman who was incarcerated for more than 11 years for a crime that she says she didn’t commit. Her sentence was overturned, and she runs a thrift store in New Orleans that aims to help people, mostly women, who have been incarcerated.

Although Uloho’s footage did not end up in Penman’s thesis film, it still informed her work.

“For the past year, I’ve been immersed in all things related to incarceration and trying to understand the various ways the system functions or doesn’t function, and her story was crucial in helping me understand some aspects of that, specifically in regard to women,” Penman said.

“There are so many different stories that revolve around crime and violence and punishment that we really need to listen to people who have been incarcerated before and who have had these experiences. There are so many individual stories, and I feel like that gets forgotten in the whole mess.”

Penman hit the ground running with production of four films during her MFA studies, said Ava Lowrey, Pihakis Documentary Fellow for the Southern Foodways Alliance.

“It’s been a privilege to watch Susie grow as a documentarian, and her success is a reminder of the importance of this program in shaping a new class of Southern documentarians,” Lowrey said. 

Penman is continuing her documentary work with incarceration this fall as a doctoral student in American studies at the University of North Carolina.

“As long as I can talk to people who have stories to tell me, I feel like that’s a way of remembering that this is something that really affects tons of people in so many different ways,” Penman said. “The MFA program helped solidify the idea in my head that I want to keep studying incarceration and using documentary methods to do that.

“It helped reaffirm the importance of people’s voices and storytelling in doing research instead of just going to a library.”