Bill Murray's sister, Dominican nun, actor too

Barbara Beckwith, in an article entitled "Dominican nun, sister of actor Bill Murray, breathes new life into saint" (St. Anthony's Messenger, March 20, 2006), writes:

With a hearty voice, an over-the-top Italian accent and old-fashioned Dominican habit, Sister Nancy Murray, OP, strides up the aisle from the back door into the Cincinnati church named for St. Catherine of Siena. She greets everyone with “Buon giorno!” and instantly draws her audience into Catherine’s life story.

Dramatizing vignettes from Catherine’s life, Sister Nancy uses minimal props, but somehow in the magic of theater, she conjures a believable Catherine who understood that love of God is love of neighbor: “On two feet you must walk my way; on two wings you will fly to heaven.”

Tim Funk, in "Nancy the nun is an actor, too" (Charlotte Observer, February 15, 2008), writes:

Two women.

Each grew up in a large framily.

Both bypoassed that well-traveled road to marriage and motherhood, deciding instead to steer their lives in a differend direction.

Donning nun's habbits, Catherine of Siena and, 600 years later, Nancy Murray joined the Dominicans -- a Roman Catholic order of preachers and teachers.

Catherine was a 14th-century Italian saint, a mystic, author, servant of the poor, adviser to the popes.

And Sister Nancy?

A nun since 1966, she's also been a servant of the poor, in inner-city Chicago, as well as a teacher, a vocation director and a hospital chaplain.

But these days, like her little brother Bill Murray -- she calls the "Groundhog Day" star Billy -- Sister Nancy acts full-time. And next Saturday she'll play Catherine of Siena, Italian accent and all, in a one-woman show at Charlotte's St. Gabriel Catholic Church.

To date, she's performed it about 340 times, all over the world.