Lainie Kazan

Lainie Kazan has settled into the role of “mom,”  “grandma” or “aunt.” Her upcoming roles include The Godmother and the mom in Oy Vey! My Son is Gay!! In the movie Beau Jest, she plays the mother of a girl who hires an actor to play her perfect boyfriend, in order to keep her parents happy. She's also a mom in You Don't Mess with the Zohan, one of our Movies of the Month!

In the Bratz movie with Jewish actresses Nathalia Ramos and Anneliese van der Pol, she plays “Bubbie,"... in Red Riding Hood, “Grandma”… and in Eight Crazy Nights, she’s just “Old Woman”! Plus, on Will and Grace, Lainie was Aunt Clare, and in The Nanny, she was Aunt Frieda.

But Lainie’s most famous role as a mother has got to be in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and the show that spun off from the movie. If you haven’t seen that film, go back and check it out on DVD! It’s really hysterical.

Lainie’s other well-known movies include Beaches with Bette Midler, and My Favorite Year, set against an early TV sketch show. They made that second movie into a stage musical, and Lainie was nominated for a Tony for her role… as a mom!

Next up is Ollie Klublershturf vs. the Nazis, about a boy genius trying to keep a time machine out of their evil hands. George Segal is the dad and Samm Levine is Ollie's older brother (guess who's the mom!). And Expecting Mary is about a spolied girl who gets a reality check in a poorer part of town. Eliott Gould and a whole lot of other celebrities show up; we're not going to ruin the surprises!

Lainie's other Broadway experience is in the musical Funny Girl, about Jewish comedy legend Fanny Brice. Barbra Streisand became famous in the role; but if she couldn’t go on for some reason, Lainie took the part. That’s called being an “understudy.”

Well, it happened! One night, Barbra had a sore throat and couldn’t sing, so Lainie took her place and got rave reviews. So much so, Lainie quit the show and went off on her own career! Over the years, she has continued to do satge work in musicals like Man of La Mancha, Gypsy, Hello, Dolly!, and of course Fiddler on the Roof (those last three hit shows were written and composed by Jews, by the way).

As you can see, a lot of Lainie’s shows and roles have been Jewish. That’s even true of the one action film she was in: Delta Force! This adventure film follows an elite anti-terror squad as they try to save a planeload of hostages from terrorist hijackers. It was filmed in Israel by an Israeli director 20 years ago, back in 1986.

One movie she’s been in that you’ll really like is The Journey of Natty Gann, about a brave girl who travels across the country to find her missing father.

Lainie’s also been in TV shows from comdies like The King of Queens, dramas like St. Elsewhere (for which she was Emmy-nominated), and soaps like Guiding Light. 

Lainie’s dad was Ashkenazic and her mother was Sephardic. Lainie herself is very motherly, and serves on the boards of the Young Musician's Foundation, AIDS Project LA, and B'nai Brith.

At the beginning of her career, Lainie sang in night clubs, and she’s doing it again, headlining in Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

But it’s New York that loves Laine the most— in 1997, they named her “Queen of Brooklyn.” Well, that’s certainly better than “Mom” again!

Bonus:

By playing so many moms, Lainie reminds us of Shelley Winters, a phenomenal Jewish actress. After first playing “blonde bombshells” and then playing wives, she said, “You gotta play mothers. If you don’t, you won’t have a long career in Hollywood!” Taking her own advice, one of Shelley’s major roles was the grandmother of Jewish comedian Roseanne Barr on her hit show, Roseanne. Other times, she played the moms of Elvis and the Marx Brothers!

Shelley must have known something, because she did have a long career. She was nominated for four Oscars in three different decades, wining twice, and appeared in movies from the 1940s through the end of the ’90s! That’s 60 years! She won for two issue-oriented films. In A Patch of Blue, she plays the mom of a blind girl who falls in love with an African-American man. And in The Diary of Anne Frank, Shelley played not one of the Jews hiding from the Nazis with Anne but one of the Dutch family who hides her. She donated her Oscar to the Anne Frank Museum!

But she did play Jews plenty of other times, especially in Jewish movies like Over the Brooklyn Bridge with Elliott Gould, Sid Caesar, and Carol Kane… The Magician of Lublin with Alan Arkin and Lou Jacobi… Diamonds, with Barbara Hershey … and The Delta Force, with Joey Bishop and Lainie Kazan. Wait— wasn’t that last one an action film? What was Jewish about it? It was filmed in Israel, and all of these were directed by Israeli director Menahem Golan, whose Golan/Globus film company we talk about in the Bonus here.

Another Jewish film of Shelley’s was Next Stop, Greenwich Village with Ellen Greene, Jeff Goldblum, and Lou Jacobi again. This was done by another Jewish director, Paul Mazursky, and together they also made Blume in Love, about a divorce lawyer who gets divorced himself; Jewish actor George Segal stars in that one.

Shelley was pretty enough to get roles like “dance-hall girl” and “handmaiden” in her early, 1940s movies, but soon proved she was smart enough for bigger roles. In 1947, she broke through with A Double Life, about an actor who goes crazy and starts believing he is his character. By 1949, she was in The Great Gatsby with Alan Ladd and Howard DaSilva (see this Bonus).

Then in the 1950s, she made the Western Winchester ’73 opposite Jimmy Stewart, plus Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis,  the crime drama He Ran All the Way with John Garfield (see this Bonus), and the creepy Night of the Hunter with Robert Mitchum. Shelly was nominated for her first Oscar for A Place in the Sun, a romance with Montgomery Clift, and closed out the decade by, as we said, winning an Oscar for Anne Frank.

In the 1960s, Shelley was in two movies that people still talk about: the private-eye story Harper, with Paul Newman and Lauren Bacall, and Michael Caine’s infamous Alfie. Shelley was nominated for her fourth Oscar for the disaster-at-sea classic The Poseidon Adventure. And she played a mean kidnapper in the Disney movie Pete’s Dragon.

Until Roseanne, Shelley did not do a whole lot of TV. She was in two episodes of the Batman show, and in Chico and the Man (one of the first shows with Hispanic-American main characters), she played a woman named Shirley Schrift… which was Shelley’s real name!

Shelley was born in southern Illinois but moved to New York as a kid. By her teens, she was working four jobs to pay for acting classes. Success in Hollywood did not come easy, but her roommate was Marilyn Monroe (see this Bonus), which was probably fun. She also studied Method acting.

One thing that has changed in movies over time is that it used to be the best thing to get a death scene. What could be more dramatic for an actor than dying? Shelley was “killed” in at least a half-dozen of her movies. Today, no actor wants to die onscreen… because then they can’t be in the sequels that every movie has to have these days. Then again, with all the supernatural and superhero movies now, you can "die" in one movie and still be in the next one!