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Julie Kavner

Julie Kavner is the wonderfully deft comedienne who, two years out of college, began her professional career playing sardonic, chubby Brenda Morgenstern, younger sister to Valerie Harper's title character, on the long-running TV sitcom Rhoda.

With her wry, sarcastic delivery, her unique, raspy and slightly nasal whine and her self-deprecating humor, Kavner has carved a niche as a likable second banana, playing scrappy underdogs, working women and supportive wives in such films as Bad Medicine (1985), Surrender (1987) and Awakenings (1990), as well as TV-movies like No Other Love (1979) and Revenge of the Stepford Wives (1980), Neil Simon's Jake's Women (1996) and, of course, the classic animated sitcom, The Simpsons (1990-), as the voice of Marge Simpson.

A Woody Allen regular, she has acted in seven of his films including Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Shadows and Fog (1992) and is reputedly the only actress to play his mother (in Radio Days 1987), his girlfriend (in New York Stories 1989), and his wife (Don't Drink the Water 1994). Other film credits include Forget Paris (1995), Dr. Dolittle (1998), and The Lion King 1 ½ (2004).

Kavner got to display her gifts for mimicry and improvisation as a cast regular on The Tracey Ullman Show on Fox Network and Tracy Takes On for HBO creating such diverse characters as a Soviet circus performer and a bisexual talent agent. She was cast in her first starring role as a cosmetics saleswoman and mother turned successful professional comedienne in Nora Ephron's warmhearted domestic comedy This Is My Life (1992). Kavner also did well in another prominent role as an extremely, if inadvertently, honest box-office analyst who becomes involved with a film producer (played by Albert Brooks) in James L. Brooks' I'll Do Anything (1994).

Her New York theater credits include God's Heart at Lincoln Center, The Mineola Twins, the two-character play Particular Friendships and The Vagina Monologues, which she opened in New York and then performed in Los Angeles as well.


Note: This profile was written in or before 2006.
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Julie Kavner Facts

Birth Name Julia Deborah Kavner
OccupationActress
BirthdaySeptember 7, 1951 (72)
SignVirgo
BirthplaceLos Angeles, California, USA

Selected Filmography

The Simpsons Movie
Radio Days
Click
The Simpsons: Season 6
The Simpsons: Season 12
The Simpsons Complete Series Collection Seasons 1-17 and Season 20
The Lion King 1 1/2
Awakenings
The Simpsons: Season 20
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