The character actress who helped bring one of the 2000s’ most cherished romantic comedies to life has been seen in Los Angeles this week.
Born in Brooklyn, she attended school alongside Barbra Streisand before beginning her acting career as Streisand’s understudy in the Broadway production of Funny Girl.
She went on to appear in a celebrated 1980s film featuring a cast that included Lawrence of Arabia star Peter O’Toole.
In the 1990s, she also became a memorable presence on an iconic sitcom, playing the title character’s self-absorbed aunt—a woman whose seven wealthy husbands had all died before her.
Throughout her decades-long career, she portrayed the mothers of characters played by Ben Affleck and Adam Sandler, while also appearing alongside Angelina Jolie before Jolie became famous.
Now 86, she looked polished in a structured white blouse, black trousers and elaborate drop earrings as she was seen out in her wheelchair this week.
So, can you identify her?
The character actress known for a key role in one of the 2000s’ most popular romantic comedies was photographed out in Los Angeles this week
At 86, she appeared stylish in a structured white blouse, black slacks and ornate drop earrings while being seen in her wheelchair
Her film career has included playing mothers to characters portrayed by Ben Affleck and Adam Sandler, as well as working with Angelina Jolie before her rise to fame
The answer is Lainie Kazan, beloved for her portrayal of Maria Portokalos, the formidable matriarch at the center of the family in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
The Daily Mail has contacted Kazan’s representative for comment.
Released in 2002, the sleeper hit was a culture-clash romantic comedy starring screenwriter Nia Vardalos as Toula, a Greek American woman in Chicago who falls for a WASP character played by John Corbett.
When Toula objects to her ‘stubborn’ father’s belief that ‘the man is the head of the house,’ Maria delivers the film’s most enduring line: ‘The man is the head, but the woman is the neck, and she can turn the head any way she wants.’
The cast also featured NSYNC heartthrob Joey Fatone and SCTV legend Andrea Martin, while the film was made on a modest $5 million budget.
It went on to take more than $350 million worldwide, earning Vardalos an Oscar nomination for best screenplay and spawning two sequels.
‘I never thought it would be a hit. I never thought anybody would see it,’ Kazan told IndieWire. ‘Usually you can tell when a movie has legs, but we didn’t know that.’
Lainie Levine was born in Brooklyn in 1940 and attended high school with a young Barbara Joan Streisand. She later enrolled at Hofstra University, where she took part in student musicals with Francis Ford Coppola and James Caan.
After fellow students began teasing her with the nickname ‘Lainie Levine, the sex machine,’ Coppola encouraged her to use her mother’s maiden name, Kazan, professionally.
Lainie Kazan (right) is adored as Maria Portokalos, the strong-willed mother of Nia Vardalos’ character (left) in My Big Fat Greek Wedding
Kazan is pictured in My Big Fat Greek Wedding between Michael Constantine and Bess Meisler, who respectively played her husband and mother-in-law
The picture earned more than $350 million at the box office and eventually resulted in two sequels; Kazan pictured with Louis Mandylor in My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 in 2016
‘That afternoon I went to audition for the Westbury Music Theater, and came away with a new name and an Equity card. In that name,’ she told AMNY.
By 1961, she made her Broadway debut in The Happiest Girl in the World, a take-off on Lysistrata with music by the 19th century composer Jacques Offenbach and lyrics by EY ‘Yip’ Harburg, who had written the words to Over the Rainbow.
Three years later, Kazan got a job understudying Streisand – who had by then dropped the second ‘a’ from her first name – in Funny Girl on the Great White Way.
Streisand was so determined to retain her stage time that only 18 months into the run, when she was afflicted with strep throat, did Kazan finally go on in her place, and even then only for one matinee and one evening performance.
As her acting career sputtered, Kazan unlocked a new facet of her professional life in 1970 when she posed topless for an eight-page spread in Playboy, instigating her run as a singer in Hugh Hefner’s jazz clubs.
‘That turned everything around again for me,’ she reflected decades later to the Los Angeles Times. ‘I got a lot of jobs from that.’
Her flesh-flashing magazine shoot, in which she said Hefner projected her as ‘the Jewish Sophia Loren,’ became the inspiration for a comic book character called Big Barda devised by Jack Kirby, creator of the Avengers and the X-Men.
Kazan herself ended up running two of Hefner’s nightspots, Lainie’s Room East in New York City and Lainie’s Room West in Los Angeles.
Kazan is pictured in 1970, the year she posed topless for an eight-page spread in Playboy, instigating her run as a singer in Hugh Hefner’s jazz clubs
Amid her success as a cabaret impresaria, she frequently appeared on The Dean Martin Show and became friendly with the Rat Pack; pictured onstage in 1985
Amid her success as a cabaret impresaria, she frequently appeared on The Dean Martin Show and became friendly enough with the Rat Pack that Frank Sinatra fondly referred to her as the ‘Jew broad,’ she told Page Six.
In 1982, she finally earned a part in a movie that made a lasting impact – My Favorite Year, a comedy directed by actor Richard Benjamin that starred Peter O’Toole, Joseph Bologna, Jessica Harper and even Broadway lyricist Adolph Green.
During the same decade, she was nominated for an Emmy for her guest role as the mother of Dr Wayne Fiscus (Howie Mandel) on the hospital show St Elsewhere.
In the 1988 tearjerker Beaches, she played the domineering stage mother of the character played by Mayim Bialik as a child and Bette Midler as an adult.
Kazan returned to My Favorite Year when it was adapted into a Broadway musical that opened in 1992, and although the production ultimately flopped at the box office, she earned a Tony Award for her performance.
Fans of 1990s television will instantly recognize Kazan from The Nanny as the Fran Drescher character’s raucous, gaudy Aunt Freida.
Aunt Freida’s comic plotlines centered on such subjects as her string of rich dead husbands, her foiled ambitions to be a singer and her feud with her sister-in-law, the title character’s mother Sylvia, played by Renee Taylor.
In one exchange, Sylvia ribs Freida for incorrectly saying the name of the luxury ceramic line Lladro, to which Freida sneers: ‘You can pronounce it, I can afford it.’
She played the mother of Adam Sandler’s character in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, as well as a woman seduced by Sandler in You Don’t Mess with the Zohan (pictured)
She guested on hit TV shows ranging from Boston Legal and Grey’s Anatomy to Will & Grace, the last of which she is pictured on with Megan Mullally
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Taylor and her husband Joseph Bologna often worked as a writing and directing team, including on the 1996 romantic comedy Love Is All There Is.
Set in the Bronx’s Sicilian community, the film was a Romeo and Juliet story centered on characters played by soap star Nathaniel Marston and the young Angelina Jolie, with Kazan as the boy’s mother and Paul Sorvino as the girl’s father.
In the 21st century, Kazan’s career has included playing the mother of Adam Sandler’s character in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, as well as a woman seduced by Sandler’s womanizing hairdresser in You Don’t Mess with the Zohan.
Kazan also played the mother of Ben Affleck’s character in his 2003 mega-flop Gigli, a romantic comedy starring him with his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez.
She acted in the 2000 comedy Bruno, the only film ever directed by Shirley MacLaine, and guested on hit TV shows ranging from Boston Legal and Grey’s Anatomy to The King of Queens and Modern Family to Desperate Housewives and Will & Grace.
Onstage, she has toured nationally in Fiddler on the Roof and featured off-Broadway in The Vagina Monologues, as well as holding a prominent role in a 1994 Broadway production of the satirical Nikolai Gogol play The Government Inspector.
On the personal front, Kazan has a daughter called Jennifer Bena, 54, by her former husband Peter Daniels, whom she met when he was an associate orchestra conductor on Funny Girl after he served as Streisand’s accompanist during her early pre-fame career as a nightclub singer.
Kazan has openly copped to romantic collisions with Sinatra, Warren Beatty and Bob Dylan, but never remarried after she and Daniels divorced in 1976.
