Arleen Sorkin
Arleen Sorkin is an actor, born 1955.
Very few performers get a character built around them. Arleen Sorkin did. She was a comedian and a soap actress, playing Calliope Jones on Days of Our Lives, when her friend Paul Dini co-created Harley Quinn for Batman: The Animated Series and wrote the part to fit her voice. Sorkin then played it, which is how a bit-part henchwoman turned into one of the most valuable characters DC owns.
What she brought was comic timing rather than menace. Harley in Sorkin's hands is a Brooklyn honk and a punchline delivery, somebody who is funny first and dangerous by accident, and every actress who has taken the role since has been working from that template. She carried it through The New Batman Adventures, the animated web series Gotham Girls, The Batman/Superman Movie: World's Finest and Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker.
The rest of the work is the same comic engine pointed elsewhere. She was Geneva on the late-1980s sitcom Duet, she voiced Veronica on Taz-Mania, she appears as herself in It's Pat, and she is credited as a creator on the 1997 sitcom Fired Up, which is the writing half of a career that tends to get forgotten. There is also an uncredited turn in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm where she is not playing Harley at all. She died in 2023.
Movies (7)
TV (6)
Where to start with Arleen Sorkin
Everything here points back at Batman: The Animated Series, and the episodes to look for are the ones where Harley is allowed to be funny rather than tragic. Sorkin's version is lighter than everything that came after it, and better for being lighter.
The New Batman Adventures continues the run with a harder art style and a slightly sadder character, while Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker shows how far the writers were eventually willing to push her. Gotham Girls is the odd one, a set of very short web episodes that let her play Harley as pure comedy.
Outside the cape material, Duet is the sitcom that got her noticed, It's Pat is a curiosity in which she plays herself, and Batman: Mask of the Phantasm makes a good trivia answer: she is in it, uncredited, as somebody else entirely.