Doris Grau
Doris Grau is a director, born 1924.
Doris Grau did the job nobody in the audience can name. Born in Brooklyn in 1924, she moved to Hollywood in 1940 and became a script supervisor, the person on set who tracks continuity line by line, and she kept doing it into the 1990s on films including Point Blank and King Kong and on television including Cheers and The Tracey Ullman Show.
The Simpsons hired her in that capacity. The writers then discovered what her voice sounded like, a flat, gravel-bottomed Brooklyn rasp with no performance in it at all, and started writing parts for her, most famously the school lunchlady, along with assorted small characters like the ice cream lady our credits record. The Critic, which came out of the same writers' room, gave her Doris Grossman.
Live action came late and stayed small: Hattie Rifkin in The Distinguished Gentleman in 1992, Elsa on Monty and a worker on Sibs. She died in 1995, having spent a fifty-year career off camera and a late coda as one of the most recognisable voices in American animation.
Movies (1)
TV (4)
Where to start with Doris Grau
Everything here starts and ends with The Simpsons. Her lunchlady exists to deliver bad news about food in a voice that has given up on the concept of appetite, and it works because there is nothing performed about it: she genuinely sounded like that, which is why the writers kept giving her lines.
The Critic is the better showcase for anyone who wants more than a catchphrase. Doris Grossman is a bigger part, in a sharper and much shorter-lived show, and the exhausted-professional register suits it.
The live-action credits are a curiosity rather than a career: The Distinguished Gentleman gives her a name and a few lines, Monty and Sibs are for the thorough. Watch the animation, then read the script-supervisor credits, which are the actual body of work.