Jane Wiedlin
Jane Wiedlin is an actor, born 1958.
Jane Wiedlin co-founded the Go-Go's, played rhythm guitar and sang backing vocals in them, and had a solo career afterwards. That is the day job, and it explains most of what happened to her on screen: the film industry of the 1980s liked pop musicians, and it liked them best in one scene.
So she turns up as the Singing Telegram Girl in Clue, as an alien communications officer in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and, in the largest and most enjoyable of these, as Joan of Arc in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, where the joke is that a medieval saint takes to an aerobics class immediately. None of these ask much of her as an actor. All of them work, because she is good company and the films know it.
The voice work turned into the durable half of the career. She plays Dusk, drummer of the fictional band the Hex Girls, across Scooby-Doo! and the Witch's Ghost, Scooby-Doo! and the Legend of the Vampire and Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?, with a separate turn as a backup singer in What's New, Scooby-Doo?. The Hex Girls have outlasted plenty of real bands. Elsewhere she voices Miranda Kane in The New Batman Adventures, Gwen in Mission Hill and Zuzu in Droopy, Master Detective.
More recently she appears as herself: in the Sparks documentary, on The Surreal Life, and at the 2021 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony.
Movies (7)
TV (7)
Where to start with Jane Wiedlin
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure first, and not only because it is the biggest film here. Joan of Arc is a proper comic role with a payoff, and Wiedlin plays her with a total commitment that the rest of the cast is deliberately not bringing.
After that, Clue for the singing telegram, which is timed to the second, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home for a walk-on in the loosest and funniest of the Star Trek films. For the voice work, Scooby-Doo! and the Witch's Ghost is where the Hex Girls arrive and easily the best of the three Dusk appearances, with Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? as the late victory lap. Then The Sparks Brothers, where she is one of the more articulate talking heads in a documentary full of them.