Jean Stapleton
Jean Stapleton is an actor, born 1923.
Jeanne Murray worked as a secretary in New York before she worked as an actress, and the stage came first: summer stock in Maine in the early forties, a New York debut later that decade, then Broadway musicals through the fifties. When Bells Are Ringing was filmed in 1960 she came with it, playing Sue, and for the next decade she was the dependable character woman in other people's pictures, including a secretary in Klute and Mrs. Wappler in Cold Turkey.
Then All in the Family, and Edith Bunker. The part could have been a doormat joke: a woman whose husband talks over every sentence she starts. Stapleton played her with a high, fluttering voice and a habit of arriving at the moral point of a scene about thirty seconds after everyone else had walked away from it, which made her right and made the room wrong. She won three Emmys for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for the role, and the show used her as the place where its arguments finally landed.
The later work stayed varied without ever getting bigger, which seems to have suited her. She narrated for children, played the Fairy Godmother in Faerie Tale Theatre, took Agatha Christie's Ariadne Oliver in Dead Man's Folly, turned up as Pansy Milbank in Michael and Birdie Conrad in You've Got Mail, and kept a hand in sitcoms into the nineties. She died in 2013.
Movies (8)
TV (12)
Where to start with Jean Stapleton
Start with All in the Family, and do not stop after two episodes. The character reads as a sweet fool on first contact, and the performance only declares itself once you have watched Stapleton hold a scene against three louder people and win it by waiting.
For proof that the voice was a choice, watch Klute, where she has a handful of lines as a secretary and plays them flat and fast, nothing like Edith. Cold Turkey from the same year is the broadest thing here and worth it for the ensemble. After that the late work is the pleasure: Dead Man's Folly hands her Agatha Christie's Ariadne Oliver, Michael and You've Got Mail use her for a few minutes each and get more from them than the leads manage in an hour, and Faerie Tale Theatre has her playing a Fairy Godmother perfectly straight. Bells Are Ringing is where the musical career shows.