Kathleen Freeman

Kathleen Freeman worked for more than fifty years and was rarely on screen for more than five minutes at a stretch. Born in Chicago in 1919, she became the industry's designated sharp woman: maids, secretaries, teachers, nurses, busybodies, landladies and neighbours who had already decided they did not like you. Almost all of it was comedy, and almost none of it was written to be funny until she arrived.

The clearest single example is Singin' in the Rain, where she plays the diction coach trying to drag a usable vowel out of Lina Lamont and gets one of the film's biggest laughs out of a single syllable. She is uncredited in it, which tells you how the studios used her. She made twelve films with Jerry Lewis across the fifties and sixties, the largest body of her work, and then found a second life with directors who had grown up watching her. Sister Mary Stigmata in The Blues Brothers is the one everybody quotes: a nun with a ruler, entirely unimpressed, holding a scene against two comedians at full tilt.

The final stretch is why younger audiences know the voice without the face. Mrs. Crackshell on DuckTales, an old woman in Hercules, an elder in FernGully, and finally Shrek, released a few months before her death in 2001. Elsewhere she is the maid in the original The Fly, playing dread completely straight, the woman at the vegetarian restaurant in The Seven Year Itch, and Microwave Marge in Gremlins 2, which is roughly ten seconds of screen time and a permanent nickname.