Leslie Hendrix
Leslie Hendrix is an actor, born 1960.
For a long stretch of New York television, Leslie Hendrix was the person who told detectives what the body could and could not tell them. She played medical examiner Elizabeth Rodgers across four Law & Order series, three of which are listed here: the original, Criminal Intent and Trial by Jury. The 1998 film Exiled credits her as M.E. Rogers, the same job with a letter missing.
It is a specific and underrated kind of part. The medical examiner exists to deliver information the plot needs, and most performers read it as data. Hendrix played it as a woman with a job she was good at and slightly bored by: dry, unhurried, faintly amused by detectives in a hurry. That is why the character kept being invited back across the franchise instead of being recast every few years.
Away from the autopsy room the work is smaller and more scattered. She was a reporter in Sweet Home Alabama, Alice Johnson in Arthur, a doctor in Living with Yourself, and Kathryn, the enigmatic figure at the head of the Court of Owls, in Gotham. She also played Judge Hannah Lampert on the soap opera All My Children. Nine screen credits is a thin record for an actor of that standing, and much of her working life was spent in the theatre.
Movies (4)
TV (5)
Where to start with Leslie Hendrix
Everybody meets her the same way, through Law & Order, and that remains the right way, because the character was built there and the show handed her a great many variations on the same two minutes of screen time. Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Law & Order: Trial by Jury import Elizabeth Rodgers wholesale, and Exiled does the same under a slightly different spelling of the name.
Gotham is the real departure. Kathryn is a conspirator rather than a technician, and the show lets Hendrix be openly theatrical for once, which the procedurals never asked of her.
The rest is light: Sweet Home Alabama and Arthur are brisk studio comedies with a scene apiece, and Living with Yourself is the odd one, a science-fiction comedy that suits her deadpan better than either of them.