Marcella Lowery
Marcella Lowery is an actor, born 1946.
Marcella Lowery was born in Queens in 1946 and has worked as a stage and screen actress ever since, mostly in the parts New York film production generates by the hundred: one scene, a character name, a line that has to land immediately. Harriet in Arthur, a switchboard operator in What About Bob?, a woman in a hallway in New Jack City, Selma in Fletch Lives, Mrs. Washington in School for Scoundrels, Yvette in Wiener-Dog, a party guest in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Grandma Norma in Thunder Force.
What she brings to those parts is authority rather than warmth. She plays women who have already formed an opinion of whoever has just walked in, and she does not soften it for the audience, which is why directors kept giving her the person behind the desk, the counter or the front door.
Two roles gave her something longer to work with. She was Grandma Cece Jenkins across Ghostwriter from 1992 to 1995, a children's mystery series where she anchored a family, and Principal Karen Noble on the NBC sitcom City Guys. She also played Francine Tibideaux on The Cosby Show, which is not among the credits listed here, and Anna Eldridge in The Preacher's Wife. That is roughly forty years of steady work in a category of performer that film history barely records.
Movies (10)
TV (8)
Where to start with Marcella Lowery
Nostalgia is not the reason to open with Ghostwriter. It gave her an actual family to play rather than a single door to answer, and a children's series shot in New York in the early nineties turned out to be the best surviving showcase of what she does.
The Preacher's Wife is the largest film role and the easiest to find. After that, treat the list as a lesson in supporting work: Arthur and Fletch Lives are the eighties comedies, Wiener-Dog is by far the strangest film she has been in, and Can You Ever Forgive Me? and Thunder Force are the recent bookends. For television, City Guys is the sitcom a certain age group will remember her from instantly.