Nancy Pelosi
Nancy Pelosi is an actor, born 1940.
Nancy Pelosi's screen credits are a byproduct of a day job that had nothing to do with screens. She was the 52nd Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, serving from 2007 to 2011 and again from 2019 to 2023, the first woman elected to the post and the first to lead a major American party in either chamber of Congress, which she did as head of the House Democrats from 2003 to 2023. She has represented a San Francisco district since 1987. Twenty years leading a party in the House ties Joe Martin's record and trails only Sam Rayburn's.
Her presence in a film and television catalogue is therefore documentary rather than performance. Michael Moore used her twice, on camera in Fahrenheit 11/9 and in archive footage in Capitalism: A Love Story. Everything else is the ordinary furniture of a long political career: interviews on 60 Minutes, a guest chair on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, archive clips folded into Frontline, History 101, First Ladies and The Problem with Jon Stewart, and an honoree spot at Trailblazer Honors.
Read as a filmography that is thin. Read as a record of whose footage other people kept reaching for across four decades of American politics, it is not thin at all, and the balance between archive credits and live appearances is itself a fair measure of how much of her career happened in rooms with no cameras in them.
Movies (3)
TV (8)
Where to start with Nancy Pelosi
Fahrenheit 11/9 is the one to watch, because it is the only credit here where she appears on camera inside a film that has a definite point of view about her party rather than simply borrowing a clip of her.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is the friendly-room version, useful mainly as a record of how a party leader performs on late-night television. 60 Minutes is the serious interview format doing what it does. The archive-footage credits, Capitalism: A Love Story, Frontline, History 101 and First Ladies, are exactly that: her presence used as raw material for documentaries about something else. Trailblazer Honors is the tribute. None of this substitutes for the political record, and it is not meant to.