Stephanie Faracy
Stephanie Faracy is an actor, born 1952.
There is a job in American comedy that almost never gets named: the person who plays the scene straight so the funny one has something to bounce off. Faracy has been doing that job since the 1970s. Her first run of films is a list of studio comedies in which she is the plausible human being in the frame, Corinne in Heaven Can Wait (1978), Susie Davis in Blind Date (1987), Connie Ripley in The Great Outdoors (1988).
Television is where she got to lead, most substantially on the sitcom True Colors, which ran from 1990 to 1992, and it kept her in work between films for decades.
The specific thing she is good at is warmth with an edge under it. Jenny Dennison in Hocus Pocus (1993) is written as pure setup, and Faracy plays her as a woman who is mildly enjoying her own evening, which is the only reason the scenes land at all. The same instinct shows up in a single scene as Stephanie's mother in Sideways, in Rosie in Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, in a florist in The Five-Year Engagement, in Anna in Flightplan.
She never stopped: Grandma James on Dog with a Blog, Lisa Lawson on Uncoupled, and Lynn on Nobody Wants This, which began in 2024 and has given her the best-written part she has had in years. Close to fifty years of turning up and making other people's jokes work.
Movies (13)
TV (17)
- Dog with a Blog (2012)
- Nobody Wants This (2024)
- The Thorn Birds (1983)
- Dark Skies (1996)
- Togetherness (2015)
- Extreme Ghostbusters (1997)
- Stark Raving Mad (1999)
- True Colors (1990)
- Friends with Better Lives (2014)
- $#*! My Dad Says (2010)
- Bette (2000)
- Out of Practice (2005)
- Stacked (2005)
- The Lot (1999)
- Goodnight, Beantown (1983)
- The Fantastic Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor (1996)
- Uncoupled (2022)
Where to start with Stephanie Faracy
Most people meet her once a year without realising it, in Hocus Pocus, and that is a perfectly good place to begin: watch the parents rather than the witches and you can see how much work she is doing to keep the film's adults believable.
For the shape of the career, Heaven Can Wait and Blind Date show her as a young studio-comedy regular, and The Great Outdoors drops her into a bigger ensemble. Sideways is a one-scene appearance worth noticing precisely because it is so small and so exact.
The late work makes the better argument for her, though. Nobody Wants This as Lynn and Uncoupled as Lisa Lawson are both cases of a veteran comic actor finally being handed decent writing and doing something quietly excellent with it.
The films people have seen
Forty-five years of supporting parts in American comedies. Hocus Pocus has become an annual ritual, The Great Outdoors is the John Hughes-produced one people rewatch, and Heaven Can Wait goes all the way back to 1978. Sideways is the one with actual weight.
The sitcoms
American network television gave her lead and regular roles across four decades, in shows that mostly ran a season or two. True Colors is the significant one, an early nineties sitcom about a blended interracial family that was ahead of its network.
The recent work
The last fifteen years have been better than the middle of the career. Nobody Wants This gave her a regular role in her seventies, Togetherness is the good Duplass series, and the comedies keep casting her as somebody's exasperated mother.