Carol Kane on her memories of making Hester Street, the singular experience of Taxi, and wanting to reprise the role of Madame Morrible in a Wicked movie. A conversation with BilgeEbiri
Photo: Midwest Films Carol Kane was just 23 when she appeared in 1975’s Hester Street, a gentle, low-budget black-and-white drama partly in Yiddish and set among Lower East Side Jewish immigrants at the turn of the century. Written and directed by Joan Micklin Silver and effectively self-distributed, the heartbreaking film turned out to be one of the unlikely indie sleeper hits of that year and garnered Kane a surprise Best Actress Oscar nomination.
It was an incredible shock! I owe it all to this one man named Max Burkett, who the Silvers somehow found. He was a retired PR person for one of the great studio heads back in the day. He had done Julie Christie’s campaign for Darling, where she actually won the award. He said, “I like to bet on a dark horse!” He literally went around Hollywood — he knew everyone in Hollywood — with cans of film to people’s homes, like Rosalind Russell’s house and Frank Sinatra’s house.
You eventually became known primarily as a comic actor, but your early career is filled with amazing performances in dramas and horror films and other things I would not call comedies. Hester Street, When a Stranger Calls, Dog Day Afternoon. Were you planning to be more of a dramatic actress? Maybe, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything because the experience of working on Taxi is still so alive for all of us. It’s hard sometimes for people to know what they have when they have it, you know, but Tony, Danny, Marilu, Chris, Judd, we all knew while we were there that we had landed in gold to be part of that show. We continued to stay very close. So if I got a little branded, it was worth the trade-off.
Then he disappears into the kitchen, and he’s on the phone for like half an hour with one of his many girlfriends — because he was quite a ladies’ man, which none of us at Taxi knew anything about. Finally, I started losing my patience. I went into the kitchen and I said, “Andy if we’re going to go to Mexico, I really think we better get going.” And he looked at me like I was out of my mind. I believed him that we were going to Mexico! But he was completely believable.