Carol Kane

Kane's career didn't build slowly — it announced itself. Her lead performance in *Hester Street* (1975), a black-and-white drama about Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side, earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress (TMDB/Wikipedia). She didn't win, but the nomination put her on the map in a serious way, and Woody Allen cast her in *Annie Hall* (1977) not long after. Two major films in two years. That's a real start. The early 1980s brought *Taxi*, the ABC ensemble sitcom where Kane played Simka Gravas — a character introduced as a love interest for Andy Kaufman's Latka and eventually elevated to series regular. The role is a good example of how Kane works: she could be genuinely funny and genuinely touching in the same scene, sometimes in the same line reading. She won two Emmy Awards for the performance (Wikipedia), which remains one of the more decorated supporting runs in sitcom history for that era. What followed was a long middle period of character work across film and television — the kind of career where you don't always top-line the poster but you're frequently the reason people remember a project. She committed nearly a decade to *Wicked*, playing the imperious Madame Morrible on Broadway from 2005 to 2014 (Wikipedia), which is a serious theatrical investment by any measure. Then came *Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt* on Netflix (2015–2018), where her Lillian Kaushtupper — a rent-controlled-apartment-dwelling, protest-attending, deeply eccentric New Yorker — became something of a fan favorite. Hard to say if any single role in her later career has landed quite as well with a new generation of viewers, but Lillian is a strong candidate.