Rhea Perlman was born March 31, 1948, in Brooklyn to Polish Jewish immigrant Philip Perlman, manager of a doll parts factory, and his wife Adele, a bookkeeper. She graduated in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in drama from Hunter College in New York
Her first role was in a 1970 off-off Broadway play Dracula Sabbat that ran nine months. She had a bit role in the film Hot Dogs for Gaugin in 1972, and met her future husband Danny DeVito that same year in Up—An Uppity Revue in a Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective stage production.
In the television show Taxi, she played the role of Zena Sherman, the sweet girlfriend of DeVito’s character Louie De Palma. In 1982 , the same year she and DeVito married, she won the role of the wisecracking barmaid Carla Tortelli on Cheers, which in a run that ended in 1993 won 20 Emmy awards out of 95 nominations. Perlman won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy four times out of 10 nominations.
With DeVito, Perlman had three children, Lucy, Grace, and Jacob. With a Jewish mother and a Catholic father, the children celebrated Jewish and Christian holidays “to keep the traditions and the culture going, but I truly don’t have a great feeling about any particular organized religion, and I don’t think it’s right to impose one on my kids,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “I feel like I’m bringing them up to be good people and that’s what it’s about.”
Perlman and DeVito acted together in the 1996 film Matilda in the role of the title character’s mean and nasty parents. In 2012, the couple separated, reconciled in 2013, and separated for a second time in 2017, but did not divorce. Perlman said after their separation, she and DeVito became close friends.
In 2006 and 2007 in collaboration with Dan Santal, she wrote six children’s books in the Otto Undercover series, making use of many palindromes, anagrams, oxymorons, and onomatopoeia, which are highlighted and explained in a side panel.
In 2009, she and daughter Lucy acted together in Love, Loss, and What I Wore in an off-Broadway production.
The veteran of many movies and television episode’s most recent role was in the 2023 movie Barbie, in which she played the iconic doll’s creator, Ruth Handler. Twenty-three years earlier in her career, she had played another historic person, Jacqueline Kennedy in How to Marry a Billionaire: A Christmas Tale.
Tomorrow, April 1: Sydney Newman
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SDJW condensation of Wikipedia articles.