Background and career
Carol Kane (born June 18, 1952) is an American actress and comedian. She gained recognition for her role in Hester Street (1975), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. She became known in the 1970s and 1980s in films such as Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Annie Hall (1977), When a Stranger Calls (1979), The Princess Bride (1987), Scrooged (1988) and Flashback (1990). Kane appeared on the television series Taxi in the early 1980s as Simka Gravas, the wife of Latka (played by Andy Kaufman), winning two Emmy Awards for her work. She has played the character of Madame Morrible in the musical Wicked, both in touring productions and on Broadway from 2005 to 2014. From 2015 to 2020, she was a main cast member on the Netflix series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, in which she played Lillian Kaushtupper. She currently plays the recurring role of Pelia in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2023–present).
Kane was born on June 18, 1952, in Cleveland, the daughter of Joy, a jazz singer, teacher, dancer, and pianist, and architect Michael Kane. Her family is Jewish, and her grandparents emigrated from Russia, Austria, and Poland. Due to her father's occupation, Kane moved frequently as a child; she briefly lived in Paris at age eight, where she began learning to speak French. Additionally, she resided in Haiti at age 10. Her parents divorced when she was 12 years old. She attended the Cherry Lawn School, a boarding school in Darien, Connecticut, until 1965. She studied theater at HB Studio and also went to the Professional Children's School in New York City. She became a member of both the Screen Actors Guild and the Actors' Equity Association at age 14. Kane made her professional theater debut in a 1966 production of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie starring Tammy Grimes, her first job as a member of Actors' Equity.
Kane's on-screen career began while she was a teenager, when she appeared in minor roles in films such as Desperate Characters and Mike Nichols's Carnal Knowledge in 1971, the latter of which led her to befriend lead actor Jack Nicholson. In 1972, she was cast in her first leading role in the Canadian production Wedding in White, where she played a teenage rape victim who is forced into marriage by her father. She also appeared as a sex worker in Hal Ashby's 1973 film The Last Detail, where she collaborated with Nicholson again.
In 1975, Kane was cast in Joan Micklin Silver's feature-length debut Hester Street, in which she played a Russian-Jewish immigrant who struggles with her husband to assimilate in late 19th-century New York. For her performance in the film, Kane garnered her sole Academy Award nomination for Best Actress at the 48th Academy Awards, and it remains her favorite of all her roles. Additionally, in 1975 she appeared as a bank teller in Sidney Lumet's crime drama Dog Day Afternoon, which received numerous Academy Award nominations in other categories that same year. This also marked her first on-screen collaboration with Al Pacino, whom she had known prior to the film thanks to their shared background in theater.
Despite this recognition, however, Kane has recounted waiting for approximately a year before being cast in her next role, which she has attributed to the trend of actors being typecast after receiving awards attention. Her return to the screen would come with Gene Wilder's 1977 comedy The World's Greatest Lover, which she has credited for identifying the comedic talents that would become her staple in later years. During the same year, she was cast in Woody Allen's romantic comedy Annie Hall, where she played Allison Portchnik, the first wife of Allen's character Alvy Singer. She also appeared in Ken Russell's film Valentino, which, like The World's Greatest Lover, takes inspiration from the silent film era, as it is a biographical drama loosely inspired by the life of Rudolph Valentino.After this, Kane appeared in the horror films The Mafu Cage (1978) and When a Stranger Calls (1979); ironically, Kane herself is largely averse to horror, and she admits to being unable to watch the latter. In 1979, she also appeared in a cameo role in The Muppet Movie, as well as played an emotionally dependent and childish American woman in La Sabina. For her performance in the latter she won the CEC Award for Best Supporting Actress.
From 1980 to 1983, Kane portrayed Simka Dahblitz-Gravas, the wife of Andy Kaufman's character Latka Gravas, on the American television series Taxi. She has theorized that she was cast in Taxi in part due to her work in Hester Street, where a significant portion of her dialogue was spoken in Yiddish, since Simka speaks a fictional language with a vaguely Eastern European accent. Kane has attributed the on-screen rapport she shared with Kaufman to their different work ethics: where she was trained in the theater and enjoyed rehearsal time, Kaufman was rooted more in stand-up comedy and did not care for rehearsals, a contrast that she believes enhanced their believability as a married couple. However, she maintains that she and Kaufman had a loving relationship on set, and she has spoken fondly of him in retrospective interviews. Kane received two Emmy Awards for her work on Taxi. Her role on the series has largely been credited as the beginning of her pivot towards more comedic roles, as she began to regularly appear in sitcoms and comedy films after the series ended. In 1984, Kane appeared in episode 12, season 3 of Cheers as Amanda, an acquaintance of Diane Chambers from her time spent in a mental institution. She was also a regular on the 1986 series All Is Forgiven. In 1987, Kane appeared in Ishtar, Elaine May's notorious box-office flop turned cult classic, playing the frustrated girlfriend of Dustin Hoffman's character. That year also saw her make one of her most recognizable film appearances in Rob Reiner's fantasy romance The Princess Bride, where she played Valerie, the wife of Miracle Max (Billy Crystal). In 1988, Kane appeared in the Cinemax Comedy Experiment Rap Master Ronnie: A Report Card alongside Jon Cryer and the Smothers Brothers. During the same year, she was also featured in the Bill Murray vehicle Scrooged, where she portrayed a contemporary version of the Ghost of Christmas Present, depicted in the film as a fairy. For this performance, Variety called her "unquestionably [the] pic's comic highlight". Additionally, she played a potential love interest for Steve Martin's character in the 1990 film My Blue Heaven.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
