Joanna Merlin

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Joanna Merlin ; actually Joann Ratner (born July 15, 1931 in Chicago , Illinois ) is an American actress , casting director and acting teacher.

biography

Joanna Merlin was born in 1931 as Joann Ratner , daughter of the Jewish grocer Harry Ratner and his wife Toni. As early as 1942 she appeared in a performance of Too Many Marys in Chicago. Merlin attended the University of California (UCLA) in Los Angeles and counted Michael Chekhov among her mentors. In 1956 she made her feature film debut with a small role as one of the daughters of Jethro (played by Eduard Franz ) in Cecil B. DeMille's monumental film The Ten Commandments , from now on using the maiden name of her mother (Merlin) as her stage name. In the mid-1950s, Merlin moved to the US East Coast and started playing at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford ( Hamlet , A Midsummer Night's Dream and A Winter's Tale , 1958) and at the Rockland County Playhouse (including Blick zurück im Zorn and The Diary of Anne Frank ) to play.

From the early 1960s, Merlin appeared as an actress in several plays on New York's Broadway . In 1961 she was hired as the second cast for the role of Martha Bernays Freud in the original production of A Far Country , a drama about the life of Sigmund Freud . In 1964 she took over the part of Zeitel in the world premiere of the musical Anatevka , which was to be performed over 3200 times on Broadway. Although Merlin had no vocal training, she had received the role from Jerome Robbins , who had previously turned down the actress when auditioning for the Broadway production of Mother Courage .

At the beginning of the 1970s, Merlin began working primarily as a casting director. The wife and mother had been persuaded to do so by theater director and producer Harold Prince , whom she had met while producing Anatevka . In this position, she worked on the successful Broadway programs Side by Side by Sondheim (1977), Stephen Sondheim's Pacific Overtures (1975) and Sweeney Todd and Evita (both 1979). As a casting director, she has worked for feature film directors Michael Cimino ( In the Year of the Dragon , 1985), John Carpenter ( Big Trouble in Little China , 1986) and James Ivory ( Mr. & Mrs. Bridge , 1990; Jefferson in Paris , 1995) active. She received the Artios Award of the Casting Society of America for casting Bernardo Bertolucci's Oscar- winning film The Last Emperor (1987) . She received another award for casting the Broadway production Into the Woods (1987).

Merlin appears regularly as an actress in film and television, whereby, as in the theater, she mostly specialized in ethnically oriented character roles, including the part of the landlady in the Oscar-nominated drama Hester Street (1975). Merlin also took on minor supporting roles in Alan Parker's award-winning musical Fame - The Road to Glory (1980), in which she was seen as a dance teacher, as well as Bob Fosse's Behind the Limelight (1979) and Roland Joffé's The Killing Fields (1984) . She had a recurring television role from 2000 to 2009 in the series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit , in which she played the judge Lena Petrovsky. For her performance in Ragnar Freidank's Beautiful Hills of Brooklyn (2008), Merlin was awarded the Actor Award of the Strasbourg International Film Festival . The short film, which Merlin co-wrote and co-produced, is based on the one-act play of the same name in which she appeared in the New York Brooklyn Museum in 2005 and is about the everyday life of a retired secretary in the New York borough of the same name.

From 1950 to 1955 Joanne Merlin was married to the artist and teacher Martin Lubner. In 1964 she married the lawyer David Dretzin for the second time. She is the mother of two children. In addition to her acting career and casting work, Merlin regularly gives acting workshops at New York's Tisch School of the Arts , The Actors Center , the American Conservatory Theater, the Manhattan School of Music, and Columbia University . In 1986 she co-founded the Non-Traditional Casting Project (NTCP), which campaigns against exclusion and racism in theater, film and television and supports artists with a migration background and disabled artists. In 2001 she published the Auditioning: An Actor Friendly Guide .

Plays (selection)

year Play Role / function stage
1942 Too Many Marys Chicago
1956 Bullfight Pilar New Hampshire Playhouse (Hollywood, CA)
1956 Lysistrata Athenian Girl / Myrrhina Lenox Hill Playhouse (New York)
1957 The Pidgeon Gina Temple Theater (New York)
1958 Hamlet American Shakespeare Festival (Stratford)
1958 A Midsummer Night's Dream American Shakespeare Festival (Stratford)
1958 A winter's tale Emilia American Shakespeare Festival (Stratford)
1959 Tunnel of love Isolde Rockland County Playhouse, New York
1959 The Diary of Anne Frank Mrs. Frank Rockland County Playhouse, New York
1959 Look back in Anger Helena Rockland County Playhouse, New York
1959 The Flowering Peach Esther Rockland County Playhouse, New York
1959 No trifling with love Rosetta St. Marks Playhouse (New York)
1960 Major Barbara Major Barbara Murray Dodge Theater (Princeton, NJ)
1960 The Winslow Boy Catherine Tenthouse (Highland Park, IL)
1960 Right You Are Gina McCarter Theater (Princeton, NJ)
1960 The Breaking Wall Anita di Speranza St. Marks Playhouse (New York)
1960 The Rules of the Game Silia Gala Gramercy Arts (New York)
1961 Becket Gwendolen Hudson Theater (New York)
1963 The Emperor Poppaea Sabina Maidman Playhouse (New York)
1963 Thistle in My Bed Dawnthea Gramercy Arts Theater (New York)
1963 Come to the Palace of Sin Lucille Lortel Theater (New York)
1963 Thistle in My Bed Dawnthea Gramercy Arts (New York)
1964 The Wall Rachel Apt Arena Stage (Washington DC)
1964 Fiddler on the Roof Tzeitel Imperial Theater (New York)
1966 The Bird, the Bear and the Actress Gertrude Glass Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theater (Waterford, CT)
1970 Company Casting Alvin Theater (New York)
1971 Follies Casting Winter Garden Theater (New York)
1973 Shelter Gloria John Golden Theater (New York)
1973 Clytemnestra Clytemnestra The Cubiculo (New York)
1975 Pacific Overtures Casting Winter Garden Theater (New York)
1977 Side by Side by Sondheim Casting Music Box Theater (New York)
1978 On the Twentieth Century Casting St. James Theater (New York)
1978 The grinding machine Anna Colonna American Place Theater (New York)
1979 Sweeney Todd Casting Uris Theater (New York)
1979 Evita Casting Broadway Theater (New York)
1980 The Beach House Leslie Nathan Long Wharf Theater (New Haven, CT)
1981 The Survivor Zlatke Morosco Theater (New York)
1981 Merrily We Roll Along Casting Alvin Theater (New York)
1982 Solomon's Child Liz Little Theater (New York)
1982 A Doll's Life Casting Mark Hellinger Theater (New York)
1984 Play memory Casting Longacre Theater (New York)
1984 End of the world Casting Music Box Theater (New York)
1987 Into the Woods Casting Martin Beck Theater (New York)
1992 Family portrait Mother Ubu Repertory Theater (New York)
1996 The Yiddish Trojan Women Devorah Brodsky American Jewish Theater (New York)
2005 Beautiful Hills of Brooklyn Jessie Sylvester Brooklyn Museum (New York)

Filmography (selection)

actress

Feature films

  • 1956: The Ten Commandments (The Ten Commandments)
  • 1958: Weddings and Babies
  • 1975: Hester Street
  • 1978: Sleep Well Father (The Last Tenant , TV movie)
  • 1979: Behind the Spotlight (All That Jazz)
  • 1980: Nurse (TV movie)
  • 1980: Fame - The Road to Fame (Fame)
  • 1982: Soup for One
  • 1982: Love Behind Bars (Love Child)
  • 1983: Baby it's you (Baby It's You)
  • 1984: The Killing Fields - Crying country (The Killing Fields)
  • 1987: The Prince of Darkness
  • 1988: Pizza Pizza - A Slice of Heaven (Mystic Pizza)
  • 1990: Murder in Black and White (TV movie)
  • 1991: The Law of Power (Class Action)
  • 1991: A Marriage: Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz (TV movie)
  • 1991: The Taylor Murder: Fighting Over a Child (In a Child's Name , movie made for TV)
  • 1993: Love, Honor & Obey: The Last Mafia Marriage (TV movie)
  • 1993: Mr. Wonderful
  • 1995: 25 cents (two bits)
  • 1996: MURDER and murder
  • 1996: The Prosecutors ( TV movie)
  • 1998: City of Angels (City of Angels)
  • 1999: Black and Blue (Black and Blue , TV movie)
  • 1999: Witness Protection program ( TV film)
  • 2001: The Jimmy Show
  • 2003: Just Another Story
  • 2007: Invasion (The Invasion)
  • 2008: The Wackness
  • 2008: Beautiful Hills of Brooklyn (short film)
  • 2010: Sarah's Key (Elle s'appelait Sarah)

TV Shows

Casting director

Awards

Casting Society of America

  • 1988: Best casting for a feature film (drama) for The Last Emperor

Strasbourg International Film Festival

  • 2009: Festival Award for Best Actress in a Short Film for Beautiful Hills of Brooklyn

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d cf. Interview with Terry Gross at Fresh Air (transcript), July 2, 2001, 12:00 Noon PM ET (accessed via LexisNexis Wirtschaft )
  2. ↑ a b cf. Profile at filmreference.com (English; accessed June 4, 2010)
  3. ↑ a b cf. Profile in the All Movie Guide (English; accessed June 4, 2010)
  4. ↑ a b c cf. Profile at gradacting.tisch.nyu.edu (English; accessed June 4, 2010)
  5. ↑ cf. Simmons, Paulanne: Dear Diary at brooklynpaper.com, March 5, 2005 (accessed June 4, 2010)
personal data
SURNAME Merlin, Joanna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ratner, Joann (maiden name); Merlin, Joann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American actress and casting director
DATE OF BIRTH July 15, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago , Illinois, United States