Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic To viewers of a certain age, Carol Kane is as indelible a screen presence as Robert De Niro or Charles Grodin. Her offbeat vibe thrived during the 1980s boom in studio comedies such as Scrooged (where she played a pugilistic Ghost of Christmas Present) and The Princess Bride alongside Billy Crystal, and on the sitcom Taxi, trading nonsense with Andy Kaufman. But the theatrically trained actress cut her teeth on 1970s New Hollywood fare: Carnal Knowledge, Dog Day Afternoon and Annie Hall.As we sit in an airy Upper West Side café, she vividly remembers her big break, starring alongside Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel in Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge (1971) as a flower-child girlfriend. “Mike was already shooting in Vancouver and they sent me there and said, ‘If she gets the part, she’ll stay and shoot. If she doesn’t, she’ll be back the next day.’ So my mother said, ‘Well, if that’s the case, you have to fly her back first-class!’”Kane got the part, and remembers Nichols as a welcoming and encouraging mentor. “I just fell in love with Mike and Jack and Artie and [scriptwriter] Jules Feiffer. It was like heaven on earth!” (The fearless young actress even did a scene where her character presents herself nude to Nicholson, but it was cut.)Every generation seems to discover anew Kane’s old-school New York charm, like the neighbour who gets in your elevator and shares her grocery tips and life story before you hit the lobby. Broadway fans raved about her Madame Morrible in the musical Wicked; comedy connoisseurs grin at her landlady’s chutzpah in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.Now she stars in a new film, Between the Temples. She plays Carla, a retired music teacher in upstate New York who’s studying for her bat mitzvah — a coming-of-age ceremony more typically performed at age 12 or 13. Carla bonds with her much younger instructor, Ben (Jason Schwartzman), a lonely, shambolic cantor who, like her, is widowed. Directed with syncopated spontaneity by indie filmmaker Nathan Silver, this is an unpredictable movie about figuring out what comes next. Kane is effusive about her young collaborators. “It felt so wild in the making! But not a ‘what the hell are they doing’ type of wild. It’s very graceful,” she says in the warm, raspy warble that — with her blue-eyed gaze and unruly nimbus of blond hair — is her signature. That voice turns pixie-ish or husky on a dime, as when she pauses to mimic an exchange from Dinner at Eight between Jean Harlow and Marie Dressler.In the classic Hollywood vein, there is a screwball streak to Between the Temples. Carla and Ben’s relationship discombobulates his parents (two mothers, played by Caroline Aaron and Dolly de Leon) and his employer, a rabbi (the comedy maven Robert Smigel). Kane’s own sure-footed comic timing comes into play, although it was an under-appreciated talent right at the start of her career. “Gene Wilder called and asked me to be a leading lady in a comedy, The World’s Greatest Lover [1977]. And I had never done a comedy!”Wilder cast her as the hand-wringing wife of a baker, played by Wilder, who aspires to rival the silent movie star Rudolph Valentino, telling Kane at the time: “I’ll take care of the comedy, you take care of the reality.” That same year she appeared in Ken Russell’s Valentino and of course Annie Hall, leading to a life-long friendship with Diane Keaton.On Between the Temples, Kane draws inspiration closer to home, from family. “I based a lot on my mother. Carla’s a very full, unique woman and really brave,” Kane says. Her own mother, Joy, is a composer and teacher in jazz improv, who once restarted her life wholesale with a move to Paris.Kane’s professional life stretches back to her teens. (She joined the Screen Actors Guild and Actors’ Equity when she was 14.) Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she loved theatre in school and, when her mother went to New York to pursue music, she followed. Kane studied at Professional Children’s School, where Elliott Gould also went, and made her way into roles on stage and as a movie extra. When she got the part in Carnal Knowledge, she stayed in the maid’s room of Mia Farrow’s family home on Central Park West.Success came astonishingly early: she was a 23-year-old nominee for the Academy Award for Best Actress in Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street. But then, she says, “I didn’t work for a solid year” — perhaps because of the role’s specificity, as an Orthodox Jewish emigrant housewife to New York’s Lower East Side. Decades later, Between the Temples picks up a throughline with Hester Street in its exploration of Jewish identity. Coincidentally, like Carla, Kane did not have a bat mitzvah at 13, indeed at all. “We were not religious,” she says. “I almost wish that I’d been forced to learn more and then had the option of rejecting it if I wanted to when I was older.”Perhaps the echo helped ground Kane in the character, which caused her a little apprehension because the role came without a fully fledged script. But taking chances has been crucial to Kane’s career, such as a project with Elaine May and John Cassavetes that never bore fruit. “Elaine and I played hookers who were roommates, who were unsuccessful because we were way too picky about who our clients would be. And John was one of our johns,” she says. She and May improvised scenes while walking around the Warner Brothers lot, as Cassavetes watched.She first met Danny DeVito, a co-star in Taxi, on a city bus as a teenager; later, during The Princess Bride, she remembered his tip of setting up a TV set on the dressing table to watch movies during hours-long make-up sessions. When she lived in Los Angeles, she struck up a friendship with her idol, Bette Davis, who invited her over for drinks (and answered the door in a baseball cap).Between the Temples could open up yet another avenue, but who can say. “If you know, could you call me? I have no idea,” Kane jokes. She is hopeful about a play she is working on with May and enjoys her gig on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, playing an engineer. (Exploring genres is nothing new for her: she starred in the cult psychological thriller The Mafu Cage opposite Lee Grant and a lovely but toothy orangutan. “Them there’s some powerful chops!”)She won’t soon tire of seeking out roles that reflect her curious nature. Call it idiosyncrasy, or just being human. “Each person does what they do in a completely unique way. And I guess I want to keep finding out about different types of people, which there is an infinite amount of,” she muses. “Wouldn’t you say?”‘Between the Temples’ is in cinemas from August 23Find out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
