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Doris Roberts

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This versatile character player of TV and films has been equally adept at playing sympathetic roles as well as hard-boiled dames, gossips, nags and ethnic types, yet always comes across as if she is too savvy of the ways of the world to be fooled by anyone. Doris Roberts is best known as Marie Barone, the strong-willed mother of the title character in the CBS sitcom "Everybody Loves Raymond" (CBS, 1996-2005). Others may remember her memorable supporting roles as the mother to the married-rich Donna Pescow on "Angie" (ABC, 1979-80) or as the slightly overbearing Mildred Krebs on "Remington Steele" (NBC, 1983-87) or for her memorable, Emmy-winning performance as a bag lady in a 1982 episode of NBC's "St. Elsewhere".

Roberts was one of those New York stage veterans who didn't break into TV and film in a big way until they were tired of playing eight shows a week. Born in St. Louis, but raised in Manhattan by a single mother, Roberts would often cut school to attend the movies or theater. She made her stage debut in the mid-1950s in "The Time of Your Life" and later was featured in Neil Simon's "Last of the Red Hot Lovers" (1969, co-starring James Coco, with whom she was often teamed in TV and films), Paul Zindel's "The Secret Affairs of Mildred Wild" (1972, alongside Maureen Stapleton) and Terrence McNally's "Bad Habits" (1974).

TV and films roles were sporadic during Roberts' stage period. She guest-starred in an episode of "The Defenders" in 1964, and on "The Doctors and the Nurses" in 1965 (both New York-based series). In 1961, she played a five & dime co-worker of Carroll Baker who gives Baker flak about her alleged rape in the feature film "Something Wild". Roberts had small roles in "No Way to Treat a Lady" and "A Lovely Way to Die" (both 1968), and was Elliot Gould's mother in "Little Murders"(1971). She was the mayor's ambitious wife in "The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3" (1974). In 1975, she scored critical notice as Mrs. Kavarsky, the older neighbor lady who helps Carol Kane become Americanized in "Hester Street", the Joan Micklin Silver movie about life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the turn of the century. Roberts, who comes from a secular Jewish family, borrowed from her grandfather's Yiddish and translated Yiddish expressions and infused them into the production, including the memorable, "You can't pee up my back and tell me it's rain."

After "Hester Street", Roberts, like many other theater performers, migrated to Hollywood and scored immediate notice on her first assignment: an episode of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in which she played an employment agency worker who has to help Phyllis Lindstrom find a job. That scene from the 1975 episode remains one of the funniest in the tenure of the show. In 1976, Roberts made another memorable episodic appearance on "All in the Family", in which a defiant Edith heads out to Kelsey's Bar on her own. Roberts was the hard-edged dame who takes Edith under her wing and points out which men "will get you through the night." Roberts followed by playing scamming evangelist Dorelda Doremus on "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" (syndicated, 1976), with several appearances on ABC's "Barney Miller" and as the mother of a priest who gives up his vows for a woman on "Soap".

She found regular work for a season and a half as Donna Pescow's mother on "Angie" (ABC, 1979-80), a show focusing on the marriage between Pescow's poor girl and a rich guy. After that series' demise, Roberts was a regular on "Maggie" (ABC, 1981-82), playing a hairdresser who gabs with the title character, an Erma Bombeck-like writer. After her Emmy-winning turn and a stint on "Remington Steele", she continued to make memorable guest shots, including the grandmother of the kids on "Full House" (ABC, 1989) who drives their household crazy after her retirement. Roberts had the recurring role of mother to Toby (Denny Dillon) on the HBO sitcom "Dream On" and in 1993 was the wife of a retired fireman (Ned Beatty) in the CBS sitcom "The Boys".

She returned to weekly TV as the (in the actress' words) "meddlesome, intrusive, control-freak mother-from-hell" on "Everybody Loves Raymond", a part that has garnered her multiple additional Emmy nominations and four wins as best supporting actress in a comedy in 2001, 2002, 2003and 2005 (yet another nomination came in 2004). Roberts would use her celebrity status to publicly battle ageism, especially in Hollywood, and would also write a cooking tome, Are You Hungry, Dear? based on her character's penchant for stuffing her family's faces.

Roberts has appeared in TV longforms as well. She was the wife of Martin Balsam, a TV writer who fears his script has triggered a youth to commit arson, in "The Storyteller" (NBC, 1977), and was mother to Marlo Thomas in "It Happened One Christmas" on ABC that same year. In 1980, Roberts played Mrs. Van Daan (the Shelley Winters role) in the NBC remake of "The Diary of Ann Frank" and a perturbed tourist in "If It's Tuesday, It Still Must Be Belgium" (NBC, 1987). In 1991, she was a woman living with her husband (Harold Gould) in a retirement village who becomes distraught when he decides to join a Yiddish-speaking group in the PBS anthology drama "The Sunset Gang". She later appeared to excellent effect as a family matriarch suffering from the onset of Alzheimer's in the Thanksgiving telepic "A Time to Remember" (2003).

Roberts has appeared in numerous feature films since her move to Hollywood, but usually in roles far less spotlighted than her TV work. She was in Joan Rivers' "Rabbit Test" (1978) and played Bette Midler's mother in "The Rose" (1979). She was again a mother--this time of musically supple Robert Carradine--in "Number One With a Bullet" (1986), and was married to Cesar Romero in the modest independent production, "Simple Justice" (1989). Roberts was the overbearing Aunt Lonnie in "Used People" (1992), and in 1993 had a role with few lines but amusing expressions of confusion and suspicion as the neighbor who doesn't understand why different sets of men and women are coming from the apartment down the hall in "The Night We Never Met", with Matthew Broderick and Annabella Sciorra. In 2001, she essayed a salty receptionist in the indie comedy "All Over the Guy" and she cameoed as David Spade's hard-driving stage mother in the 2003 comedy "Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star."

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